Sonja Becker - The Female Leader

That’s what we call a mission. And, as is well known, Ms. Roddick has not only achieved it: it has made her one of the richest women in Britain.

Why mission? No sooner have the values which are personally decisive been ascertained when you should accomplish a “mission”? And…isn’t that a little too much pathos? Ask someone who knows what he is talking about: the missionary Albert Schweitzer.

In his opinion you lead a happy life if you want to pursue a specific objective in your life. If you direct and concentrate your values towards a challenging objective, your mission will appear. And then you are happy while you are accomplishing it.

B

ut like most people, we often renounce what we would really like to have. The “I want that”

of our childhood is forced out of us, though it would make decisions for example much easier.

If you can’t recognize your fundamental impulses, you can’t join the game. But it would be tedious if you attempted to fight against these human impulses.

Instead try to get them under control. Ambition is the impulse that determines the size of your goal. False humility restrains this ambition. If you duck out of the way of these challenges you will notice how the senses become dulled and you fall into a peculiar form of lethargy – the melancholy that arises when you regret in your inmost being not having tackled a goal, and you mooch around more or less aimlessly because of it.

It looks something like this. After getting up you don’t know what to do. But you get by. Every distraction, even including breakfast television, comes to the fore. You arrange to have breakfast with like-minded friends in order to talk yourself into the vale of tears. It is not long in the conversation before there is no way out of it. Then, first a prosecco to it. A small one. Thus weakened, and also to avoid being reminded of past glorious times, you lie down briefly after lunch for starters. In the end it was three “small” proseccos.

Afterwards you drag yourself over to the computer to check your email. And even if the guy you met recently has sent you an enthusiastic email you will never be satisfied with your mail. If anything, you are an email junkie. In the evening a couple of great ideas, especially ones which make sense of your life, occur to you. You make some notes and already your energy has gone. Your energy only stemmed from the guilty feeling that you haven’t done anything else sensible all day in the first place. But the first beer of the evening tastes great again. You meet up with your peers again, because you can be sure that with they will go along with anything you say. What a taxing, tiring day! Although you haven’t done anything. In his thesis on “Melancholia and Society”, Wolf Lepenies describes the phenomenon of melancholia as coming not from inside but out: forms of melancholia, such as lovesickness or other mental symptoms which were treated (mostly by blood-letting) up to the nineteenth century, are indicators of a society which has outlived its time, with failed revolutionaries, bankrupt noblemen and others who lounged about uselessly in the salons of the late nineteenth century without really having anything to do. For they had literally given up their job - or it had been taken from them.

In the modern sense this type of melancholia is of a different nature: an event in your life that continues to have an effect on you such as a separation or a divorce and makes you feel that you have been badly or unjustly treated by someone or, worse, by a man. This feeling dominates you and robs you of the power of looking ahead. You have to get out of this dark corner of the soporific salon.

W

omen have one big advantage over men in their careers. At the end of the performance scale, that is to say at the summit of satisfaction, you find yourself in a Buddha-like state: things happen simply because you want them to. You don’t do anything any more, you have an effect. Your magical magnetic power of attraction, the spell of your charisma alone ensures that everything you want comes true. You know this situation. You only have to be standing on your own at a party and send out a couple of signals, play with your feminine charm so that men sniff around out like Pavlovian dogs and, yes, sit up and beg. As is well known, men can always do that. But if the woman isn’t interested they don’t have a chance. And everything that men do, they do only to win women, even if they aren’t aware of it. And if that isn’t an incentive to use this wonderful feminine quality in your career, we don’t know what is. At last that is the aim of this chapter: to show how women can determine their goals.

What would happen to these wonderful values if you didn’t use them? Of course you need a target before you can hit the bull’s eye. And a target needs a playing field, a system of coordinates in which the time span and the challenge are plotted. Then your values will turn into a mission. For one thing has been missing in our notes up to now. And this factor comes into play in this chapter: other people. Your mission is your personal vision of how to use your values in reality. This vision can be brilliant, bombastic, challenging or simply sweet, humane and tender: there is no difference in principle between Joanne K. Rowling with her empire and Mother Theresa. Some people want to change the world, others to have a good life and raise a family. And some want both.

Your mission is a game for life, a strategy which will in every case even fascinate and attract like-minded people. If you ply them with what arouses your curiosity and bring out what is within you, you will not be alone for long. As soon as you channel your values into a coherent mission, your life takes on a sense of direction. You will have comrades-in-arms who love you and want to put the same values into practice with you. Only: the others have to realize that these values can be implemented together.

Up to now we have talked about general values that are important for you. These are abstract values that you have taken for your personal ones. But up to now we haven’t been dealing with concrete things, personal goals, content. Life isn’t a church synod. It is great to be for peace, but it won’t bring you any closer to your goals. Think more individually, more egoistically, more materially: what can I do for peace? What are my intentions? What do I want to be successful at? Not what do I want to be, but what do I want to achieve. This is nothing to do with thanks and recognition for great human endeavors, but with success. Enough of petting, what you need is a brilliant idea, which however you have to be completely convinced by. Then, and only then, will your success be unstoppable.

T

he fundamental question of your mission is: what arouses my curiosity?

What is it that keeps me going, what theme can I play upside down on the keys like Mozart, for what do I have the right touch, will I appear genuine to people, what drives me, what things that others don’t see can I paint in oil if I have to, curiously enough? What devolves on me, what is so easy for me that I am amazed that others don’t find it so?

The answer is very simple: your genius. And your genius consists in exactly those things for which others admire you, even if it is that you are the only one around who can open every kind of tin can. And that’s why missions develop out of things that can be seen. Your mission is no longer an abstract mental picture, but an ability to attract the attention of others in the real, physical world. You often do something that arouses your curiosity and combines two of your basic interests in a strange way – look at Anita Roddick – and suddenly everything revolves around you. It is decisive that you see these things in all clarity. Don’t think too much about what you would like to be or to have, or about false compliments, or your career will take completely the wrong direction. You discover two things: that your road will cost you trouble and pain, and that your efforts are not fully recognized. A genuine mission comes true when people come to you in droves by word of mouth and enthusiasm, because they can see that you are the best at what you do!