Empowering Manager News March 2008
leadership through partnership
In this issue
What are you walking towards?
More information
What are you walking towards?
When I became self employed in 2003 I wanted to pursue several interests and was very keen to include teaching Tai Chi in my new portfolio of jobs. At the time I believed that the Tai Chi would be badly paid and finding students would be difficult. I assumed that I would need to subsidise my tai chi teaching with other higher earning work. Well, it turned out very differently and there is a very important reason for that which I had overlooked.
When I talked about my teaching I felt myself light up with enthusiasm. Of course people were attracted to that. It seems pretty obvious now that the place where my enthusiasm and deep interest lay was going to be both personally and financially rewarding. Yet I didn't get it at the time and put more energy into promoting other parts of my portfolio.
As Jools Holland* said of his decision to leave the Squeeze and develop his own music, 'The irony was, having reconciled myself to the fact that I was going to be more hard-up by sticking to the activities I enjoyed, those very activities ended up bringing me in much more than the ones I'd thought about doing for money.'
Here are some questions to ask yourself. What do you really want? Are you walking towards that, or something else? What could you be assuming that may be holding you back?
Michael Bungay Stanier's funky new movie has more great questions to get you walking where you want to go. Click on the link below to see the 5 3/4 Questions You've been Avoiding.
Alison Smith CPCC
Empowering Manager
leadership through partnership
PS: One of my favourite resources: Get Unstuck and Get Going is being revised and a brand new version will be available soon - watch this space.
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*Barefaced
Lies and Boogie-woogie Boasts
Jools Holland
2007
