Are you being true to your character?

Character development will rarely come through a life that is easy. It will normally come in the areas of our lives that are difficult and in areas of our lives where we have had to overcome or have had to live through a crisis, not avoid one.

One consistent truism in pursuit of your career or business becoming a reality will be that you will learn more from the trials than from successes or the mountain top experiences.

We learn far more by going through than going around our problems.

It is very important that we never miss the message of a crisis. When starting a business or growing into your ideal job, career, vocation, an unshakable resolve will be your greatest asset. If you endure a $20,000 setback in your life or business, whether it be your fault in bad debt or a mixture of several problems, you must work out how to make it become a lesson of equal value.  It is so important that our perseverance leads to character development, which realigns us with our hope and returns us to the path for success.

Therefore, we must be faithful to our word regardless of the current circumstances. Our decisions always need to be congruent with our moral compass and values regardless of the prevailing circumstances. With established tried and true ethics as a guide and not made up on the spot in situations and circumstances we will weather every storm.

We must be trustworthy beyond the current circumstances. We must be careful we are not swayed by situational ethics and peer pressure.

An excuse is giving ourselves permission to lie. 

All excuses are equal, all effort isn’t. 

If we don’t have a reason, don’t make up an excuse. Live congruent to your goals by making decisions that move you closer to, rather than taking you further from your goals.

As we mature in our role in leadership and we take on more responsibilities, what happens to us as the leader is never as important as what happens through us and our reaction to issues needs to change to a measured response as we learn from our experiences. As leaders, we need to become shock absorbers and be less swayed by circumstances and more focused on our direction.

In the process of developing our character, there will be a confrontation, unmet expectations and problems dealing with people from all areas of our life. There will also be some great, surprising and wonderful experiences as well. It will not all be negative. Learn from every experience; the positive and negative experiences of life will show us who we really are and what it is we want more of, or less of, in our life.

Every trial we face exposes where we are up to in our maturing process. Trials are like exercising our emotional maturity and intelligence. I had a client once ask me, “Does it ever get any easier”? I had to give her the real answer, "No!"

But I did mention to her, “while our trials may not get easier, we get better and more mature at dealing with them. Discouragement, disappointment  and distraction do not have to lead us to despair. If we learn how to respond and not react we have found the path to maturity.

Planalife you want to live in through a Business on Purpose.

And check out our latest podcast with Richard Prosser.