Something About You
I have been involved in self improvement and reading management guru books for a few years now. These books show a lot of common sense items that are easily overlooked and they are full of great ways to improve your relationships with others and become more effective, however there is a trap that is hard to see involved with becoming involve in these books.
They always focus on you. What can you do better? Here is how you can be more effective. This is what you can do to help others. Often, the reason to get into these books is for you to help others better, while helping yourself through becoming better at what you do. After reading so many, or listening to them on audiobook, you may forget the reason you got into them, that you are bettering yourself to help others. It is easy to end up focusing so much on what you can change to become better that you may end up just focusing on one person (yourself), instead of the many that you are supposed to be helping. It happened to me that way.
There is a natural cycle that I experience every year about the month of October in which I evaluate the year and decide whether to be satisfied or not with the job done over that year. It just naturally happens, I don’t intentionally try to shift my thoughts to that evaluation. I used to always be disappointed in whatever I had done that year; usually because it wasn’t much.
When I got into school, got married, had a son, and basically got my life in order, I was much more pleased with the results of my looking back. Now, being one semester away from graduation (I still can’t believe it!), this years results weren’t quite as good as I had hoped they would be. Realization came that I was a bit self absorbed. Not good. So I thought hard about how I had gone from being 80% focused on others to 80% focused on me.
It turns out that a small portion of it is simply because of a confidence boost in college (from good grades, people complimenting me, and finally being able to achieve some things) and some more of it is because I let myself fall into a trap with these management books. I still reserve the largest portion of the blame simply through my own ignorance.
There is something called locus of control in management theory. It involves how “in control” of their lives people feel, and whether they feel that things happen to them or through them. If you get a promotion, was it because you worked hard and angled yourself for that position or because you just happened to be in the right place when they were deciding who to promote. Entrepreneurs generally have an internal locus of control (”I made it happen”) instead of an external locus of control (”It happened to me”). I have learned through college and events in the last few years to move my own locus of control from very external to very internal.
In all honesty, I used to think that I had almost no control, whereas now I feel like I have almost all of it. Perhaps this is another aspect to falling in that trap. They say that with power comes abuse or responsibility, and internal locus of control gives you the power. You are in the driver’s seat of your own life, just be sure to manage all aspects of it carefully so that you don’t fall into a tower of mirrors with no view outside.
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