Success

New Beginnings, New Opportunities
Happy Black Woman

(Photo Credit: Mommy Noire)

Sometimes you have to allow yourself to move away from stagnant, declining and decaying spaces to offer yourself new opportunities to reach your highest potential. Too often people’s talents aren’t able to be used or are being wasted in unproductive spaces. Embracing the status quo and/or being overtaken by a spirit of complacency leads people to develop a false consciousness that they’re truly at “home” in these restrictive spaces. When you feel like you’re not growing and aren’t able to maximize your potential, it can be quite useful to consider the spaces you’re occupying.  Are you really happy where you are in life right now?  If you’re not, you may want to contemplate the impact the spaces you frequent or dwell in are having on your ability to experience happiness.

Don’t simply stay in a place to make the people around you happy.  Why would you want to live a miserable life just to make other people happy? Does not your own happiness matter too?  If you’re going to be truly happy and successful, you must have a willingness to take risks.  Find a successful person who never took a risk.  Let me save you some time: you won’t find one.

When you depart from spaces you have frequented or inhabited for a long time, it’s natural to experience some separation anxiety as a result of leaving people you love. Take the necessary time to deal with the impact of this separation anxiety, but don’t lose sight of the true happiness and prosperity you desire to materialize.  At some point, you’re going to have to learn the importance of keeping your emotions in check. Successful people don’t give their emotions the power to rule them; they rule their emotions.  If you allow your emotions to run you, then you will make many emotional decisions; emotional decisions are often poor and damaging decisions.

You may have to try or learn some new things to make room for new beginnings and new opportunities.  Don’t get frustrated with the new thing you have to learn.  You have to understand that the new thing you have to learn is a part of the process of getting to the life you long to live. The path to success is not going to be easy and it’s not going to come without some struggle.  When you muster the courage to pursue new beginnings and new opportunities, you have to develop a resolute mindset to meet your aspirations.  You have to be determined to accomplish your goals no matter what comes your way.

Recognize that there will be people who will attempt to discourage you from pursuing new beginnings and new opportunities, but you must view them as only hindrances.  Don’t permit a single hindrance to stifle your progress in any way.  Keep pushing forward, even if you have to push your hindrances literally out of the way.

Be excited about pursuing new beginnings and new opportunities.  One of the amazing things about life is you never know what great opportunity will come your way.  It’s up to you, however, to engender an environment where new beginnings and new opportunities run to you instead of run away from you.

Life becomes sweeter and sweeter when we’re open to change.  Change can be good for you.  Go ahead and give yourself a chance to be a better you!

Dr. Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Winning Habits for Success: Be a Better Leader

Success

As a leader, you have the opportunity and control to set the tone and direction for your whole organization, so you want to create a productive working environment and have happy employees.  To become an influential executive leader, such as Mark Weinberger, CEO of Ernst & Young, take note of the tips offered in this piece.

Shared Standards & Responsibility

The days of Mr. Scrooge counting his gold in the corner and doling out horrendous tasks to overworked paupers shouldn’t be real life.  Successful business leaders hold themselves to the same standards they hold everyone else.  When their team suffers from a mishap, a good leader takes the fall.  When the team achieves a triumph, a good leader makes certain his team receives credit for the positive outcome, which can be motivational as well.  Forbes calls this an inverted “blame-to-credit ratio.”  A supervisor who takes credit for the good and then points fingers during the bad is “simply being a weenie.”  A true leader stands tall during success and failure; it’s part of the job to take responsibility says Forbes.com contributor Josh Linkner.

Positive Attitude & Environment

Complaining or barking to employees lowers morale and leads to defensiveness.  To achieve goals and accomplish tasks, managers need to positively cultivate talent and support employees. Good energies and attitudes in a workplace can make the difference.  Also, developing a personal, yet professional, relationship with your team can foster mutual respect.  With mutual respect, a manager and employee can work effectively in tandem and continue to develop a relationship free of negative emotions and toxicity that can alter productivity, efficiency and creativity.  Working well together and learning something new from one another is the true definition of a team.  “The team is always stronger than the individual,” argues Executive Mark Weinberger on WashingtonPost.com.

Power of Accountability

As a leader, your behavior should set the standard for the behavior of those around you.  Think of your actions and attitude like swimming in a fishbowl—they’re transparent for all to see and mimic, as described by YoungEntrepreneur.com.  When a problem arises, take accountability for it.  If something stressful overwhelms you, your response will determine the standard for how the rest of the team also responds and cooperates.  People who don’t act accountable for the weight of their actions can set the stage for performers never living up to their potential.

Empathy & Consistency

Being able to finesse the waters of the work world includes empathy.  As a leader, one of your most important tasks is to deliver results.  Expressing empathy with your team helps ameliorate productivity and produce results because your employees feel valued.  Along with empathy, stay consistent with how you approach and respond to your team.  Managers who unexpectedly and hastily attack employees verbally or through email, for example, can cause employees to feel emotionally jarred.  Just like a positive attitude, empathy and understanding engender a productive environment where employees don’t feel restricted because they work in fear or anxiety.

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Take Some Risks

At some point in your life, you have to take some risks.  It is important to understand that we are all going to experience failure—it’s an inevitable and valuable dimension of life.  Your focus should not be on failure but on the lessons learned from failure.  One cannot allow his or her mind to become so consumed with a fear of failure that he or she never is unwilling to muster the courage to take a risk.  In no way am I advocating for you to take risks each day.  I am, however, encouraging you to be willing to step out of your comfort zone from time to time and have an openness to try something new, try something that you cannot be certain is going to turn out to be successful.

If you want to move to the next level of success in your life, then you cannot simply sit around and allow doubt to dominate your psyche.  You will not be able to experience the fullness of life by simply playing it safe.  Life has much more to offer you when experience some things you would not normally do.  Many people miss out on life-changing opportunities because they approach most things from “I cannot do it” and “it won’t work” mindsets.  You will never be able to be as successful as you can be when you approach most things with little faith.  When you give yourself more opportunities to experience success, even if you fail in the process, you increase your confidence in your ability to execute tasks successfully; that is, you increase your self-efficacy.

We can all learn from the examples that entrepreneurs provide us each day.  Entrepreneurs take risks every day—they have to take them.  All of our great national and international corporations started from a strong belief in the power of the entrepreneurial spirit.  Prominent national and international corporations were founded by individuals who had enough courage to not allow a fear of failure to stop them from walking into what is possible.  Many lesser known small business owners have just as much or more faith in themselves to take risks than the more well-known entrepreneurs that founded major corporations.  These people understand that having a successful business in a capitalist system requires you to take some risks.  If you are to be truly successful in a capitalist system, you are going to have to realize that from time to time you must take risks.

Even if you characterize yourself as “not a risk-taker,” don’t allow labels to prevent you from making moves that can significantly benefit you and your family.  We often use labels as vehicles for hiding our fear of failure.  As we strive to grow into more successful and wiser people, we have to confront our fear of failure more directly.  Having a strong fear of failure can cause you to coast through life instead of truly experiencing it.

I am going to be honest with you and tell you that confronting your fear of failure can be quite unsettling.  When you begin to wrestle critically with your fear of failure, you begin to understand some ugly truths about yourself that you would rather bury than bring them to the surface to work to improve them.  Don’t be afraid of your ugly truths—work to ameliorate the ugly truths that emerge from your critical self-examination of your fear of failure.  As long as you continue to live, you are going to fail.  Therefore, you should not allow a fear of failure to hinder you from experiencing the success you can enjoy in life.  Muster the courage to be the best you can be.

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Exercising Patience

Although many situations require us to act and/or think immediately and decisively, there comes a point when we have to be patient. We may not be patient people but some situations mandate that we be patient. I have to admit that I’m not a patient person. I do, however, understand that being successful and remaining successful entails being patient sometimes. I’ve been dealing with some problems for the last two years that I wanted to act immediately and decisively on, but I found that acting immediately and decisively on those problems would not be in my best interest. Yes, I could have solved those problems immediately but I would have missed out on what time has placed in my favor to address those problems with even more auspicious results for me. It’s almost time for me reap the benefits of exercising patience with several serious problems that I’ve let time work in my complete favor. Again, I’m a tremendously impatient person and a person who loves to respond immediately to problems, but I have learned that allowing time to benefit you on some problems will help you to address them in their totality and not just the surface level issues of the problems.

I understand that it can be hard to not immediately respond to a problem that emerges from someone doing something wrong to you. I am a person who has to work hard to try to calm myself down because I don’t mind popping you in your mouth in a heartbeat when you do something wrong to me. Over the past two years, God has been really good to some folks because they were supposed to be…(the Holy Spirit just interceded, so I cannot finish this sentence). Lol! When people do things wrong to you, I have learned that you cannot try to respond to them all immediately all the time. You will find yourself fighting daily battles and never having an opportunity to work on advancing yourself if you attempt to respond to all things people do to you all the time.

I’ve also learned to be more patient in my personal and business relationships. I’m so aggressive that I don’t really want to wait on anything. I’ll see something or someone that I want in a personal and business relationship and I’ll just immediately try to seize the thing or person. This is not a wise thing to do, however. Everything is not made to be seized immediately. You can actually disrupt the natural connection that you have to things and people when you rush your relation to those things and people. When you are as aggressive as I am, it’s vital for you to take a step back and think about how your aggressiveness might be perceived as a tremendously negative thing in a personal and business relationship. You don’t have to change who you are but you can consider how you might better position your natural aggressiveness to benefit you the most. You can allow your aggressiveness to manifest itself in other ways than just immediate reactions.

When you make a conscious effort to be more patient, you can learn serious truths about yourself. You might learn that the things or people you desired are not really what you need or want or what you need or want immediately. When you are not willing to exercise patience sometimes, you could prevent yourself from benefitting from the critical thinking you need. The lack of patience can really lead us to some ignorant decisions.

Of course, it’s essential to act immediately and decisively in many situations, but your dominant approach should not be to act immediately and decisively all the time. When you are always ready to make decisions immediately and decisively, people can begin to start to anticipate you; you become predictable. You need to have some level of unpredictability in your personal and business relationships.

Exercising patience is not being weak—it can often reveal your true strength.

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison