Achieving Personal Success

by Margot Caimes from Whole Person, Issue 42, May/June 1995.

This article is about achieving success in business. Many of the strategies in the article relate to the Transgender / Transsexual person as well. Starting your own small business affects every area of one's life - as does accepting a change in lifestyle and accompanying changes for transgender / transsexual person. The article is reprinted here in part only, omitting the references to particular small businesses.

More and more people are going to have to learn to be their own leaders. This means choosing your own path and sticking to it. From this place of self determination and personal commitment comes the motivation and energy to find lateral ways of making dreams come true.

Many of us look for solutions to our financial and personal problems outside of ourselves. Idries Shah in his book "Thinkers of the East" recounts the Sufi story of the woman who left the religion of her birth, decided against being an atheist, and joined a new faith. Then she became certain that the truth lay in another teaching.

Each time she changed her beliefs, says Shah, she imagined that she had gained something, but not quite enough. Each time she entered a new fold she was welcomed and her recruitment was regarded as a good thing and a sign of her sanity and enlightenment.

Her inward state, however, was one of confusion.

Eventually, she heard of a great Sufi Master and approached him to be her teacher. He told her to go home and await his answer. Some days later one of his disciples came to the woman's door with a package from the Master. It was a glass bottle with three layers of packed sand - black, red and white - held down by a stopper. Attached was a note that read "Removed the stopper and shake the bottle to see what you are." When she followed these instructions she found that the sand mixed together and all that was left was a "mass of greyish sand".

How often we think that the answers to our searches lie in someone else's teachings. "If only I do this course, follow this set of advice or live my life according to this or that creed", we tell ourselves, "everything will be alright" Like driftwood on the sea of life we bob about looking for a clear channel to the perfect shore. All the while our disappointment grows because we never seem to reach our goal.

In business jargon we call this being reactive; constantly responding to the environment with a knee jerk reaction. We convince ourselves that we are on the right path because we are welcomed so warmly by disciples of each discipline we embrace. We experience a momentary high as our this-minute beliefs are affirmed by other converts and for a while we seem to be more successful. However, the euphoria of new paths does not last nor does it lead to us living life on our own terms or achieving the kind of ongoing success we crave.

The path to enduring success offers little instant feedback, appears very risky in the short term and can have us feeling quite alone. This path we call in business jargon having a long term vision and strategy, in psycho-speak we would call it being self-determining. This is the path of sitting down and working out who you are, what you want to do with however much life you have left and then making choices about how you are going to allocate your energy to ensure that you stay on track.

This way of living and doing business (perhaps changing your whole way of life, person and perhaps environment ... - Editor) is based on a number of premises.

• If you don't know where you are going you are unlikely to get there.
• How you experience your life and what you get from life matters enough to put in whatever is necessary to ensure that your experience is top quality.
• Anything of quality takes time to create and may be difficult.
• Once you are clear about what you want and have convinced yourself that you are worthy of having it, success involves moment-by-moment choices ensuring that you spend your time and energy focusing on creating your life to be the way you want it to be.

Herein lies the loneliness of the front runner. Success is a state of mind, a way of operating that involves constant self-review, ruthless decision making, strongly focused mental energy and pragmatic action. These are all things each and every individual has to decide for themselves, situation by situation, moment by moment, relying always on their own judgment, believing in their own vision and accepting their own right to have, really have, those things that they want.

Of course, we are not in control of everything that happens to us, but we are in control of how we respond to everything that happens to us. We have great power to use every situation, every change, every interaction to help us clarify where we are going and what we want. We can use every conflict, accident and missed opportunity to learn about ourselves, the world in which we live and how to interact. Always, always however we have to come back to hard, often painful decisions about how we are going to use our scarce and valuable time, energy and resources. This means turning down some opportunities and letting some options pass.

These are all decisions, constant choices, all of which need to be linked in with what you want. There is no one to tell you which ones will work, which ones are right. Only time and experience and your own wisdom will tell you that.

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.