Personality development secrets unleashed! Winning Traits – 2

Foundational traits that accelerate personality development

“A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions.”  

Marcus Aurelius

Three aspects define your personality:

1. What you have
2. What you drop
3. What you pick

The foundational qualities you need to have for accelerating the personality development process :

1. High ambition
2. A strong belief system
3. Clarity on goals and ambitions
4. Undeterred discipline

ABCDs in short.

The thoughts you need to drop:

1. Unrealistic expectations
2. Unfounded fear
3. Greed
4. Hatred

Ambition

It all starts with ambition. It is the fuel that can transform potential energy into kinetic energy.

We all have desires and drives. I wrote this book because of my ambition to teach someone. You are reading it because of your ambition to learn something new. We always want to do something better.

Ambition is believing in yourself, even when no one else in the world does.

We need to have the ambition to create the drive, grit and determination to succeed. 

Belief

“If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.”

Anonymous.

We are not talking about faith or anything close to religion. We are talking about the conditioning of our brain to embrace success and realise one’s purpose.

An ordinary person sees something and believes it. An extraordinary person believes in something and shows it to the world. Walt Disney had visualised Disneyland long before it was built. Steve Jobs had played with iPhones mentally much before they were physically produced. If you want to make a difference, you need to believe in your ideas first.

Before you can become successful, you need to believe that you can become successful. You need to build the right beliefs and fence them with your core values. Practicing core values will protect your beliefs.

• You are what you believe
• Your belief creates your vision
• Vision builds meaningful goals
• Goals trigger passion
• A healthy belief system enables you to make your dreams come true
• If you don’t build on your dreams, someone will hire you to build on theirs

Clarity

“It’s a lack of clarity that creates chaos and frustration. Those emotions are poison to any living goal.”      

Steve Maraboli

No, we are not talking about the clarity on larger life issues like finding your purpose or becoming a mystic. We are also not talking about finding out how the president is going to handle the global crisis. 

We are just talking about the clarity of 

• Your role
• The jobs you handle
• Delivering what you are accountable for 
• Predictability of crucial people you work with or work for
• Visibility of fundamental changes or trends that are likely to impact you and your team 

The first step in finding answers to these questions is by simply changing a preference that is, by developing a craving for clarity.

When you develop a desire for clarity, the magic begins to happen. The need to have clarity will not let you make assumptions, procrastinate or leave anything untidy or disorganised. When you have clarity, the next logical step is following it up with action.

1. Be clear about yourself
2. Find clarity about the preferences and priorities of your clients, boss, direct reports, and other key stakeholders
3. Declutter your home, office room, laptop, mind, and heart. Purity sparks clarity
4. Ensure that there are no open assumptions about anything we are accountable to manage
5. Understand the hums of data 
6. Avoid procrastination 
7. Ascertain the predictability of crucial people
8. Watch out for visible fundamental changes and trends 

You can understand how critical is this aspect for a sustained personality development process.

Discipline

• Discipline is what binds everything together
• It teaches you how to be accountable
• Discipline is a magic ingredient of life that can transform the ordinary into extraordinary.

Discipline to our mind is what the Sun is to this planet. It’s free, consistent and extremely crucial. Imagine a week without sunlight. There cannot be a bigger calamity than that. This is the most important ingredient that helps in your personality development process.

Multiple fuels can power our execution engines: discipline, motivation, curiosity, emotion and passion.

You will quickly notice that fuels like motivation are not only temporary but are also costly. If your engine is running on motivation, it is on a high maintenance mode. The engine encounters frequent breakdowns and requires expensive fixes. The same is the case with all other fuels. They are even costlier and available in fewer quantities. Discipline is the best fuel that will ignite and run the execution engine in you. You can occasionally mix them up and give a nitro boost to your engine. However, if you take discipline out, you will encounter a sudden breakdown on your race track. You won’t win the race for sure; and you could also be overtaken by your competitor who may be on the ‘D’ fuel.

• Add it to your talent list, you’ll become competent.
• Add it to an idea: It will transform into a well-executed project. 
• Put it in a child: You get a prodigy. 
• Put it in an ordinary man: You’ll get a professional.
• Add it to a goal: You get accomplishment. 
• Similarly, take discipline out of any professional and the person becomes dull and lazy. He will languish every day and eventually perish.

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”

– Frank Herbert

All human beings come pre-fitted with a powerful ‘execution engine’ that enables them to act on something. It is the same engine that drives us to drink that first drop of milk, stand on our feet or take that first step. Our bodily movements are results of physical manoeuvres, not ideas.

All successful people in the world upgrade this engine into a high-power monster. All unsuccessful people neglect it or spoil it completely. There is no other differentiation. But why do these engines break down?

Discipline is about doing what must be done, even if you don’t want to do it.

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