Tag: Skills

This Is Your Craft

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Relationships, Success

The work that people do when they are working at a successful level is often described as a craft. A craft is an activity with specialist skills that need to be perfected to be good at that thing. It is the element of perfecting these skills that causes the work of successful people to be described as a craft.

I have come to realise that whatever a person’s craft is, there is another craft that sits behind it and is the same for everyone. This singular craft is the craft of thriving. It involves the thinking of the mind, the actions of the body, and the cultivating of chi. If you do not have the right mental health, physical health, and chi health, you don’t have any health at all. And without good health, you can not be successful.

So, the craft behind your craft is to make sure that you thrive. This begins with your mind. The thoughts you have and the beliefs you hold, both conscious and unconscious, control most of how your day goes. If you are not in a good place mentally, most things will not go well. You won’t be happy and you won’t be successful. When your mind is in a good place, you can make sure that your body is healthy and your chi is balanced, strong, and flowing. Then, with this foundation, you can work on your craft and be successful.

When you thrive, you can better succeed and serve others. When you serve others, they can better thrive, and so can you. To thrive and help others to thrive is the foundation of a good life.

How To Develop Confidence

Achieving Goals, Leadership, Relationships, Success

On the way into work yesterday it was quite misty, but it wasn’t thick enough to be fog. It reminded me of something I heard about how driving in fog is a metaphor for life. Often, when moving forward with a new venture, a new relationship, or anything that takes us out of our comfort zone, we are scared because we don’t know what the future holds. This is like driving in fog when you can only see 10 feet in front of you. The way to get clarity on what is ahead of you is to move forward 10 feet and then you can see the next 10 feet.

The lesson here is that we will never be able to predict the future 100%, but this should not stop us from moving forward. The best strategy is to work on your skillset and learn from your experiences. With skills and experience you can make wiser decisions and you can pivot where needed, depending on what life throws at you. If you trust your car brakes, steering, lights etc, then driving in fog is less stressful because your car and you can handle whatever you come across.

In order to improve your skillset and experience, you have to put in the time to try things out and develop skills. However, confidence also comes from our mindset, we have to believe in ourselves and our abilities or the actions we take will largely be ineffective. This mindset has to be a growth mindset, the ability to be agile and flexible requires it. Having a fixed mindset will cause your confidence to crumble when you hit the realities of life.

So, confidence requires skillset, mindset and experience. A seemingly obvious statement, but we often think of confidence as something we are born with. In reality confidence comes from how we behave on a moment to moment basis.

The final piece to the puzzle of confidence is our environment. If we feel safe enough to try and fail and try again, then our confidence goes up. If failure is treated with rejection, then we will develop a fixed mindset, we won’t believe we can do anything and we will not gain the required experience. This is why we need trusting teams at work, and supportive relationships in our lives. Add together all of these elements and you have the recipe for confidence.