“Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Focus on your character, not your reputation. Focus on your blessings, not your misfortunes.”
When you're stripped of your titles, medals, achievements and accomplishments, who are you really?
What choices do you make when you’re all alone?
How do you respond to events, situations and circumstances in your life, especially in private?
The truth is that reputation is only what the public sees and thinks about us – and it’s essentially in the hands of others. You can influence it but you can't control it.
The only thing you can control is your character. What you do when no one is watching … and what inevitably drives your behaviour in public.
Character is making a come back (and so it should!) as society as a whole questions what we see reflected in our modern leaders and those who hold platforms of influence – and this includes business leaders, royals, entertainers and key opinion leaders.
Additionally social trends — from rising mental illness to widening and debilitating anxiety, particularly among young people, the growing reliance on drugs and alcohol, a societal moral vacuum and an hyper-emphasis on achievement and wealth alone to define success, etc — are raising alarm bells about what we value.
There’s a realization that over the years we haven’t “attended to the whole person”.
As a society, we’ve somehow not paid heed to the deeper, often invisible moral fibre of life.
We haven’t attended to character.
So what is character? Anne Snyder, author of the book ‘The Fabric of Character’ defines character as “a set of dispositions to be and do good, engraved on a person in multiple ways’:
- by strong family attachments that teach what to love and how to love well;
- by regular habits that ingrain small acts of self-control;
-by teachers and role models who personify excellence and inspire emulation;
- by religious instruction on honest, courageous, and compassionate living; through institutions that establish standards for good conduct and mentors who inculcate concrete ways to execute it;
- by the reading of great literature; through experiences of struggle, positions of responsibility, and the blessings and demands of enduring commitments.
Character is more about ‘we’ before ‘I’, more purpose before pleasure, more submission to others before self-expression.
Character is about knowing the right and selfless thing to do that and following through.
Character builds resilience, another recent hot topic, which helps with dealing with the harsh realities of life, including set backs and failure.
Character feeds your choices, which in turn impacts on your reputation. But remember, character and reputation are built over the time.
Don’t rush the process. Take your time. And be teachable and willing to be challenged.
Insight Inspiration:
The question is, do you have inner character you're prod of? Because your character is what will define and seep into your brand and reputation.
What you do in private will have a knock on effect to your public life.
If you don't believe just open up a newspaper and pick from the scandals splashed all over the front page in black and white.
The key is to look at it this way: The results we achieve in life and in public depend, more than anything else, on how we respond to the events and circumstances we are facing in private, and how we deal with them.
And, it is our character that determines how we will respond to those events and circumstances.
Therefore it is our character that ultimately determines our success.
Think on it.
