Regardless of their educational background, most people are unaware of how to create the life they want. Creating the life you choose is an exciting possibility.
If you are a business owner or manager and want to build a high-performance team, showing people how to create the career they want within the structure of your organization pays high returns both in monetary terms and self-satisfaction. Here are some suggestions.
Have your participants carefully formulate a picture of their desired future within your strategic framework.
Include what we can control rather than what we cannot control. Instead of saying “people (customers) respect me/us,” make a declaration to “conduct myself/ourselves in such a way that …” Remember, we create who we choose to be, not how others responds to us.
Here are several principles that may help:
1. Clearly describe your preferred future. (Dream big!)
2. Describe the benefits of your desired future.
3. Describe the consequences of not creating this future.
The third step is often missed. Some people are motivated to get something while others have a stronger desire to avoid losing what they have.
Some people lose their lives trying to protect their possessions but will avoid doing what they know might help them in the future. The fear of loss is often greater than the desire for gain.
Determine the behaviour changes required to accomplish each person’s objectives.
What skills are required? If someone aspires to move into a new position ask them: “How does a person already in that position act? What do they know? What do they do?”
Suggest they get busy developing the necessary skills and find a mentor to support them. It may help to remind them that the price of success is payable in advance.
Underlying our behaviour is a set of values, or “unifying principles.” Here are some of mine. Yours may be different, but that’s okay, since these are individual choices.
• I choose to respect individuals as unique and “unrateable.”
• I choose freedom.
• I choose health.
• I choose to be true to myself.
• I choose to be the primary creative force in my life (on this earth).
• I choose to accept individuals for what they are without always endorsing their lifestyles.
• I choose to support others in less fortunate circumstances, even if I believe they chose their circumstances.
• I choose to give of myself freely, expecting nothing in return, other than knowing I am making a contribution.
• I choose to help others fend for themselves by refusing to treat them as helpless victims.
• I choose to defend my values without apology.
• I choose my emotions and accept responsibility for their consequences.
• I am fully responsible for my actions and accept the consequences of those actions.
• I am not a victim of my past or present circumstances. If I am a victim, it is to my own firmly held, irrational beliefs.
• I choose to learn from yesterday, anticipate tomorrow, but live today.
Freedom to take risks and suffer the consequences of our behaviour is the cornerstone of a free society.
Unfortunately there are those who advocate feeling good about themselves—even if it means giving up their freedom to succeed and/or fail. Some even go so far as to blame imaginary villains for clearly self-inflicted problems.
Claiming this kind of helplessness is initially an easier position to take, but in the end it always leads to feelings of resignation, and when we resign ourselves to failure, our resignation is always accepted.
It’s more rewarding to strive toward creating the life and career we choose.
Dave Mather is a Performance Improvement Specialist at Dale Carnegie Business Group in Toronto.
His columns can be read at ept.ms/dave-mather
Find Dave on LinkedIn.
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