What have you willed?
Today -1st November- is the 5th Anniversary of “The You Tomorrow”…my journey as a Coach and Family Business Facilitator.
I’ve learnt that what makes a great family does not make a great team, but what makes a great person always makes a great leader.
Great families have great leaders, and great teams need great leaders too.
Both families and teams are result oriented yet with a difference.
Teams measure results via competition. How much better are they in the market place or on the field compared to other teams? How well is their product doing versus how much better it could or should do.
Families measure results via feeling. How does s/he make me feel? How important am I to the other…Is it safe here?
Our competitive strength lies in our ability to ignore feeling and do exactly that which is needed to be done. It is in fact the reason why doctors are not allowed to operate on their own family members.
Our competitive weakness lies in our need to adhere to feelings and avoid the absolute validity and necessity of an action.
Family businesses with weak leaders generally crumble under the conflicting pressures of these opposing dynamics.
The human being, each individual person, is intrinsically good. S/he is filled with goodness from the womb. Yet mysteriously we find that being and remaining ‘good’ is tough for us.
Too easily the unskilled amongst us lose our calm, our composure, our balance and our gentleness. Too easily do we adopt rudeness, abuse, and violence.
We are skewed inappropriately towards our own comfort at all costs, and respond too easily and too often with a sense of being threatened.
Our lack of skill displays itself everyday in the smallest of things …in the way we are victim to three fears. (1) The fear of loss of control/power. (2) The fear of loss of face. (3) The fear of loss of possession.
A great person is one who has mastered self. This is what leadership means: mastering self… the one who overcomes these fears.
In these last five years, I have had superb opportunities to help both individuals and families.
While almost everybody has complimented me on the positive difference I have made in their lives and in the lives of their families; I sometimes feel, I made as much real impact as I would have had by pushing the Titanic with my little finger.
I realise there are two kinds of people: The moveable and the immoveable. The difference between being immovable and moveable is these two things:
1) The immovable wants to have other people change. The moveable wants to change and grow themselves.
2) The immovable always possess the desire to change but never make the journey of translating that desire to a firm resolve.
I invite you to do this exercise today.
Look at your life and write down what has occurred because you CAN’T do something, and what because you WILL not do something.
The truth of happiness lies in our will.
The misery of unhappiness lies in our will-nots.
May you will happiness… God bless.