Are You Managed or Led?
If you had a choice, would you want to direct your own life or have someone else direct it for you? Ok, the next thought…do you go to work to be managed or do you go to work to be led?
After you reflect on those questions, I will say with confidence that over 90% of the readers would undoubtedly want to direct their own lives and they are looking to be led, not managed. The other 10% I would break down to being afraid or uncertain how to direct their own lives and at the end of the day if they found a way to take charge of their direction they would.
Here are some thoughts on how to take charge of your life:
- Love and respect yourself because if you can’t love and respect yourself how could you expect anyone else to love and respect you.
- Develop a growth plan. Without personal growth (or team/organizational growth) the only path left is to irrelevance and the path to irrelevant goes from some control to no control. Growth whether personal or professional must be intentional and on-going. Effective growth is a journey and growth must influence you personally.
- Find a mentor(s) who has traveled the path you want for yourself. Find a room where you can learn from others knowing that if you are the smartest in the room you are in the wrong room.
- Evaluate failure, don’t find fault. Regardless of how good we are we all will have successes and failures. Celebrate success and then move on, evaluate failure, learn and re-engage.
- Personal growth in your own life will do two things, one growth makes you better and second, your growth models the way for others taking you from relevant to significant.
The discussion on the value to personal growth goes way beyond what I have introduced here. Personal growth is not the responsibility of your employer, in fact most work-related training has insignificant effect unless you can practice it outside of work. I find that any training, workshop, conference, webinar, or any other form of development needs to touch the heart and be practiced daily regardless of where you are – from transactional training to transformational growth.
Sterling Martin
