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My intention with each of these posts is that you’re challenged to interrupt the noise and routine in your life, just for a moment, to think more deeply about what really matters in life… your relationship with yourself and with others in your professional and personal life.
Action Summary
- Take time to assess your level of skills, knowledge and attributes (your competency) required to help you achieve in your personal and professional life
- Assess your level of motivation – your internal drive – to apply your competency to achieve
The WHY:
If you were able to apply a formula to determine your competency, you could add up your skills, plus your knowledge, plus your attributes.
But your competency is pretty useless if it’s not being applied in meaningful and intentional ways to make life better for yourself and for others. Just having competency isn’t enough – without intentional action, you’re just competent.
For competency to be truly valuable it needs to be intentionally applied and what causes competency to be applied is motivation.
Your motivation multiplies the sum of your competency.
How would you rate your level of motivation to do the things you know you need to do to be successful in your professional and personal life?
Where could you be applying your competency to achieve higher results than you are currently achieving? What skills do you need to develop? What knowledge do you need to gain? What attributes do you need to work on to develop your personal character?
It is this intentional striving to develop your competence and character that will earn others’ trust in your professional and personal life, and it’s through earning others’ trust that will create more opportunities to make life better for yourself and for others.
I’m an advocate of the work of one of the world’s leading academics in positive psychology, especially around his research on ‘flow’, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who advises us that:
“If the next generation is to face the future with zest and self confidence, we must educate them to be original as well as competent.
My best to you for now, and remember when you intentionally improve the life of others in your professional and personal relationships, you set up the power of reciprocity … what you give out, you get back.
