The most important battle

Published 2:00 pm Thursday, May 30, 2019

“Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies with us.” – Charles Spurgeon

“Success is moving from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm” – Winston Churchill

We face plenty of battles in this life. Finances, health, sleep and people all give us plenty of trouble, but there is one battle that matters most.

If we can win this battle, we can win all the others. That battle is in our minds. The thoughts we listen to determine what we believe. Our beliefs determine who we become.

How do our thoughts determine the levels of success we achieve during our limited time on this earth? Here are four biggies for me:

1 – Leadership

To achieve great things in life we must lead. We must lead ourselves and we must lead others. To convince others to follow us for more than a limited time we must be worth following.

Self-leadership makes us worth following and self-leadership begins with self-awareness. We are all terrible at this self-awareness thing.

What we meant when we said or did something often has zero correlation with what the other person saw or heard. Our inner voice will convince us the problem must be with them. We’ll ask, “Why couldn’t they understand what I told them?”

The self-aware leader knows what the other person heard is far more important than what he said. To produce great outcomes, we must humble ourselves and assume the problem is always with us.

2 – Performance

Our performance is determined by many things – our natural abilities, hours spent in practice, the conditions, etc. We can all have a great performance every once in a while. After all, even a blind squirrel can find a nut occasionally.

But great performers deliver consistently good performances. They do this because they can control their minds. Those who control their minds stay positive in the face of adversity, they have a vision for performing at the highest level and they take responsibility for their performance and life.

3 – Grit

Consistently excellent performance requires lots of hard work. Lots of getting back up after you’ve been knocked down. Excellence requires seeing every failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. Excellence requires grit and we cannot develop grit if we are listening to the negative voices in our heads.

4 – Happiness

Last and most importantly is happiness or joy. The ability to enjoy your life even when things are not going as planned is a skill that we can all learn with practice.

At any moment in life there are many things we can be thankful for and many things we can wish were different. We have a choice. We can focus our minds on those things we are thankful for or on those things we wished were different.

Finding the positive in life regardless of the state of our lives is the most important thought process we can develop.

Positive people attract positive people. They are attracters. Attracters get more done. They are better leaders and they have a great time while leading.

Life and death have been set before us. It is up to us to choose life.

Curt Fowler is President of Fowler & Company and Director at Fowler, Holley, Rambo & Stalvey. He is dedicated to helping leaders create and achieve a compelling vision for their organizations.

Curt is a syndicated business writer, keynote speaker and business advisor. He has an MBA in Strategy and Entrepreneurship from the Kellogg School, is a CPA, and a pretty good guy as defined by his wife and four children.