Success is knowing my purpose in life.

If you know your life’s purpose, you can use that knowledge to figure out which things in life are important to that purpose. Your values can become defined and your life can shift around them. The only things that matter are the things that will really affect your life according to those values and will make a difference to you even when you take a step back. If you look at something you are doing or have from a “bird’s eye view” kind of perspective and still think that it’s important to your life, then keep it, but if it doesn’t matter or it is a negative thing, do your best to remove it from your life. Once you know what you should be focusing on, you can move on to other things in your leadership role and spend your time and energy on those things.

I chose this because I know that personally I have had some struggle with trusting in the fact that I have a purpose and when I do trust it I usually don’t have any idea what it is. So this is something that I really want to work on so that I can become the best me I can be.

I can incorporate this into my leadership and learning because if I know my purpose and my values, I can be more comfortable with my schoolwork. This is because I know that when I take a step back I will see how much this will help me in the future since I will be able to connect with people better and be a better leader, so my organization can be more successful. Because I will appreciate my work more, I will be motivated to put more time and effort into it, instead of just half-doing it. So when I get work that I might not be very motivated to do, I will take a few minutes to think about how and why it will affect my life in the future, then I will do the work accordingly because it will have more significance in my mind.

We don’t realize the leadership potential in those around us.

This means that when in a group, we are usually so wrapped up in ourselves that we don’t see that there are other important people around us. There could be someone in your group who has excellent leadership skills such as organization and communication, and could be extremely useful in completing the task at hand, but you don’t notice because you are too focused on completing it yourself. We don’t think that anyone can or should do better than us so we block out the possibility of such and therefore hinder our own ability to realize when someone has those skills and equip them. So when that happens the person goes unseen and dismissed by us because we refused to notice.

I picked this because I like to think that I can see the talents of others pretty well, but sometimes I get too caught up in keeping the control that I have. I also find that a lot of the time the people who have control around me don’t realize my potential, because it happens a lot where I have an idea and it gets shut down without a second thought because it doesn’t necessarily go right along with the leader’s ideas. So I feel really ignored and it’s a feeling I don’t particularly enjoy, which means that when I do get a chance to share my thoughts, I grasp onto that opportunity with a really strong grip. Unfortunately, because of this I can’t easily surrender control to anybody else, meaning that they get put in the same position as I was.

I can incorporate this by making sure that everyone gets a chance to speak if they want, so that no one gets left out or dismissed. I can do this by taking a moment every so often when a collaborative activity is being done to ask the people who haven’t really spoken up if they have any possible contributions that they haven’t shared yet. This will help me to appear as a more thoughtful person and a better leader.

Our attitude can turn our problems into blessings.

This means that when a problem arises, your attitude can change it depending if it’s negative or positive. If a problem comes up, like if someone makes a mistake on a test, someone with a negative attitude will look at it as just something bad, they will only see that they did something wrong and they won’t see the benefits. But if that happened to someone with a positive outlook on life and who is more optimistic, they could see that it is a chance to improve, because if you always get everything perfect, you can’t improve. They will also learn from that mistake, because they know that they need to study or learn more on that part of the test and they will be better with it next time around, perhaps even better than someone who had gotten it right the first time. So your attitude can’t necessarily fix previous problems, but it can change how you perceive them and how they affect your future.

I chose this because I want to have a more positive outlook on life since I think this is a very valuable quality to have as  it obviously results in many benefits. I also think that sometimes I am too negative and I want to not be because it can have a really bad effect on my emotional state, and therefore my interactions with the people around me such as my family.

So I want to remedy this and be more positive, which will mean that I will be more inclined to see mistakes as moments to learn and will work harder to improve for the next time. This will make me better at that topic than before and I will feel more comfortable with the material and homework on it, so I will be less stressed and more productive in the future.

The secret of our success is discovered in our daily agenda.

This means that success doesn’t happen in a day, it takes a lot of hard work over a long period of time. You have to commit to daily work towards your goals, and that means that if you take it a day at a time and put the effort in for that day and don’t think that success will happen to you out of nowhere, you can start to become successful.

I chose this because I think that if I don’t stress about how much work I have on my plate at every moment I can be more productive. I tend to focus on just the sheer amount of work I have for myself and the related stress leads me to just put off all of it for a later date because it feels like too much and I can’t do that much work. As a result, I still have that work, just less time to do it, leading to even more stress as I try to rush to finish all of it in a small amount of time so that it’s not late.

But if I just look at what I can and need to do in the current day, I can develop a clearer, more realistic and less stressful idea of my workload. Because I will have a smaller immediate schedule, I can be more motivated to finish the homework when it is given. I can just do what is needed for tomorrow or the next closest time and focus on that. Then, if I have time to do more, I can do that, while still making sure to leave time for other things like personal and family time. Because I’m not looking at the workload as a whole and instead as small, more manageable pieces, I can stress less about what’s due because I know that it’s possible to finish in the given time. This will also mean that I will have more work finished on time, which is obviously a huge benefit!