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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