Читать книгу The Female Leader - Sonja Becker - Страница 27

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e develop tactics with which we deceive ourselves a little to survive everyday life. We find compromises or white lies. We play for time, pretend to be stupid, although we could do better. On holiday, in a lonely cottage, or after a disastrous business experience, there are often moments when it is too late to fool yourself, when you are led or forced into clarity.

The reasons why you do this or that or want to do this or that appear again from behind the grey wallpaper of everyday life. In the morning everything often appears so clear and simple. A few minutes later the motives of your actions are swallowed by the duties of everyday life. You need absolute peace in order to contemplate your values.

What is the most important thing in life? What do you want most? Why do you live and what makes life worth living? What is most desirable? The easiest answers come first: money or love, a fulfilling sex life, fame and honor etc. These are abstract values without content. They have nothing to do with your real life. If you decide on money, you should marry into a rich family or play the lottery. Is that your life? Recognizing your values means to think beyond costs and returns on investments. Many middle class people regard prosperity as a genuine value in their lives, only to discover that it has nothing to do with their own lives once they have earned their money through a huge investment of time and sacrifices. There is little time left to enjoy life. Values are the measure of things that are more important to you than money. Which values are important to you?

How much value do you place on your health? When you are sick you suddenly discover the values on which you depend. Then all the money in the world becomes of matter of indifference: the main thing is to get well again. People are not cars on a production line. Each person has his integral temperament. There are great differences in sensibility, character and in the level of activity. Active people find their salvation in movement; passive people love peace and contemplation. But common to both is their disposition. Hopes and fears form our characters. Our need to grow and interact with other people is a fixed integral part of our system. Unconscious feelings steer our consciousness. Many people who have grown up in poverty for example never lose their fear of losing everything, regardless of how much money they have.

Personal values are the secret spices in the recipe for prosperity. If you can train yourself to develop courage, humility and awareness, you will be in a position to change to the winning side.

Many people who have grown up in a successful business family imbibe certain values with their mother’s milk. Others – most of us – look for models that can help us to develop perspectives. But the majority of people train their brains to find excuses for their existence or put the blame on others, such as politicians or their boss, for their situation. If they spent only half the time they spend in regret and finding out where they went wrong on producing results they would be rich.

Every time you obtain personal success a blemish in your personal system always threatens to bring your best plans to nothing: vanity, pride, arrogance, presumptuousness and haughtiness arise. Your faults appear as soon as you come into close contact with other people. Life is simply too short to iron out all your faults. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is to know the advantages and defects of your character. It concerns your positive as well as your negative values. The outcome of this is your talent. You can integrate them into the structure of your character as you earn money.

Often it can even be the negative influences that lead to a business. One of our clients was a loser in private, but a winner in public. Wherever he went he opened his big mouth to show that he was the greatest – to the distress of his fellow human beings who knew him better.

As far as they were concerned he was a pure exhibitionist who by any means and with a lot of shamming annoyed everyone so much until all eyes were fixed up on him. He failed interviews regularly because he made requests and demands that bore no relation to his actual accomplishments.

Of course the coaches didn’t know anything about this. It came out during the session that he was on the wrong side in his chosen profession, the media. He was a complete actor, who belonged in front of rather than behind the camera: a limelight hogger! No sooner had he discovered this for himself when he found an honest and deep relationship. Now he is working on a personal project which he will stage one day; and he works willingly and hard on it, so he can get his well-earned applause.