

With Character, On Your Way To Leadership!
David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL who has earned many accolades and who has participated in more than sixty marathons.
David Goggins is also the author of the Amazon Best Seller Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds.
The culture that we live in encourages people to live their dreams and follow their passions. We don’t necessarily have a guideline to live the dream, to exercise our passions and to find the career that best suits us.
It seems that to get a fulfilling job or to do great work, following your passion is definitively not the way to go.
Because following your passions is difficult, rarely successful and dangerous. Studies have shown that:
When going after the career you want, you must measure the importance of growing a set of skills and adopt the craftsman mindset.
Indeed, there are two ways of thinking about work. There’s the craftsman mindset and the passion mindset.
The passion mindset focuses on what the world can offer you. It sets you constantly on high alert, seeking for what you don’t like. It leaves you perpetually in a state of confusion.
The craftsman mindset is useful in building the career that you want, irrespective of what type of work you do. It focuses on what you produce and what you can offer the world. It leaves you with clarity and a love for what you do.
Great work is a combination of creativity, impact and control. This combination is rare but valuable.
Matter of fact, great jobs are rare and valuable. To find them, you need to build up great skills and in turn offer skills that are rare and valuable.
The craftsman mindset is the best way to acquire skills Capital.
To grow a craftsman mindset, you can follow these 5 steps:
Gaining control over what you do is an important part of enjoying what you do and is the hardest part.
Gaining control turns out to be tricky: you cannot ask for more control if you don’t have enough Capital to back it up or you have acquired lots of control that you can no longer evolve in your role.
It serves to have a unifying focus or mission for your career. A mission will focus your energy toward a useful goal and increase your impact on the world. To accomplish your mission, you can take small steps that generate concrete feedback.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You is an extremely practical, logical guide to get the career that you want and to be so “good they can’t ignore you”.
In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport believes that you should not pursue your passions in order to achieve career success.
Instead, you should seek to improve your skills and apply yourself in a particular field. By mastering a skill, you will gain in efficiency and gradually become passionate about the work you do.
According to Cal Newport, people who solely follow their passions end up shifting careers when they realize that their career is not what is cracked up to be.
To get a fulfilling job and the career that you want, he suggests 4 rules or principles that are extracted from many successful people lives and that are difficult to implement.
It was very interesting and somewhat refreshing to hear an unpopular opinion. His principles and opinion are not designed for dreamers. It is however designed for people at entry-level at their jobs, for analytical people who are geared towards efficient performance and who are career focused.
Even if I’m a practical person, I admittedly don’t see anything wrong with pushing people to follow their passions that might get them out of their comfort zone and into their dream job.
I think that there isn’t one approach to success or else everybody would be doing it. Some people are motivated by having a solid plan, others by an unshakable purpose and others by an exciting passion.Â
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The workplace can help us realize our potential but it can also trigger fight or flight responses in us, bring out our innermost insecurities. At work, as leaders so many things threaten our career goals, our promotions, our desires for success, our relationships and most importantly our sanity.
Leaders constantly feel the pressures of keeping up, of always being on top of everything. It is even a requirement that leaders project confidence, demonstrate optimism, or remain stoic in the face of events.
However, sooner or later, we end up sacrificing what we value most, solely keeping up with appearances, looking busy but being unproductive, spreading ourselves thin, doing sloppy work and not caring about people.
Wondering what strategies to use to improve your well-being and work-life balance?
Work is part of life: we spend most of our waking hours at work more than anything else. Needless to say, work and life are not opposite nor are they inseparable: lack of work-life balance has direct repercussions on our health, finances and families, creates fatigue, poor judgement, poor performance, high emotions.
Creating work-life balance is not giving equal attention to both work and life. But, it means that you are satisfied with your contributions to your life and work, that you are able to create a sustainable synergy between both so that you are fueled by them on a daily basis.
A healthy work-life balance can be motivated by life changing events or by a desire to do better. Work-life balance involves wise time management, self-discipline, and creates a better quantity to quality ratio.
Balancing work and life is hard but achievable because time is limited and we want to maximize our time the best we know how.
A healthy work-life balance is an issue that mostly plagues millennials. To them, work should be enjoyable, emotionally and financially rewarding.
In many ways, it forces us to redefine success, our career and our relationships. It also helps us fulfill our needs, give us a profound sense of satisfaction, and become the best version of ourselves.
It allows you to create intention: you move with a clearly defined purpose. It is essential to manage your time and resources, level of commitment, to invest most of them in yourself and not in someone else’s dream.
It has the ability to increase job satisfaction, well-being, sense of self, self-awareness, effectiveness, adaptability, resilience, and creativity. It provides the tools to improve work performance, to revamp health, to maintain relationships, to appropriately deal with stress, and to avoid burnout.
Sometimes we are unable to distance ourselves from work because we feel indispensable to the organization, we feel threatened, or replaceable. Furthermore, achieving work-life balance is hard: some people, mostly high achievers, can feel guilty for taking time off and not investing it in their work.
However, an unhealthy work-life balance can lead to burn out, can trigger unexpected emotional outburst, heavily strain your physical and emotional well-being.
Burnout is hard to recover from. It hits you unexpectedly but is actually a slow burning process. Burnout is caused by overworking yourself, by a lack of recognition, by a lack of validation and chronic stress. It translates itself into feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, dissatisfaction, despair, depressions, low self-esteem, feelings of being stuck and of failure.
In addition, it is detrimental to understand that living to work or sacrificing health and energy is not the way to succeed. To successfully create a healthy work-life balance:
Hope that I’ve helped you get it together on your way to leadership!
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