LEAD D CHANGE (2)

I am still perusing one my mentor’s book- Winning with people -John Maxwell. As I read through I came across something that resonates with me. He said that if I want to win with people, make a difference, that I need to examine myself first-the first person I must change is my self.

“If I ever think I’ve finished growing, then I’m in trouble” Maxwell wrote. Anyways one remarkable story he shared in the book reads:

In the crypts of Westminster Abbey, the following words were written on the tomb of an Anglican bishop who lived in the eleventh century:

“When I was young and free my imagination had no limits, I dreamed of changing the world. As I grew older and wiser, I discovered the world would not change, so I shortened my sights somewhat and decided to change only my country. But it, too, seemed immovable. As I grew in my twilight years, in one last desperate attempt, I settled for changing only my family, those closest to me, but alas, they would have none of it. And now as I lie on my deathbed, I suddenly realized: If I had only changed my self first, then by example I would have changed my family. From their inspiration and encouragement, I would then have been able to better my country and, who knows; I may have even changed my world.”

The bottom line here is that change begins with us. If you become a better you, you will then be able to encourage someone out there to become a better person as well, and it grows that way. We are naturally quick at judging people around without examining ourselves first. If you must make a difference in this world, you must take responsibility.

I was tempted to throw a used recharge card on the road few days back, but on a second thought, I felt I would be contravening what I have always preached against, I thought that if I throw this on the road or by the road, and some other person does that and another person does the same thing, everywhere will be obviously littered with dirt. I would have contributed to the nuisance we all are trying to curb. So I decided to keep the used card and trashed it on getting home.

Don’t think that, that seemingly little good you are doing to keep our environment clean by not littering the environment with dirt is insignificant, if everybody will do the little within our powers we will achieve much and by so doing we would have made a significant impact in the lives of people and our country as well.

Don't stop doing good because some persons are not. You can choose to be different!

CHANGE BEGINS WITH YOU!

Take Charge!

Favour Erebosi

Write The Vision

"This sister is not taking the prayer session seriously" I assume my pastor and some church members who had their eyes opened while prayers were going on in church few weeks back, would say about me. Because while prayer was on, i was writing down ideas as they come. This is not to overlook the place of orderliness in His presence, so don't get me wrong. Anyway i have learnt to always have a jotter or writing material with me, everywhere i go.

Ideas abound everywhere, it could come while in church, during sermon, prayer, worship, it could come while in the Convenience, Bathroom, while taking a walk; am sure you will be wondering if i go to the bathroom with writing material... Never mind. The point is, learn to write those ideas down, don't procrastinate about it, the possibility is that you might forget if don't write it immediately.

Most businesses today have a mission statement that talks about the purpose of the company. In life, every person should also have their own mission statement. What’s your purpose? What are you dreaming about? What are your goals? How are you going to use your talents and abilities? Many people have an idea about where they are headed in life, but something supernatural happens when you write down your vision and make a plan. There’s a resolve that takes place on the inside of you. No longer is that thing just a dream, but now it’s something you can look at every day. The people around you can see it, too. You never know how God is going to use someone in your life to help you get to where you need to be. If they can see your vision, then they can run with it!

I want to encourage you, don’t just vaguely live day to day. Make the decision to write down the dreams and visions you have in your heart. Submit your plans to God and watch what He will do to bring them to pass.

Take Charge!

LEAD, IT'S IN YOU!

Success Habits

Good to be here again after a long while, hope you are great? Just felt like sharing a few thoughts with you today and more later. Endeavor to follow through cos it promises to be inspiring.

Today, we will be looking at success habits.

Success is simply the achievement of set goals while habit is what you do continuously over a long period of time and therefore becomes a part of you. We are all creatures of habit.

It might interest you to know that habit determines our character and our character determines our destiny. We can therefore conclude that good and Godly habits bring about success.

Some of these habits include:

Meditation: This is simply getting involved in deep thinking, its one of the ways to contact the supernatural. It helps you roll over ideas, which gives room for more inspiration.

Prayer:Prayer is not a monologue as most people think. It is supposed to be a dialogue with your creator. Don’t be too busy not to pray, spend time with your father daily. It should be one of your daily responsibilities.

Responsibilities: How often do you blame people and circumstances for your failure? Guess what? Well, would love to let you know at this point that you must take 100% responsibility for your life if you want to be successful in life. Responsibility is the key to true freedom. Wise people don’t let things happen to them, they happen to things.

Self Improvement: What are the new skills you are learning? What books are you reading to improve your thinking and reasoning? Teach yourself something new, work on yourself intellectually and otherwise, teach yourself etiquette. Learn more, read more, ask more, do more and be more.

Positive Self –Talk: “I am blessed beyond a curse” “I can never be poor again” ‘I am more than this’ Speak these words in season and out of season. Avoid negative and foul languages. Replace negative words with positive ones. You can use your confession to redirect your life. It is therefore important to mind the words you speak about yourself and those seemingly difficult situations you are facing. You have the choice to tell the challenge-“I am coming out of this”

Persistence: Develop the attitude of not giving up until you get your desired result. Do you remember Thomas Edison’s story on the invention of the incandescent light bulb? He persevered amidst challenges but scaled through after 10,000 attempts and today he is being credit for his outstanding invention. Every business has its challenges, just stay put, you will get there.

Planning: This is a strong key to success. When you plan, you break down your job. You can’t define wisdom outside of thinking. The more you plan the more you rise. You need to sit down and set a medium or long term goal for your life then plan on how to achieve each step by step. Planning is simply thinking ahead. Most people roam through life but successful people make plans and make most of the opportunities around them. You can employ a To-do-list for each day. When you plan your days, you will have an organized week, months, and year and so on.

Be action orientated: After you are done with your planning, take action. Newton’s law of motion states that ‘all object remains at a state of rest until a force is applied’ When are you going to take action on those Biz proposal you have written, those ideas you have written down, when are you going to do something about them? Do something about them today! Erase procrastination from your dictionary.

Association: Successful people are very deliberate about the kind people they associate with, because they’ve discovered the impact it has on their destiny. The people you associate with will influence you. Don’t be sentimental about people; be sensitive about your destiny. Learn to relate with people that are higher than you in life, because they will challenge your thinking pattern.

Time Management: Time is more than money; it is life, value time over money and activities. Invest your time productively. Be sensitive to your seasons and times in life, it determines your level of success.

Integrity: To be perfectly honest with God and yourself as a person. This must be your lifestyle. Learn to do things right.

EMPATHY IN LEADERSHIP

Servant- Leadership begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The best test is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants...Robert Greenleaf


Why do people still complain about bad leadership and governance? How come they don’t see anything good in what the leadership is doing, is it that the leaders’ strategies are not working or could it possibly be that the people are insatiable? Don’t wonder too far, guess I have a clue. It does not always work when you try to put a square peg in a round hole.

For a better understanding of empathy in leadership lets take a look at how the dictionary defined empathy and leadership and what relationship exist between the two words. A formal definition of Empathy is the ability to identify and understand another’s situation, feelings and motives. It’s our capacity to recognize the concerns other people have. Empathy means: “putting yourself in the other person’s shoes” or “seeing things through someone else’s eyes”.

Leadership is about ascertaining a method for people to contribute so that it can result in a significant achievement. It is a process that enables a person to influence others to achieve a goal and directs an organization to become rational and consistent. Leaders carry out these processes by leveraging their leadership traits such as values, ethics and knowledge. Good leaders are not born. They are made. If a person has the willpower and the ability to learn, he can become a successful leader. A good leader engages in a continuous process of education, experience and training. He studies to improve his leadership skills and does not rest on past glory.

If empathy and leadership are symbiotic siblings how come they are not seen together in some aspects of leadership? A leader cannot be empathic if he has not experienced or learnt what the led go through. If empathy is feeling what the led feel and putting yourself in the other person’s shoes then we need to know how far this has gone in our democratic dispensation where people have the say about who should lead them.
Until we have leaders with empathy in places of authority, those who have felt the kind of pain people feel, who have been through the rugged road people are presently treading, who feels or have felt what people feel, attending to the follower’s needs and aspirations will be difficult.

Little wonder the system of government where a sojourner who has traveled for over decades to study abroad returns and suddenly shows interest in politics, and because he has a fine face and fantastic diction we all fall for him and elect him into a leadership position. How can he understand what is obtainable in the system, will such leader not find it unnecessary to visit the poor and resigned in our remotest villages.

The leaders who are making impact presently are those who have put ears to the ground and felt the pain and cry of the downtrodden. Why do you think the president of the United States of America, Barrack Obama got a land mark victory that took him to the white house? He was empathic, if you have read his best seller book, (Audacity of Hope) you would discover how much time and energy he spent traveling to rural, suburban and urban areas all in the bid to listen and know the yearnings of the people. Strategically it worked because he was able to address the core issues of the people of America that both great and small were looking for.

As a country, we seem to be suffering from empathy deficit because where we put our time, energy and money is the test of what we value. Barrack Obama said: “Unless political leaders are open to new ideas and not just packaging, we won’t change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy policy or tame the deficit”.
We need to go back to the roots and learn about the people we lead. After all, listening is one of the skills a good leader must possess and communication has not taken place without feedback as it is a vital part of communication process.

Is it possible to have a program or platform which seeks to scrutinize prospective leaders on several grounds? Is it necessary to take time to find out background information about leaders before they are elected? Can their backgrounds and experience in life have a great influence on their system of leadership? I think that if we take time to consider the above before we elect a leader, we might be able to discover the suitability of a leader. It is necessary to tidy up these areas because if a man has not been successful in his private life and business, it’s not far from the truth to say that the possibility of his success in the public office is very slim.

Great servant-leaders nurtured empathy: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa certainly exemplify empathy in leadership.

Favour.

Published in Financial Standard, 13/08/09, page 11.

KEEP ON KEEPING ON

Hello Friends,

The road to success, they say, is dotted with many tempting parking places. This simply means that as you strive to attain your goal in life, you will surely encounter obstacles and distractions that might hinder you from achieving your goal. These tempting parking spaces could be those seemingly insurmountable challenges, weariness –which could come as a result of having put so much time and energy into the project or whatever it is and nothing seems to be happening still, and what comes to mind is to park and let it go.

My dear, you’ve got to keep on keeping on. Even when you fail, it’s not over. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist, philosopher and poet, said: “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail". You’ve got to rise up. The glory only shows up when you rise and not when you fail.

It is worthy of note here that challenges are what make us stronger, they test our character, and ability to persevere. Challenges are inevitable encounters on the way to success. The obstacles you may encounter are not stop signs but guidelines and you can make stepping stones out of those stumbling blocks.

One more thing, make your goal your focal point and not the obstacles and you will find strength to KEEP ON KEEPING ON despite all odds..

Keep on keeping on!

All the best.

Favour.

Letting go of the past

Hello,


One of the things that can stop you if you allow it to is not letting go of the past. Clinging to the past has stopped many from becoming what God has deigned them to be. He said “I know the thought that I think towards you, thought of good and not evil, to give you and expected future” what can be more motivating than this?
Letting go of the past can be difficult. The past is our history, it's what forms our opinions and our perceptions but history is exactly what it is. The past is over, done and dusted.

You can't go back and change anything so put the past behind you and move on. By all means take the lessons learned, the strength uncovered, the knowledge and experience but don't hold on to grudges, anger, guilt etc. What good will it do you? How will it help you to move forward and live your life?
If you're having difficulty in letting go of the past, ask yourself why? What is holding on to the past giving you? Are you using it as an emotional crutch, an excuse not to do something new?

Take the plunge. Changing your life takes courage but take it one step at a time. We're very good at imagining all the things that could go wrong, all the pitfalls, the dangers but when we go ahead and do it usually we find there was nothing to worry about after all. We let our fears get in the way when actually we don't have any evidence that anything bad will happen if we take a step forward.
So start living your life to the full, enjoy every minute. As far as we know, you only get one chance at life so why waste it brooding on what has happened when you could be living it and making new memories.

As much as you can, put the past where it belongs-past and move on, greater things lie ahead.

Got An Excuse?

Hi,

Been a long time, hope you are making impact and touching a life? Good to know! I guess you would be asking me " How did you know?". Never mind, whether you admit it or not you are making an impact. But what i would love to have clarifications on is whether it is positive, life-changing or not, hoping you provide the answer...

Enough of those preambles, i want to share something on the above subject with you;"Got an Excuse" We have seen people who blame environment, government, parents, poverty etc on why they are not successful, hope you agree with me?

According to Francois De La Rochefoucauld, a noted French author of maxims and memoirs, “Nothing is impossible; there are ways that lead to everything, and if we had sufficient will; we should always have sufficient means. It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible”

It is funny how people blame their circumstances for their failure in life, but the fact remains that you have no excuse not to become a success in life.

Did you know that Richard Branson, the famous English industrialist, best known for his Virgin brand of over 360 companies. Whose first successful business venture was at age 16, when he published a magazine called Student, is without a college degree? Yes, he doesn’t have a college degree. I am very sure you are also aware that the founder of Microsoft, Bill gate, is a Harvard drop-out.

He Attended University of Texas, Austin; but did not finish. I am talking about Michael Dell, the founder of famous Dell computer, one of my favourite quotes from him is “When I started our company, it was very much an idea outside of the conventional wisdom, and if there were people telling me that it wasn't going to work, I wasn't really listening to them”.


Evidence of the fact that the past need not dictate the future can be found in the life stories of many great achievers. Think of the wealthy businessmen, leading sportsmen, great scientists, movie icons, super models and entrepreneurs in all walks of life. Did they all achieve success, fame and wealth because they came from a privileged background? Did they all have caring parents, a superior education and limitless financial backing? If you study their life stories you will find the answer is no. Many of these successful people started life in an ordinary or even underprivileged style but they were able to achieve success because they freed themselves from the constraints imposed by the past.

Suffice it to say here that God has provided all you need to be a successful person but you keep giving excuses on how uneducated you are, not having enough time and all that, you have no excuse not to be all that God wants you to become. It is up to you.

All the best

Paragraphs 3-6 Excerpt from the book: "The Man With a Different Spirit"- In View.
Author: Favour Erebosi.