‘Personal mastery, professional competence critical to individual’s success’

By Jude Ndu

Jude Ndu IN the 13th and 14th Century, Bruges was the most important seaport in North Western Europe. Then an accident of history filled the waters of the port with silt and the seafaring ships went to Antwerp, leaving bruges to this day an almost perfectly preserved Medieval town. Lodewijck Van gruuthuse was one of Bruges greatest Leaders, and he built his house to reflect it. Throughout the house of this diplomat – soldier, he had carved in stone walls his personal motto: plus est en vous. Meaning – “There is more in you.”

Humanity was once led by a strong Leader, the king who ruled by dynasty. Then the world outgrew the monarchy evolving into today’s democracy. The flock was once dominated by the priest and monastery people obeyed with submission and sacred devotion.

Today, individual awareness, not priestly doctrine guides the conscience. Superstition once enslaved humanity. Then science emancipated the individual. Yet, like a medieval peasant, the individual today is haunted by psychological tyrannies, success remains a myth and mystery. It can only be explained by luck, being in the right place at the right time, or being born into the right family background. The biggest superstition of all: My career and financial fortune is in the hands of others.

All growth in life is essentially an internal process. The key is the psychological effort you make to use external circumstances to create opportunities for inner growth. The more you can move in this direction, the more you can transcend lowers forms of living and sail toward your destination.

Today’s career professional is the heir to those who wrestled community from the monarchy, emancipated religious belief from priestly doctrinal domination and rose above superstition into today’s science. Every year thousands of individual abandon these superstitions to achieve economic success.

These individuals are not dominated by an environment of rapid change but follow a systematic approach to success. Man is a slave of his belief system. What a man believes about himself directs the affairs of his career life. This explains why some people go on to achieve economic and career success, while others are doomed at the bottom of the food chain. We were not born with beliefs, we adopt and adapt to them over time.

Is there some magical power in beliefs that make people perform above or below their normal talents or skill? The power, I believe only rests in the mind of the individual. Self belief proves that most people are capable of achieving far more than they think or imagine. Unfortunately their negative beliefs inhibit them from realising what is really their norm. Belief is power. The more you belief in something, the more power you give it to have effect. You could have all the skills,talents and training in the world but without the confidence that you’ll get what you want, you are doomed.

Leadership in any area of life is about confidence. If you want to build confidence in others. Yours must first be seen as confident. Never learn to recoil at the sight of difficulties. It isn’t that you are arrogant or much less that you are blinded by optimism. Rather, you have a different perspective of life and the prospect of failure.

The things that happen during difficult and challenging periods should make you reflect more and that everything can turn out for the better and that all kinds of challenges thrown at you can be resolved. As one Chinese business chief executive recalls – “I have never considered myself an outstanding leader. But I think I am a person with an indomitable iron will.

Will is the power of your thoughts and actions in other to achieve what you what. Once I set a definite goal and time table, I must succeed. Other companies have pursued the same business opportunities as our company over the years in the same economic environment. The difficulties they encountered were our difficulties as well. The difference, however, is that many of them were too willing to give up.

What differentiates winners is their self confidence. Cast not away therefore thy confidence. But this kind of confidence is a matter of choice. It is not something your opponent can away from you. It’s something you willingly give away the moment you stop believing that you can win. This is why a Leader, business manager or sports coach never demeans his players when things are not happening accordingly to plan and play.

The players, staff or employees need to belief that their skills are better than their competitors. Whatever form the coaching assumes, sports coaches or business managers must focus on just one point; their player’s confidence. Confidence is contagious and running down your own team mates is one of the worst things a leader or coach can ever do.

The knowledge of how to rise in life is about an individual’s psychological organization. Any individual can learn to master this component to create success without Limit. What counts is not who you are or where you come from, but where you are going and the inner resources that you bring to bear. And really the trick is not how well you deal with success but how well you deal with adversity.

Success depends on you and your ability to marshall inner resources. You must work in an integrated effort to bring yourself psychologically out of your limiting environment. You must learn to rely on yourself to draw out inner resources and success will certainly develop and deploy them through out your career. Drawing on your inner resources means above all using external circumstances both opportunities and adversities to faster your personal and professional growth.

Adv-ersity is part of triumphs of life. Getting knocked down but not knocked out is part of the natural testing and feedback process of life. Your biggest challenge is learning how to trap the negative mental dialogue that occurs during adversity. Don’t allow negative situations ruin your mental well being. This ability to deal with and explain adverse adversity can be found in the mindset of every great athlete, sales person, investor, scientist and coach.

Do you believe that your ultimate outcome in life are externally determined, or do you believe that how your life turns out is ultimately up to you that despite all the things that happen, you are, and only you are responsible?

Consider the global airline industry and think of all the events and factors outside managerial control that have hit it since 1972: fuel hike shocks, high interest rates, deregulation, wars and more recently the threat of terrorism and the September 11, 2000 bombing of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City. And yet, the No 1 performing company of all publicly quoted and traded company in the United States in terms of return on investment to investors for a 30 year period from 1972 to 2002, is an airline.

According to Money Magazine’s retrospective report in 2002, Southwest Airline founded by Herb Kelheler beat Intel Microchip, Wal- Mart Stores, GE, all of them. Now the question is - what would have happened if the folks at Southwest Airline had said – “Hey, we can’t do anything great because of our environment.” Yes you could say the airline industry is terrible. Everyone in it is statistically destined to lose money. But at Southwest Airlines, they say- “we are responsible for our own outcomes”.

Jude Ndu is a lagos based management consultant.