Master the power of habit in executing goals to soar

What are you doing here? You do know by now that only the individuals who are ready to embrace the ever-changing environment are the ones who will rise to the top.

Those who understand that to fully appreciate and align themselves with any organissation’s goals, they must raise their own awareness and establish their personal goals.

It is imperative that we get to understand the importance of personal discipline in raising the value of our contribution to our personal and professional interactions. It is those of us who master the power of habit for effective, consistent, relevant and timely execution of their aspirations who soar.

These are the people who take it upon themselves to develop their mindsets and consequently influence the improvement of organisational culture by personifying the leadership traits that they desire to experience in others.

We all know people like these. We see them scale corporate ladders and increase their spheres of influence and envy their professional progress. Because we are all drawn to goodness and advancement, we start to rally around these people in the hope that a little of who they are rubs off onto us.

In the process, we effectively install them as opinion leaders in their various fields.

We cannot help but admire them because they continually attract greater responsibilities, gain recognition and command higher remuneration with every move they make. This is because they make the uncommon effort to develop, internalise and embody their distinct professional edge.

These are not people who incessantly comb through the classifieds looking for jobs.

They are among the very few who have exciting careers knocking at their doorsteps. They are the people who develop new and additional income streams.

Unfortunately most of us do not do this. The majority of us secretly entertain great big ideas that sound ridiculous even to ourselves. We dare not breathe a word of them to anyone lest we be branded as mentally unstable. The unfortunate situation is that we do not know what the steps are, to bring our ideas to life.

So we suffer in silence. Our careers stagnate. We struggle to manage ourselves on a day-to-day basis.

The teams we manage become a burden to us and we can hardly carry out projects without gnashing our teeth through it all.

We grow older and more set in our ways. The companies we work for begin to feel less like the exciting opportunities we sought a while back and more like mazes of unending bureaucratic systems that serve more to handcuff our creativity than empower us to give our best output.

Lethargy sets in and before we know it, we are no longer the star performers we once were. We are no longer the energetic professionals that our employers signed the dotted line for.

Our employers are busy people with little or no time to babysit us, especially because there is no shortage of younger, cheaper, eager and energetic entrants into the workplace to pick from.

Opportunities inevitably start to skip us more than we can bear. We dream of transitioning into new roles or take the plunge into entrepreneurship for years but do nothing. We convince ourselves that we are being realistic — we are tied up in loans, school fees and mortgages, you know.

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So we stay put feeding our minds on the unfortunate notion that it is better to be safe than sorry. Most of those around us subscribe to the same school of thought. This is what life is, right?

All the while, the clock’s hands tick away diligently. Soon, retirement stares right at us in the face, the children grow up, leave home and we wonder what we are supposed to do with ourselves in our empty nests.

We finally realise that we have spent most of our lives digging a hard place and now find ourselves at the rock. We are literally and metaphorically stuck right between a rock and a hard place. We are brilliant people! how on earth did this happen? What about all the vibrant dreams we had? How could life have passed us by?

Here is how it happened; we stopped developing ourselves the minute we got jobs expecting life stooped for us as well. In a nutshell, we remained normal.

You know that you are tired of playing in the junior leagues at the back-end of things. The question is whether you are ready to muster the courage to move forward to centre-stage with all of it’s glaring spotlights. You are called to leadership. Will you respond?