Eclectic Effusions

I am a 'leadership facilitator'. I started working with the supervisory level of management, and have been facilitating management and leadership at the middle and upper levels for the last three years.

Much of my work cuts across the personal development realm, where the questions of happiness, success and 'self actualisation' often arise.

Getting into leadership issues on a daily basis has distinctly led me to the qualititive and quantitive issues in defining success. Indeed, when facilitating with students and leaders, I find myself sharing and discussing not so much the achievements of sporting, civic, political, social and celebrity successes, but of the lessor fashionable, and often unquantifiable, issue of a more common definition of 'personal success'.

In one session a couple of years ago, we talked about what constitutes 'personal success'. One individual was very quick to highlight the, 'he who dies with the most toys, wins!', mantra, which significantly rattled another individual who shared an enlightening and refreshingly different attitude to what constitutes personal success.

This individual cited the case of his next-door-neighbour, who, as a boy, suffered all forms of serious abuse at the hands of his direct family. This young boy grew into a highly troubled teen and adult, with forays into crime, drugs and life dysfunction, earmarking his descent into the enevitable life cycle that almost always ends in abject tragedy. The student told how he lost track of his neighbour, only to find him several years later. What he found, he remarked, set his benchmark for what he now constitutes 'success'.

This individual was now a full-time employed 'chicken catcher'. He had weekend and holiday custodial visits from his two children from an estranged relationship, lived in a rented, fibro cottage. He had little possessions, and was living week-to-week. However, he had not taken drugs for several years, was in regular counselling to help him come to terms with his life, had never abused his wife or children as he had witnessed in his family all his life, and was quietly helping individuals with similar histories turn their lives around. In the morning, he sit's outside and looks into the day with a sense of thanks that he was alive, and was in no way a reflection of the life he witnessed and lived. In his words, "The example for my life was my family's treatment of me and their circumstances. I decided that was to change with me. I have raised myself above their tragedy. I am at peace with what I've achieved, in the face of what I have suffered, and if I achieve nothing more from this point on, I have succeeded in changing my fate. I am a success".

And so he is. 'Successful' is to seek to achieve above apparent enevitability, against criticism and discouragement. Success is achievement against the 'now' or the status quo, and at whatever level that may be. To make an improvement, to declare and attempt achievment of a goal, to attain a level higher than your circumstances, and in the end, to be at peace with your circumstances, whatever they may be. Success cannot be balanced against another's perceptions or circumstances. Success is personal. To try to compare one's success against another is fruitless, unproductive, and will eventually and enevitably disappoint. This leads to unhappiness and anger, and neither emotion equates with life success.

True success, as I have had the privelege to discover, is the mark of a person's own expectations and achievements, regardless of any other's.

• Posted by: The Buzz at October 5, 2006 01:12 PM