The training we receive in our formative years has a powerful influence on us as adults. The ways we learn to win as we are starting out tend to shape our view of how success is attained. The only problem with this is that as you become more successful, the rules for future success change. Unless you learn the keys to succeeding at higher levels, your progress is destined to come to a screeching halt.

Individual contributor – When I give her a job, I know it will get done

When we start out, it is important to understand how to become a successful individual contributor. Individual contributors are those who can master a task well. When given a goal and parameters, they are technically competent and understand all the details on how to accomplish it. Demonstrating mastery of the technical skills of delivering the product or service is key to advancement.

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Image by .nele via Flickr

Where are You Heading?

I am on the board of NFTE Greater Dallas – The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. I recently had an opportunity to go to the national organization’s annual gala where they recognize leading entrepreneurs for the work they do in their field, but more importantly, they recognize the leading student entrepreneurs and their teachers for their program.

NFTE (pronounced nifty) is a program that teaches entrepreneurship to middle school and high school students with the expectation of creating some relevance within the school experience and teaching them some life skills. As I went from booth to booth, learning about the businesses of these young entrepreneurs, including handmade jewelry, custom spray painted t-shirts, baby sitting, tutoring, artwork, hair dressing, and motivational speaking, I pondered on how this related to what I was doing with my InPower coaching system. And, of course, I see a direct connection.

What these young people were being exposed to was an early experience with self-determination, with choice. They are learning that they have an opportunity to shape the destiny of their lives and they don’t have to be totally dependent upon “the system” to provide for, determine, and limit the scope of the future possibilities. They are learning that they have the power to make choices, and to take actions, to get the results they seek in life.

One of the speakers at the gala shared a quote from Lao Tzu, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” For these students, all from low-income neighborhoods, the statistics show that where they were heading, without some intervention, without a change in direction, is likely to have a future that is not very bright, promising, and in many cases, not even very long. A change in direction is life saving.

What about the adults? What about those who are either trapped in the rat race or who are struggling just to join that race? What lesson can those who were successful in school and in their corporate jobs take from the entrepreneurial experience? After all, entrepreneurship is not for everyone, right? Someone has got to work for the big corporations and for the smaller businesses started by the entrepreneurs, don’t they?

Right and wrong. While it may be true that not everyone will want to go out and start their own business, it is true that everyone of us is already a business. The American economy in recent decades has moved more towards a dependence upon services. The real truth is that it has been dependent upon services all along. In a service business, people sell their time (e.g. lawyers, plumbers, babysitters who bill by the hour), their knowledge (e.g. doctors, consults, and tutors are paid for sharing and using their expertise), or their skills (hair dressers, artists, and craftsmen who pay often varies by how well they perform given tasks). Every single worker, therefore, is operating a business. They are running their own professional services firms in which they are selling their time, knowledge, or skill to a client. If they are currently an employee, they have are selling primarily to one client.

With that perspective, how might the thinking of adults who are employees change? I believe it can be a very liberating shift that provides room for a much greater range options for self-determination. With this mindset, there is an entire range of tools that business owners have perfected to shape the future of their entities that can be applied to the individual to establish a clear path to a future determined and created by that individual.

Have a powerful day!

Cecilia