Work on you 1st, others 2nd.

I had an interesting topic come up during a coaching session I had this week on self-development. This was my mentor Ali’s new business/personal manager who Ali had sent to me for shadowing and coaching. She shadowed me throughout the day and had asked several questions about how I manage my schedule, motivate my team members, keep everyone accountable and manage my personal life. One of her main focuses directed by Ali was to be able to focus on running and improving the employees of his organization. One of the questions she asked was how to develope the team, what software do you use, what books do you read and how do you continuously improve your people. My answer was simple “if you are not moving forward, if you are not improving, if you are not developing yourself how would you expect the people that you lead to do the same. People rarely do what you tell them, they do what they see so you need to set an example”

I find it interesting in leadership roles allot of people get too focused on what they want and they forget that we never attract what we want, we often attract what we are. So if there is something that needs Developement it’s most likely to the “self” needing development. In an orgonozation if you are not please to have bunch of 6 out of 10s and you want 9 out of 10 that usually means the personal score you have is only slightly higher than everyone else’s. So if your people are a 6 then you are most likely a 7. If you want 9s then you absolutely have to become a 10. I noticed instead of improving ourselves we look for things outside of us, it’s really hard to fix what’s not you, in my personal experience although it’s tougher to start it will always be easier in the long run to work on you first others second not the other way around.

Before we ask the question to a perceptible ambiguous puzzle which we don’t understand and have no hope of understanding we need to ask ourselves, what will the answer mean to us? There are many things about the way things work that we don’t understand and sometimes we burn our efforts looking for answers that are irrelevant in discovering what we are looking for. Often we burn our efforts in politics and religious endeavors that have nothing to do with us, in pursuit of happiness we believe happiness relies in the clarity of controversy but little we realize we are caught up in progress of endless misconception of what we think happiness is. One thing for sure, knowing how gravity works will not make the difference in what we are missing that keeps us away from happiness and discovering who we are, knowing how our mind works will lead us to having answers to things that matter to us most on a personal level which leads to happiness. Being able to understand how our mind works is the process of settling with ourselves its not researching the next theory of where happiness is. You are not somewhere else, you are right where you left you, in pursuit of answers we can get so far from the “you” that we put great distance between what matters most, we get confused of who we are and continuously look for the “you” or the “why” behind the next turn endlessly.