living for eternity today

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Don’t Strive For Success

In a culture that is bent on getting ahead and being the best and coming out on top, this is not a very popular idea. But if you hang with me for a bit hopefully you’ll come around and see things a little differently.

Success is defined as the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.

At face value success isn’t really a bad thing. Actually there’s nothing really wrong with success in and of itself. Being successful simply means that we’ve done something the way it was expected of us.

But there’s a problem when success is our aim. When all we care about is success at all costs things go off the rails quickly. And just like a train that goes off its rails, when we go off the rails people get hurt. Innocent and unexpecting people get hurt.

When we strive for success it will quickly overcome us. Success isn’t the problem. We are the problem. When we let success become the driving force behind what we do, it quickly takes over. If you’re in it for yourself then success might take you a decent distance. But it will always have a ceiling. Success can only take you as far as your achievements allow.

I’d like to encourage a little different approach than mere success. Instead of success strive to be a person of value. The difference between striving for success and striving to be a person of value is that a person of success will never surpass their talent, but a person of value builds on the success and value of the rest of the team or organization.

Being a person of value means that you’re not just in it for yourself. Being a person of value means that even when you don’t succeed you still don’t fail because you maintained value for the team or organization.

Striving to be a person of value is something lacking in so many aspects of the world today. Instead of getting ahead at all costs, perhaps we could stop and find how we can add value to the group granting us an even better chance at long term success.

Leaders Ride ATVs

It might seem weird to put the ideas of leadership and ATVs in the same line. For those of you who have no idea (not sure how but I’m sure you exist) ATVs are those cool all terrain vehicles. I have one myself actually. I love my 4-wheeler! Tons of fun to go cruising through the field. Not to mention it’s super helpful to haul things around the property! Oh and don’t forget it’s how I plow my driveway. But that’s not really the ATV to which I’m referring.

I think leaders need a different kind of ATV in their lives. In a leader’s life, ATV stands for Authentic, Transparent, and Vulnerable. These are hyper critical elements that every leader needs to be effective and grow in her or his leadership capabilities.

Authentic

We start with authenticity. Authenticity is one of those hot button kind of words. More commonly we use words like genuine and real. Have you ever met someone who was just fake? I don’t mean they were a cartoon figure but they just didn’t live out who they said they were. Authenticity is the trait of being in real life who you say you are. When a person’s actions match their confession then they are authentic, genuine, real.

There are tons of examples of people who are just not authentic. We see it in many politicians and movie stars. They are people we look up to on the big screen. Then we get a glimpse into their personal lives and realize they might not be someone we want to look up to after all.

Leaders need to be people who are real or those who follow them won’t know who they are following. An authentic leader is one who is tested against their own words. When a leader is authentic, they can be trusted. A leader who is not authentic isn’t trustworthy or follow-worthy for that matter.

Transparent

This one is a bit more complicated for some leaders. There’s a fine line between being transparent and oversharing. This doesn’t mean that every leader has to air all of their dirty laundry in public. There are some things that no one really needs to know! So keep some of those behind closed door moments, behind the closed door of silence.

Being transparent is really about letting people see the real you. Between authenticity and transparency a leader is walking with the people he/she is leading. Transparency is the ability to say what’s going on and let people see inside. There are some emotional parts of our lives that we need to let people see into. Transparency is about admitting faults and asking for forgiveness when you’ve done wrong. Which leads us to the last part of this…

Vulnerable

Vulnerability is a tricky one. Leaders don’t like to be vulnerable. I’ll be honest this is one the harder ones for me as well. Letting people in means we have to trust them not to use what they see against us. Some people will take your authenticity and transparency to highlight your vulnerabilities and blast you with it. Those people are not people with whom you need to surround yourself.

Being vulnerable is really about lowering your guard enough to not just let people see inside but to have access to your weaknesses. And yes it takes trust – immense trust! But leadership requires trust as well. A good leader needs to be able to trust the people she is leading. The leader has to demonstrate that he isn’t above everyone else. When our authenticity and transparency give way to a level of vulnerability we become even more real and more relatable to those around us.

So in short, every good leader needs to have an ATV. We need to be real and authentic. We need to open ourselves up and show the real us even when we’re in charge. And we must do the hard work of letting our guard down and letting people in so we can expose some of those soft spots in our character.

Just like my ATV lets me ride over some pretty intense terrain, when as a leader you are willing to expose your true self through authenticity, transparency and vulnerably you will go places you could never go otherwise!

It’s time to ride friends!

Less Is More

The saying is older than me and I have no clue where it comes from, but I’m certain we’ve all heard it. Less is more! The idea is simple. Do less in a more intentional way and you’ll end up being more effective in the long run! So the question we need to address as individuals and organizations is What are we doing that we don’t need to be doing anymore?

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