Memoirs of GB Episode 74: Good to Great in your Life

The end goal of everyone’s life is to go from good to great. The aspiration to achieve good things in life and then help others to achieve their aspirations makes our life great. So, what are these key ingredients that makes our life go from good to great.

?1.?????The knowledge & wisdom we gain

2.?????The wealth we create and share

3.?????Happiness you feel in the progress of others.

Not everyone is fortunate to see this journey through from good to great. We have a time window from our early 20’s to late 50’s, presume a corporate career or entrepreneurial journey of 35 to 40 years. This is the crucial time window of our life to make things happen. If you split these years in 4 important phases of your life with time span of minimum 8 years in each phase. The narrative below is some of my experience and as witness or admirer of seeing some good people becoming great

First Phase – Incubation

The most crucial or foundation phase of our life. What begins well always have the higher probability to finish well. This is the self-development phase of our career. Individual growth, harnessing our potential to perform to our best of our abilities and ensure that we communicate our progress to the mentors and openly take their guidance to address our limitations. This is time to focus in sustaining our career solely focused on increasing our knowledge, shaping our attitude, and more importantly getting into rhythm without deviating from our immediate goals. This is also the transition phase for us to move from academic to a professional life. It doesn’t matter if you are the best outgoing student of a college but what matters are you the best incoming employee to this corporate world ?.

Second Phase - Inclusion

This phase of our career is about you taking responsibility for your team’s performance and output. Presume that your phase 1 is relatively successful and people see you as an emerging leader to take responsibility to lead an initiative which requires group of individuals or a team to contribute. Here you , as a budding leader whose performance will be measured by the team’s output. You are no more an Individual contributor. A simple acronym of TEAM- Together everyone achieves more, as a leader it’s about making those individuals achieve more, take responsibility for the collective failure but put the team first when you succeed. Lot of star performers fail in this phase because they find it difficult to think and act beyond me, myself, and mine. This is the phase where you spend 75% of your time on your performance improvement and 25% of your time with the team and help them to tide over the challenges. If you pass this phase at ease, then you are set to become one of the promising leaders in the organization.

Third Phase – Exemplary

Now you are in the third phase, you are seen as one of the mid senior leaders who has the right mindset, attitude, and capability to lead a division or run program with multiple teams involved. Here your actions must result in achieving some of the critical goals of the organization, it could be accelerating the growth, increasing the revenue, or optimizing the cost. Many pairs of eyes are watching you; this is not an easy phase and many professionals hit a midlife career crisis during this phase. The feeling of not doing enough, not having enough powers or feeling exhausted or saturated. This is also the time where you see some limitations coming because of the family situations (old age parents, adolescent kids, not having enough time to spend with family) and extreme pressures from the work environment. This is the time to be composed and calm in our actions and expression. We must prioritise what’s important in life, sometimes it's work and sometimes its your family and health. Do not push yourself to juggle multiple issues, give yourself some time to reorganize your priorities and once you have addressed the major crisis, you will definitely get back to your normal stream of work to achieve the most and more that’s possible. Here 50% of your time for the self and another 50% of your time goes to your team and family. If you have managed this phase well, you will be definitely seen as exemplary leader with balanced mindset and approach to deal with tougher things in life and work.

Fourth Phase – Extraordinary

What differentiates a good leader from an extraordinary leader is the ability to go beyond the third phase, they are the people who redefine the possibilities and make great strides in turning around the organizations to perform at an accelerated speed and growth. In the first three phase we crave for appreciation but in the last phase its about the affection the people have towards you. You are the role model for many budding leaders, you walk the talk and maintain an utmost integrity in your actions. Here you spend 80% of your time for others in shaping them to become great leaders and building the future for the organization. This is also the time where you spend in giving back to the society both in terms of knowledge and wealth.

Who is an extraordinary leader? Somebody who’s ready to share his knowledge and prosperity for the upliftment of the world, somebody who genuinely feels happy when good is happening to others.

If all these traits, if you are a scholar, if you’re a leader, and if you’re beautifully hearted, in all these three, you will experience the real purpose of your life.

You don’t have to go in search of any goals, it has to come in search of you. Develop the right practices, you don’t have to go in search of money, money has to come in search of you.

Everything must be naturally drawn towards you, everything must be magnetised towards you, you don’t have to go in search of anything, everything will come in search of you.

If you are committed, you will definitely reach the phase 4 of your life and I wish every corporate leader has this aspiration to grow self and give more to this planet to make it a better place.

?Godspeed

Dinesh Chandrasekar DC*

P.S: All views expressed here are my personal views and opinion and have no bearing to the organization I work