Perspectives & Strategy

I have been reading CEO Material by D.A. Benton and in the Chapter titled “You Feel Broadly Adequate” she talks of confidence and asks the question “What Does Confident Look Like?” She state you can choose to have confidence, agreed and she lists a number of qualifying attributes that add to your confidence, one of which is:

Credit luck with many of your achievements

Personally I have had the viewpoint that luck has nothing to do with any of your accomplishments. Indeed in Think and Grow Rich Napoleon Hill talks about the ability to visualise, the thinking process, that is the catalyst for success. Many other writers have also taken the view that there is no such thing as luck. I would love to hear from my loyal readers on how they view the question of luck and the role it plays in your success. Either comment or email me.

To me the key elements of success are:

◊ An ability to visualise your goals

◊ Identify what needs to happen

◊ Look at what needs to be different than it is today

◊ What do we need to do right now?

◊ Review how we are going

I am not belittling any persons view on this but the key elements to me here are about visualisation and not luck. Do the right things fall into place at the right time? For me recently they have, and I have found ways to visualise better futures.

Confidence is an important factor and that is an element that can peak and trough during all of the things that you do. Yet with everything that we do it is important to take a level headed review of where we are and what can be achieved. Yet it is this thought that also leads me to think that big advances are generally taken as a series of little steps, and generally speaking a little step is easier to manage than a big one – it is the big step that can leave us with much fear. We all have to recognise when to say NO and we all have to learn how to take NO. NO is one of the most powerful words in business grammar yet few of us know how to use it well.

NO is rarely a flat out NO, usually it equates to “we do not know enough about the problem in order to know whether we can change it”. It is often associated with a ‘red-light reflex‘ or a startle response that we react to when our stable universe is challenged.

Leadership is largely about building trust. and confidence is an important factor. It is not you own confidence, but those of other that also need to be considered. Including:

◊ Articulating vision and goals

◊ Acting persistently and consistently is defining change

◊ Judging the feelings and views of those involves

◊ Being able to motivate those involved

◊ Providing feedback, being responsive or resilient.

Overall I think it is more than being adequate, but that is a phase we all have to go though during our chosen career.