THE VALUES OF SUCCESS
THE VALUES OF SUCCESS
What do I mean by that?
Your life mission can be anything you want it to be. Essentially it can be described as the legacy you want to leave, how you want to be remembered by people. Author Steven Covey recommends writing the eulogy that you would like to have read out at your funeral. As drastic as that sounds, it is a way of putting on paper how you want to be remembered. A life mission statement is the compass by which you navigate your life, the destination toward which your choices and activities move you. It is also, to a degree, the measure of your success. Once you have defined your life mission, you are able to determine how you are doing in relation to where you want to be. Of course, success is not only about accomplishing your mission; it is also about doing the things now which need to be done in order to accomplish your mission.
For example, if you would like to be remembered as a great community leader, you are not only successful when you have become that, you are also successful every time you make a choice or carry out an action which positively moves you toward becoming a great community leader. It might start with a decision to assist in community projects, and then move on to offering to stand for various committees which arrange the projects and so on. Each of these steps is an indication of your success already achieved.
But there is another aspect to success. Success is achieving your mission within the confines of your values.
I like to think of values as the railway tracks of life. There are many ways to reach our destination, but our values, our tracks, hold us on the right path as we move toward achieving our goals. If we use our mission as our compass which determines our direction, but fail to put values in place, we can achieve that mission in many different ways, some of them good and others bad, some of them beneficial and some of them destructive. Just as important as achieving our goals is how we get there.
Let’s return to our aspirant community leader. How the person reaches the goal of becoming a community leader depends on their values. They can get there through generous giving of their time and skills, genuinely helping and improving the community without looking for reward or recognition. Or they can push people out the way who threaten their path to the top, focus more on achieving recognition as a leader than on the needs of the community, and engage in dubious deals in order to support their campaign. Without a firm set of good values in place, good railway tracks, it is possible to achieve even a good goal in all the wrong ways.
It can be more difficult to achieve you life mission when you are constrained by values, and are not free to move forward by any means. But ultimately success is about achieving your life mission, and achieving it in a positive way within the constraints of a good set of values.
THE VALUES OF SUCCESS - To learn more about this author, visit Jonathan Payne's Website.
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How would you define success? I suppose there are many ways – wealth, power, influence. One definition I like is that success is achieving your life mission within the confines of your values.
What do I mean by that?
Your life mission can be anything you want it to be. Essentially it can be described as the legacy you want to leave, how you want to be remembered by people. Author Steven Covey recommends writing the eulogy that you would like to have read out at your funeral. As drastic as that sounds, it is a way of putting on paper how you want to be remembered. A life mission statement is the compass by which you navigate your life, the destination toward which your choices and activities move you. It is also, to a degree, the measure of your success. Once you have defined your life mission, you are able to determine how you are doing in relation to where you want to be. Of course, success is not only about accomplishing your mission; it is also about doing the things now which need to be done in order to accomplish your mission.
For example, if you would like to be remembered as a great community leader, you are not only successful when you have become that, you are also successful every time you make a choice or carry out an action which positively moves you toward becoming a great community leader. It might start with a decision to assist in community projects, and then move on to offering to stand for various committees which arrange the projects and so on. Each of these steps is an indication of your success already achieved.
But there is another aspect to success. Success is achieving your mission within the confines of your values.
I like to think of values as the railway tracks of life. There are many ways to reach our destination, but our values, our tracks, hold us on the right path as we move toward achieving our goals. If we use our mission as our compass which determines our direction, but fail to put values in place, we can achieve that mission in many different ways, some of them good and others bad, some of them beneficial and some of them destructive. Just as important as achieving our goals is how we get there.
Let’s return to our aspirant community leader. How the person reaches the goal of becoming a community leader depends on their values. They can get there through generous giving of their time and skills, genuinely helping and improving the community without looking for reward or recognition. Or they can push people out the way who threaten their path to the top, focus more on achieving recognition as a leader than on the needs of the community, and engage in dubious deals in order to support their campaign. Without a firm set of good values in place, good railway tracks, it is possible to achieve even a good goal in all the wrong ways.
It can be more difficult to achieve you life mission when you are constrained by values, and are not free to move forward by any means. But ultimately success is about achieving your life mission, and achieving it in a positive way within the constraints of a good set of values.
THE VALUES OF SUCCESS - To learn more about this author, visit Jonathan Payne's Website.
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Dianne CramptonDianne Crampton is an executive leadership coach, team culture consultant, author and president of TIGERS Success Series, Inc. Dianne has been helping CEO's and Executives connect their employees to their core values and goals for over 20 years using the trademarked TIGERS team culture process, which stands for trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success. To download a free white paper on behaviors that build strong teams and behaviors that will predictably tear them down go here. Dianne's contribution to the 2010 Pfeiffer Consulting Journal (an imprint of John Wiley and Sons Publishers) entitled TIGERS Hearted Teams is available in November 2009. Her new book TIGERS Among Us: 5 Winning Business Team Cultures And Why, Three Creeks Publishing will release in March 2010. To receive publishing discounts, subscribe to the free TigerTracks Newsletter here. - Visit Dianne Crampton's Website |
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Leanne Hoagland-SmithAre your sales where you want them to be? Will you be one of the few who achieves sales or business success or one of the many who have failed to change? Are you tired of being told you are like everyone else? Then you may find my first book on sales of interest. Be the Red Jacket in the Sea of Gray Suits, The Keys to Unlocking Sales available at Amazon or at http://www.processspecialist.com/red-jacket.htm. This book is a reflection of my no-nonsense approach to improving sales to overall business results. If you are truly committed to making sustainable changes, then I can help you secure a positive return on your investment because I focus on executable solutions not telling you the problems you already know you have. From training to corporate (group) coaching to executive one on one coaching, my approach is to assess, create awareness, build a goal driven action plan and then execute. The bottom line question is "Not do you or your employees know it, but do you or they want to do it?" Please call for a free strategy session at 219.759.5601. - Visit Leanne Hoagland-Smith's Website |
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Linda RichardsonLinda Richardson is the Founder and Executive Chairwoman of Richardson, a global sales training and performance improvement company. As a recognized leader in the industry, she has won the coveted Stevie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Sales Excellence and she was identified by Training Industry, Inc. as one of the “Top 20 Most Influential Training Professionals.” Ms. Richardson is credited with the movement to Consultative Selling and is the author of ten books on selling and sales management, including Sales Coaching — Making the Great Leap from Sales Manager to Sales Coach, and Stop Telling, Start Selling. She teaches sales and management at the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Executive Development Center. Linda is a frequent speaker at industry and client conferences, has been published extensively in industry and training journals, and has been featured in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Nation’s Business, Selling Power, Success, and The Conference Board Magazine. Learn more about Richardson's sales training and performance improvement solutions at http://www.richardson.com web - Visit Linda Richardson's Website |
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