Who Do You Want to Be?

I bet when you were a kid you had heroes, and I bet that you wanted to be just like your hero. Maybe it was Superman, or David Beckham, Eric Clapton or Scary Spice. If you are anything like me you would have chosen your hero on a very superficial basis, even if you never thought what it was. As we get older we tend to be a little more cynical and probably over the years we may have dropped or moved away from having heroes. When I onboard a new client, I always ask them if they have a role model, in life and in business, and I get a wide range of answers. The question is important because it can reveal an individual’s deepest, most authentic values.

Rather than choose some pathetic, short term resolutions this New Year, and rather than set some of the more useful goals, like the number of books I will read or what I will achieve in the coming 12 months, which are important I am also going to decide who I want to be this coming year. I don’t mean I am going to pretend to be Richard Branson or Simon Cowell (heaven forbid) for the next 12 months, but I am going to consciously figure out the values that I hold to be important and which I don’t, thus far, fully embody. I will find a role model for each of those values and try my very best to deliberately live that value. Personally, I think that there are not a lot of ‘admirable’ characters in public life these days, but I have the whole of history to find my role models and I don’t need one role model to cover all of the values I want to live more fully. It may be Nelson Mandela’s forgiveness or Mother Theresa’s magnanimity or Alun Wyn Jones toughness. In reality I don’t necessarily need to find a universally known character. It may be the nurse next door who has shown unswerving kindness to people for years without reward or the parents of the autistic children who have let their love and kindness direct their lives for ever. I am sure that the exercise of discovering those values I am not fully living and consciously and purposely making the effort to live those values will benefit not only myself but everyone whose lives I touch.

What about you? Is it going to be lose a few pounds or cut down on cheese or are you going to purposely and deliberately recreate yourself as the person you were meant to be? Inevitably business owners get exhausted and burnt out as they try to grow their business.

At Kinnery we grow the business leaders so they can handle growing a business more easily and with less stress. When we grow the business leaders, we take away the things that stop growth so the business results can grow more easily and with less effort, which results in better businesses with happy business owners, staff, customers and suppliers. To check whether I can help you on that journey https://calendly.com/iankinnery/canweworktogether