16 May When No One is Looking Take the Lead #4
Curiosity Opens Up So Much of YOU
Curiosity expands your focus to exploration. It integrates you into the greater existence of the world, rather than convince you that the world exists because of you.
Exceptional leaders have a profound curiosity about most everything that hooks their attention. They live with fascination and an intense need to know about themselves, about other people and about other things.
Curiosity opens doors to challenges. As challenges increase in complexity, something else will be required to sustain your effort to overcome them. Resolve provides sustenance for effort, digesting difficulty with regularity. It feeds on frustration, replenishes on resistance, and swallows down the size and scope of any challenge.
Resolve: the undeterred conviction to achieve a goal.
With it, you will be able to energize the ingenuity that always finds a way. With it, you will be able to nourish the belief in yourself beyond “can’t do”. And with it, you will be able to nurture the effort to reap satisfaction from “I did it”. Now turn your attention to one word in that definition of resolve:
Conviction: an opinion, feeling or belief so firmly held as to be completely unaccommodating to doubt.
This is what is required to be undeterred by any difficulty that blocks the path of your goal. When Muhammad Ali risked going to jail and completely derailing his career and livelihood for his beliefs, did he abandon them? No. Conviction. When Aung San Suu Kyi, staunch in her dedication to fight against the military regime of Burma, was offered release from house arrest in exchange for permanent exile, did she accept it? No. Conviction. And when an unarmed man stood before the barrel of a tank in Tiananmen Square, in defiance of his government’s oppression, did he flinch and back away? No. Conviction.
It is the conviction for goal achievement that makes resolve the ultimate opponent of adversity. If you have it, you understand that struggle is a metric for the yield of success. If you have it, you don’t waste time loitering on setbacks. If you have it, you believe that a 1% chance is all the chance you need.
Curiosity prompts you to question for self-knowledge. Resolve commits you to pursuing it. Conviction eliminates any doubt that you will gain it. But what creates the mental environment to even consider it?
Desire: a feeling of wanting something or wanting something to happen; the stronger the wanting, the more intense the feeling.
The desire for ongoing self-knowledge can build beyond social connection, status and distinction. It can become an insistent drive to excavate the ore of identity, forge it into the mettle of character and hammer out authentic individuality.
This distinguishes leaders. They live with a white-heat insistence to understand, define and maximize who they are. It ignites their motivation, sparks their creativity, and fuels their passion. And like the sun, it burns intensely and reliably every day.
Source: Medium.com