Tag: #goals #success #progress

Go Ahead And Lead

Happiness, The Pathway To Fulfilment

We think of leaders as big, charismatic characters who lead from the front, who announce their vision and point in the direction they are going in. They inspire us to follow them.

This is not what I mean when I say lead, though to be visionary is certainly needed. To me, leadership is taking care of those around you. It is servant leadership. This type of leadership does not require vision, it requires empathy, compassion, and above all, courage.

It means that you become the solver of other people’s problem and check in with those in your circle, making human connections and taking care of people. Not in big ways but in small uplifting comments or in time spent engaged with someone, and so on. This to me is leadership.

So go ahead and lead.

How To Achieve Your Dreams

Achieving Goals, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

Napoleon Hill

Imagine swimming through jellyfish and shark infested water for 53 hours without stopping. Imagine the training necessary in order to prepare to swim such a distance. There is a stretch of water between Cuba and Florida that is 111 miles that no one, since it became a goal in the 1950s, has been able to swim across. Diana Nyad is a marathon swimmer who had a dream of swimming this stretch of treacherous water. She has a team of around 30 people, shark experts, nutritionists, navigators, etc and they had tried 4 time before. She almost died on one attempt due to being stung by a Box Jellyfish.

In 2013 Diana Nyad at the age of 64, on her 5th attempt, made it across this stretch of water. The only person that I am aware of to have ever done so. Her mantra on this attempt was “Find a way.” She said in a TED Talk entitled “Never, ever give up“, where she talks about this dream and achieving it, that she is in the prime of her life at 64 years old, and I believe her. When she staggered up onto the beach in Florida after more than two days of constant swimming, she had three messages. Number 1, you should never, ever give up. Number 2, you are never too old to chase your dreams. Number 3, it looks like a solitary sport, but it’s a team.

Now, we are not all going to be endurance swimmers, or even want to be. The message is not about specifically what Diana did, it is about how she did it. She had a dream and rather than let the pursuit of that dream fall into apathy she studied everything she needed to know, she trained consistently, and she never, ever gave up. No matter what she found a way. We all have dreams, for some of us it is a hazy inkling of an idea, for some of us it is crystal clear, but for all of us the dream will not achieve itself. It takes drive and passion and consistent effort, and above all else the willingness to fail trying until we succeed. It is about failing our way to success.

In my opinion, life should always be a striving to live life well, to find fulfilment, joy and happiness, and to bring these things into other people’s lives as well. Life, like Diana said about marathon swimming, sometimes can appear like a solitary sport, but it takes a team. Our dreams are individual, but to achieve them it takes a community of friends, family and colleagues.

So, firstly we need to figure out what our dream is, something that is individual to us. Secondly, we need to research how we can achieve this dream. Thirdly, we need to create a plan to get from where we are to where we want to get to. Fourthly, we need act on that plan everyday, even if the steps are small. Fifthly, we need to look for and accept help from those around us, life is always a community effort. And lastly, never, ever give up.

Something to think about:

What dreams have you heard that others have that resonate with you? What do you value in life? What makes you happy? What pursuit could be your dream? Think about these questions and figure out what your dream is and how you can work towards it. #LiveDeeply my friend.

3 ways to benefit from your failures

Achieving Goals, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

– Winston Churchill

1. It is an opportunity to get feedback

When we are in a working environment we often have 121 sessions with our Managers or the company has a Performance Development scheme, which can be linked to the bonuses we receive, either quarterly or annually or both. Sometimes we are involved in projects or presentations. Any of these scenarios can involve getting feedback from someone higher up in the company, usually our Manager. There is a stigma in Western culture that demonises feedback, assuming that it is always negative or in some way a personal criticism.  The problem here is that some receiving the feedback can take it as a personal attack on them as a person, because their self worth and ego are very much attached to their success, or lack of success, in the job.

I rather think that any form of feedback is an opportunity to figure out how to do better and to improve. Having a fixed mindset that our success is reliant on our abilities alone will not help us improve and get better. Taking on board the feedback we are given as actions to take to do better will mean that we will steadily rise above those who simply complain about getting feedback. Complaining gets us nowhere, it only alienates those we work with, because no one wants to hear negativity all the time. Having the courage to take feedback on the chin and move forward with positivity is a sign of strength, flexibility and humility, traits that will take us far.

2. It is an opportunity to learn something new

We only progress in life when we learn new things. If we only did the same thing over and over we would never learn to walk or run or fly. Our education does not stop when we leave school or college or university. We complete training at work, we learn new roles when we move to a new position in our company or if we move to a new company for a new job. When we get a new mobile phone some of the features will be different and we will need to learn how to use our new mobile. When we move to a new area we have to learn how to use the public transport, where the shops are, etc. All of this I would class as education. Some of use like to read books to learn new things or we watch documentaries or programs like QI. All of the above are also accepted ways to learn new things, but failure is not. Failure is often classed as a weakness in a person, but I would argue that the weakness lies in if we decide not to pick ourselves up after we fail and try again.

To illustrate this I have an example from my own life. When I was looking for a new job I was filling in applications every day for a very long time and when the application for my current job came up I decided I was not going to bother, I had had enough. I felt demoralised, but my amazing Wife kicked by butt and strongly encouraged me to apply. I completed the online assessments and got through to an interview. It was then that I decided that the job was mine and I aced the interview. If I had given up then because I had failed so many times before with other applications and other interviews I would still be stuck in the job I was trying to escape from and not working in the place I do now, which I love. I decided to look at every failed interview as opportunities to learn what went well and what I could improve on. They we stepping stones of self development.

Sometimes we need the strength of others to help us rise after failure, but even this can be a lesson in humility. Even if we fail and hit rock bottom we can use it as a foundation from which to build. Failure can teach us more about ourselves and how we handle different situations. The reason we failed can become something we realise we need to master so we can succeed. There are many lessons in failure, if we are looking for them, but we have to be looking.

3. It will help develop a growth mindset

You may have heard the term ‘growth mindset’ banded about quite a lot, but you may not really know what it means. Well I am here to demystify it for you. Generally there are two types of mindset, there is the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. A fixed mindset, as I mentioned earlier in this blog, is the viewpoint that our success is reliant solely on our abilities. The problem with this is that when adversity hits, which it will at some point, the person with the fixed mindset can crumble under the slightest pressure from adversity.

The growth mindset on the other hand is the viewpoint that our success is built upon our hard work and effort as well as our abilities. When adversity hits someone with a growth mindset they are more flexible and can work around it and develop strategies to solve problems and gain personal and team success. When we fail and we consider the failure to be because of our fixed abilities it will be hard to come back from this. If we consider the failure to be because of our actions, then we can think of what actions we could have made to have been successful and make changes. It is about taking responsibility for our failures so that we can succeed.

We can use moments of failure to develop our growth mindset skills and to learn new things. If we were never to fail then we would never grow as individuals, we would never rise to the level that we may achieve if we utilise failure to our advantage. Every successful entrepreneur has failed over and over again, but they have learned from these failures and tried again. They will all have a growth mindset. If you asked Oprah Winfrey how often she has failed in her career it would probably be more than anyone in her live audience, because she did not stop at each failure, she learned from it and kept on going. You cannot succeed long term without failure, it is a necessity. The growth mindset is so important that I have chosen it as one of the Success Principles in my Fullfilment Framework.

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Mini Reflection: 3 things we need to reach greatness

Mini Reflections

If we want to reach greatness in any particular area we need to continuously do three things. First we have to work hard. This might seem obvious, but very few are prepared to put in the hard hustle. Second we have to be able to accept criticism and use it to improve. Feedback is fuel to get to greatness, if we use it as fuel. Third we have to be teachable. To become great we need mentors and leaders to get from good to great, but if we are not teachable, if we think we can learn it all ourselves and we don’t need help from others we will only reach mediocre.

Mini Reflection: The challenge of short and long term goals

Mini Reflections

Always have a vision, an almost unachievable and wonderful reality that matches your values and beliefs, but also set achievable daily goals which are aimed at the vision ahead of you. The vision is the destination, your values and beliefs are your compass and the map comes into existence when you know where you are and where you want to get to. However, without achieving the daily goals we will never get there.

Know where you are starting from

Happiness, Success

Sometimes we feel paralysed by life and we feel that we should be doing something greater, something better, but we are unsure what this is. Fear of the future and the regret of the past paralyses us. It is important to pay attention to both the future and the past, but we have to do this in the right way.

When we are fearful of the future or regretful of the past our mind is rarely in the present, we are fully focused on the fear and the regret. If we are not present in the moment then we are preventing ourselves from being happy or successful in the present. We cannot act in the future or the past, but we can act in the present, so to get out of this paralysis we have to focus on what is happening now.

I used to spend a lot of my time thinking about what the future may bring, what my life might be like without knowing what I wanted to do with my life. I was so focused on the future I was missing the present. This is something that many of us do. We either don’t have a clear idea of what we want to achieve or we do have an idea but we aren’t sure what we need to do to reach this achievement, because we haven’t researched what we think we want. To figure out what we want to achieve with our career or our health or our relationships, we need to research our plans and start from where we are. This process has three stages to it: Grounding, Reflection and Decisive Action.

Grounding.

We need to move our focus and ground ourselves in the present. Asking ourselves what we are happy with and what we are unhappy with, what we have control over and what we don’t. This is our base camp and the end goal will be the summit of a theoretical mountain. Knowing ourselves deeply is always the best place to start. If we know ourselves then we will make decisions in our best interests.

Reflection

Next we need to reflect on our past through the prism of our present. We should reflect on our experience, our skills, our strengths, our interests, our values and our beliefs. Understanding how all of these things make up who we are in this present moment is very important.

This will help us to realise two things. What our overarching purpose is in our lives and from this what we want to see manifest in our lives. Our purpose is our why, why we do what we do and the way we do it. My ‘Why’ is “Finding purpose is a path we all walk together, through helping each other find happiness and success,” which is why I write this blog. Your ‘Why’ will help you find what you want to manifest in your life.

When we find our ‘Why’ and what we want to manifest in our life, next we should research it and find out all of its aspects before reverse engineering the steps from where we are now to where we want to be.

These first two stages will not happen over night, becoming grounded in the present involves developing new mental habits, which takes practice and dedication. However, it does help to think of this as creating new habits which will replace old ones, rather than trying to remove the old habits. This is a matter of where we put your focus.

Decisive Action

When we have grounded ourselves in our present circumstances and reflected on our skills and experience, our values and beliefs, then the next step is to set steps to achieve on the way to the goal. These will be metaphorical milestone on the climb up the mountain to achieve what we want to see happen in our lives.

An important step that many miss out is to research the goals we want to achieve in order to clarify what is involved and, importantly, if it is truly what we want to see happen. Some goals are set because something looks or sounds good or others are doing it and it is right for them. Just as we reflect deeply on ourselves, we have to put the same effort into analysing our goals. If the research is not done then we may achieve our intended goal but it may not produce the fulfilment we expect.

We each walk through our lives picking up experiences and memories, skills and understandings. Our sense of self is formed like a sculpture chipped out of rock over time, bearing the marks of these things. Each of our lives is a journey and our happiness and success are shaped by everything we experience and everything we think, say and do. Therefore, in order to live fulfilling lives our goals need to match who we are. Ground yourself in the present, reflect on your past and this will help you reach your desired goals in your future, the summit of that metaphorical mountain.

What is getting in the way of you finding the goals that match your true self?

The goal is not everything 

Success

There is a growing trend in our culture today that allows us to obtain almost anything instantly. If we want to watch a film we put on Netflix, if we order something it can be delivered the same day, if we are hungry we can go to a fast food place and get food in minutes. This expectation of receiving things straight away is spreading to the world of work and of personal success, because for many it has become a natural part of our thinking, we habitually assume this applies to all things.

Part of the problem is the development of mobile technology, specifically the use of apps on mobile phones. We can now talk to anyone in the world, find a date, find a friend, buy things and manage our money instantly. Those who have grown up with this techology are succumbing to an instant gratification mindset.

If we use the analogy of a mountain to description the goals we set ourselves, professionally and personally, then the summit would be the goal and base camp would be where we are beginning from. In our current culture of instant gratification we often focus on the summit forgetting entirely that there is a mountain between where we are and where we want to get to. This has a sad side effect, which is that when we only focus on the goal we will inevitably feel like we are failing until we get there, and if we feel it should be a goal we reach soon then the instant gratification mindset compounds the problem.

What we need to do is twofold. Firstly changing our focus from the goal, and nothing else, to a focus on the process that will get us where we want to go. The goal then becomes where we set our compass to and the process becomes our preparation,  whether we work as a team or go it alone, the map that we use and the targets we set along the way. To continue with the analogy of the mountain, we can set camps that we aim to get to after we leave the base camp. These are the stages of climbing the mountain. There can be as many target camps as you like and reaching each one will be a success.

Secondly we need to cultivate patience. Some goals take a long time to get to, and that is OK. You cannot climb a mountain in a day. Sometimes there is a lot of preparation that needs to be done before getting to the base camp. Sometimes set backs occur and alternative roots need to be taken. Patience is also a skill that needs practice, which ironically can take a while to master.

So, if we change from focusing entirely on the goal to the process we do to get to the goal, with targets to achieve along the way then our success will be measured by the progress we are making not reaching of the goal in the end. If we feel successful we are more likely to work harder, feel happier and be more creative. This mindset of working towards our goals one step at a time can be cultivated in ourselves, but what really needs to happen is that our work places create a culture where progress towards goals is favoured over the achieving of goals over everything else. If this is achieved colleagues will feel encouraged to work harder and feel safe enough to try and fail and try again. This is how innovation happens.

What are your views on prioritising progress towards a goal over prioritising achieving the goal over everything else?