Views From The Hills of Kentucky :: Goals and Roles of Success

Goals & Roles of Success

It is one of those fun type days. I have been asked to appear with a group of people at a local High School Career Day. All of the speakers except one are asked to talk about their current career, the advantages and disadvantages of the career, the quality of life, education required, etc. The odd man out was to talk about the future, the students' futures. The speaker was to talk about setting goals for success and give the students some model to follow. Guess who drew the short straw? Yep, it was me. Actually, while it was a challenge, it was a lot of fun as well as a lot of work. The following is a brief outline of the talk after more than one and a half dozen rewrites. Hopefully you will find it of some interest. I sure don't want to see all that time spent just benefiting one audience. Actually I gave the presentation five times that day. Each time for a different grade.

I started out talking about how people are viewed by others. That they are seen from two perspectives, "Who" they are and "What" they are. "What" they are being their profession, teacher, doctor, electrician, manager, sales person, hamburger flipper at McDonalds, bagger at Krogers, or greeter at Wal*Mart. The "Who" they are involves their personality and characteristics, smart/not too smart, polite/rude, hardworking/lazy, friendly/not so friendly, etc. The "What" you are is the external while the "Who" you are is the internal you. To set the Goad for both the "What" and the "Who," I used Dr. Stephen Covey's visionary approach covered in his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. "With our eyes closed, we visualize 60 years into the future, where we are driving to a funeral, our funeral. We visualize the speakers paying their respects to us and our life. The speakers are friends, former teacher, minister, family members, etc."

This visualization experience sets the foundation for the individual's Personal Mission Statement. Now that we have identified the objective of success, how do we identify the roles that can be utilized to achieve success? The objectives of success as expected varied broadly. Therefore, the roles that lead to success would vary from one respondent to the other, resulting in a need to outline the potential areas where each individual could succeed. We used the phases of life to identify the areas or roles where they could achieve excellence, intentionally keeping the categories broad. The roles included such areas as: student, family member, team player, spouse, parent, occupation, friend, neighbor, citizen, etc. I pointed out, that there are good books that cover ways of achieving success in all of the roles. The books are well worth reading but fortunately there is a single model hat works for almost all roles. That model is the 9 basic roles in all Successful Companies. (Note: Actually 11, but for the sake of convenience, I left out two steps or roles, sales and market research.)

Rather than jumping right into how the 9 Basic Roles work for an individual, I used a step wise approach where I started with the roles in a company then showed those roles in use with a high school team. Since their football team had won 7 state championships in 10 years, I used their football team for my example. The third step was to show how a single player on the team could use the same model for his march to success. The final step was to show how the model worked with any individual's role such as student, family member, worker, spouse, parent, etc.

The above is a lot to try to describe on one page. If anyone wants my talk outline, let me know and I will gladly share it. You can also find an outline of the 11 Basic Roles in my Views of October 24, 2002, titled, "Business Tools - For Everyday Use."

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