“Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”

“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”

This article was written by an Associate Member of ExecuNet, connecting Leaders since 1988.

“Why is help so frequently not sought?” That’s the question an ExecuNet member, a C-level executive in the manufacturing industry, posed to his peers in one of the business Roundtables. He noted that, in his leadership career, he would have failed countless times had he not asked for help.

“Perhaps part of the culture in this country is that failure is just not an acceptable outcome,” wondered the manufacturing executive. “Certainly nobody seeks it, but the irony is that the only way to become experienced and enjoy wisdom in business is to have a healthy mix of successes and failures. We just have to minimize the impact of failure as much as possible and learn to pick it all up and proceed forward again after it does occur.”

“It is true that the business culture in the US is mainly of cultivating success and emulating success by empathy (leaders emulating leaders through their life’s examples),” added another member, a global IT strategy leader. “Although this brings a lot of positive energy in the organization, it also creates a big vacuum, as people seldom spend time analyzing why they fail, and even less why they won.”

Further, learning from your mistakes and analyzing the real reasons why you succeeded are critical to make the success repeatable, he concluded.

M. Nora Klaver, author of Mayday! Asking for Help in Times of Need, said in an exclusive Q&A with ExecuNet that many of us have to hit the wall before we realize there is help out there; we just have to ask for it. “NOT asking is so ingrained in our culture that we remain blind to the help available in the office next door.

Instead, we push ourselves harder to find the answer. We figure we are better off solving our problems alone. We tell ourselves that we just have to ‘work harder and smarter.’ We believe that getting help from others will only display our weaknesses and lack of competence.

Waiting too long often complicates a situation that could have been more simply resolved at an earlier time.”

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.” – Henry Ford

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Einstein

“Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turned out.”-John Wooden

Setting goals is obviously a critical part of being successful. Goals guide us in achieving our visions for our personal and professional lives. In one remarkable study done by Yale University in the ’50′s, the graduating class was asked if they had goals for their futures. Only three percent had written goals. Twenty years later, the same class was surveyed again. The three percent who had established goals had an accumulated wealth greater than the rest of the class combined! If that’s not poof of the power of goal-setting, I don’t know what is!!
Although goals are very powerful tools in attaining success, I have experienced first hand that putting too much emphasis and focus on goals can produce unintended outcomes. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
? You strive to earn more money so your family can have a nice life, but alienate your family doing it.
? You try an extreme diet to lose weight, but actually do more harm to your body.
? You desire to get the corner office, but you trample over your colleagues, whose support you will need when you get there.
? You take center stage to meet deadlines, quotas, budgets and become hard and cold in the process, which is not who you really are.
As Marshall Goldsmith states in “What Got You Here, Won’t Get you There,” these opposite outcomes occur because we don’t really know what we want in our lives and from a misunderstanding of what others want us to do. The result can be conflicted values which cause conflicted behaviors and a great deal of misused energy required to keep your goals on track. If checks and balances are not put in place, you can end up in a completely different place than you intended and your emotional bank account completely spent.

A checks and balance system for your goals is quite simple and instantly available. When you feel the pressure and stress of staying on task (which is every day) ask yourself, “What am I doing?” and “Why am I doing this?” “Am I on task with my vision and mission?” “Are my behaviors in reaching my goals in accordance with my values?” If you don’t ask yourself these questions, ask someone you trust to ask you. If no one asks the questions, you don’t get answers and you begin operating in an isolated world, which is a very lonely place to be!