Sonja Becker - The Female Leader

Believe us, this way of learning is fun. While you learn what works and what doesn’t, you get to know yourself and your team better and better. It’s wonderful to work with other people. Getting to know other people on your journey through the business world broadens your perspective and brings more and more people into play with curiosity of their own. This is not about business but about an adventure. And it’s not called “going on an adventure” for nothing. Find your role and find the language for it.

Visionaries like to talk about their ideas and plans in the grand manner. Promoters use words as stepping stones for action. Managers like to discuss and “review” every possible thing to focus as exactly as possible on results and goals. Whatever your role is, you will give your best performance in it.

Your business project starts with you alone. And, alas, there are only three hearts beating in your breast. If you can balance these three powers perfectly you can only win. Once your inner visionary, promoter or manager is awakened and steadily comes to fruition, you learn to control yourself, to find your balance and to navigate your business in a straight line. Thus your project becomes the springboard for a successful career. Your competence in this area will automatically attract specialists from every single field. Note down their telephone numbers. Employ them as soon as success comes and you can pay them. It pays off. You will have more time than before and earn more money than you would have thought.

If your business grows, you have to realize quickly where your strengths lie and which people you need. Look back at your projects in the past. Ask friends and trustworthy acquaintances how they see you. Note, which jobs were the easiest, and which brought in cash the quickest…and which was the most fun. Your business is like a game. Soon you will need a player for every position, an ideal team. There is no doubt such people exist. And you will find the right people for the right team. If your staff is all doing what they like doing best, your workplace will be bursting at the seams with harmony and energy. The main thing is that the three types understand, complement and overlap each other in their spheres of competence. And then you have a team of leaders. Then others can only step aside when you come rolling.

The mental strengths and weaknesses in companies are always underestimated. Relationship complications are the dream killer number one in firms. In the mid-term they lead to disaster. In such cases many entrepreneurs draw back because they are disappointed that they haven’t communicated their energy to the others. Your dreams will only come true if you establish an energetic social network in your company. The challenge is to create an organization that works for you, not you for it.

A too dominant visionary will steamroll promoters and managers with muddleheaded concepts that aren’t from this planet. A promoter on her own will push her employees in a vague direction that will lead to disaster. A manager on her own will create a bureaucracy that will collapse under its own weight. Success comes from team players who know their place

and their function in the organization and have the necessary respect for one another. But we have not got that far yet. You are still on your own. Your curiosity and your desires should be your stimulation. The maverick and pop star Madonna who is dedicated to music (her own label is called “Maverick”) was right in the quotation above when she said that most people don’t say what they want. Even if it was in another context. Next to the text she is portrayed nude carrying a whip.

„Live your life, as if you’re gonna die.“

William Shatner

(singer, actor („Star Track“)

A woman is sitting with a cup of coffee in front of her and has nothing more to lose. She is divorced, a single mother, has no job, gets no support from her ex-husband and no child care. She gets 69 pounds a week from welfare. She looks at her sleeping daughter. She can’t give her anything. She can barely pay for the cup of coffee.

It was the beginning of a unique career. Today she is one of the richest women in the world.

This has nothing to do with blood sugar or with your value as a “useful member of society”. “Values” in the sense used here are the motives for our actions. We all live in a system of values that we are more or less conscious of. Our parents and teachers, as well as our ancestors and the culture in which we live, have created values out of which our way of life has arisen. Cultures are complex systems of values that first make an action possible within a social space. Everything that lies outside this framework is the atavistic and the bestial in us.

There are absolute values and personal values. Absolute values are those which last through generations. Personal values are the principles which make your life worth living. They are the foundation of our actions. You have to dig very deep to be aware of these personal values. Or you have to fall far.

This is where we have got to: in the eye of a maelstrom that rages around you while within everything appears placid as you are pulled under remorselessly by an unseen power. Personal values are not to be found outside you, but deep within you. Whoever has discovered the values that move them to the depths of their being, has secured the instructions by which they can attain the greatest satisfaction.

As the above example shows, there is frequently a great crisis at the beginning of a discovery of values. Only through it are our deepest interests revealed to us. But then we find the principles that will guide us for the rest of our lives.

Whenever the old fears and worries appear, we can rely on our values. This is why values are the first step into action and into the beginning of what can be called a career.

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nyone who passes general values off as personal ones is a hypocrite. Of course we all want peace, think war is evil and famine dreadful. Of course we want everything to be all right in the world and for everyone to get along with each other. There is nothing worse and more hypocritical than someone who passes these values off as their own – as if they were the pope.

Death is a good yardstick to get to know your personal values. Not just any death - but your own. The philosopher Martin Heidegger once pointed out that we never experience our own death, only those of others. If we envision our death, we move into another sphere.

We leave everyday life and its commonality with its rituals, conventions and clichés – what Heidegger calls the “inessential core of being” - completely behind and encounter the essence of our character and recognize what is real and what we live for: our values

It is not by chance that a deep personal experience is often at the beginning of a thorough reflection on the value of life. A heavy illness, a sudden redundancy, a difficult break up with a partner or bankruptcy can lead to you thinking for the first time about the real values in life. Possibly you feel disappointed, conned, abandoned, and punished. But why this whining? This is the beginning of the rest of your life. And possibly the real beginning of your success. What will people say about me at my graveside? The answer is synonymous with the contribution you made to the human race: your worth, your values, those attributes for which you want to have the thanks and recognition of your fellow human beings.

It is only recently, possibly since the end of the industrial age and the beginning of the service age, that work can even be fun. We don’t have to work as hard as before. And we can choose for ourselves what we want to do. If you follow your own way, you don’t have the feeling of working. You feel led on by your sense of curiosity. You aren’t dealing with something, something is dealing with you. If the “background program” consists of your own values, you have your model. Tie this model to your curiosity and your life will pay out in cash. It is not normal in our latitudes to connect economic success with these values. No, it is even considered reprehensible to want to earn money from your personal and social interests. According to the protestant ethic – one of the founding tenets of western civilization – hard work is the only way of being redeemed after death and received into eternal life. Work in this sense is more of a punishment or probation: the exile from paradise is the beginning of the necessity of working, and work is the only way back to heaven. “First comes work and then pleasure” is the well known formula of our social system of values, which vulgarizes this principle. Or: “work is work, beer is beer”. Work in its classic meaning is martyrdom: it causes pain. And it should cause pain. Work, as Karl Marx had already concluded in the 19th century, is alienation from oneself.