Have you seen the back to school tones in everything around you this week? About this time of year there is a “back to school” tone in every newspaper, commercial, and experience walking through retail stores. Whether its kindergarten, football, or college, there’s an energy in the air about the fall that’s coming through learning skills. Do you find yourself thinking about new clothes, new schedules and maybe even glancing at the school supplies? For leaders, learning is a never ending privilege. The outcome is no longer to achieve an “A” or “S+” but adults exchange striving for honor roll or all “a” report cards for the satisfaction of improving their income, their efforts, and experience of excellence.
Do you intentionally focus on learning how to experience more success in your life? In your business? In your relationships?
The late Zig Ziglar shared
“Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.”
– Zig Ziglar
Is success YOUR personal standard? In all the years I’ve worked with individuals who seek to become leaders of their own lives as well as their organizations there is a defining difference. This difference is clearly present in every.single.successful.leader I’ve witnessed as well as mentored throughout my organizations. Each person has valued and exercised “seeing” their dreams. Have you ever entered a meeting room and the energy was just static. Oh the room looked nice, the building was fine, but the tone was ho hum and the people in the room were just not excited about their presence? That’s the tone that happens when individuals stop seeing their dreams, or leaders stop preparing their lessons and skill sets for their organization. Are there steps to success? You bet there are. Just as you would plan your wardrobe before embarking on a tour for speaking, you plan for success as surely as teachers plan for their student’s lessons for learning.
When school starts, the teachers evaluate the folders of information on the student’s scores and behaviors the previous year. Many teachers spend a few weeks at the beginning of the new fall season going over base skills and emphasizing important previous lessons to set the stage for the new skills the students will be learning. Have you considered where your skills for success are? What grade would you give yourself for your daily, weekly, focuses? Are you developing your skills? Are you moving through the grades of excellence in your actions? If you’ve been a manager of people, you know how important it is to teach uniformly, to consistently affirm and expect excellence from your people. You know how engaging it is as an audience member to truly learn from your manager, leader, or CEO. We all love to learn, it’s in our DNA, particularly if that learning improves our daily experience, our life at home and our income doing what we do! Herman Cain shares what I think is a very important reason to focus on your dreams and to learn the mindsets and skill sets to make them come true.
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
– Herman Cain
You will not love what you do if you are not effective and successful at doing it! If you’re not encouraging yourself for the responsibility and achievement of doing! I’ve met so many women and men along the path that never seem to figure out that while the responsibilities of leading yourself and others requires effort both for yourself and for your tribe, the joy of personal growth through learning how to excel….how to truly improve your own life…is well worth the process of maturing your skills. We do not expect a baby who is toddling to immediately begin running marathons do we?But we very often expect ourselves to excel without taking time to learn the steps of success. However, if that same baby spends twenty years crawling, we would be very concerned about how to help them help themselves.
Are you ready to help yourself? Are you ready to focus this fall and advance your leadership to the next level? Have you missed the joy of gathering with elite excellence minded individuals? That’s why I love fall conferences. It’s a beautiful time of year to gather and learn together. I know in business that fall offers the most wonderful time to engage new skills and put them to work! Is it time to pause and look at what you’re doing in life? Is it time to reward yourself for the things you do well and allow yourself the gift of Identifying the skills you’d like to improve in to build a life you love? Whether it’s a podcast a day, a book a week, or putting time in your weekly calendar to set an outcome to happen, why not borrow the “back to school” mindset and focus on learning this fall? Successful leaders focus on learning and improving themselves as they go!
“Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.”
– George Sheehan
P.S. I hope you’ll join us for my Women with Vision Conference 2016. I’ll be teaching my own version of how to embrace success, how to enact the skills to develop your dreams and create your vision to reality in your daily focus!
