Five Crucial Mindsets of Meaningful Personal Accomplishment
Any meaningful personal accomplishment depends on five crucial mindsets:
Forward-Facing
Mission-Driven
Goal-Focused
Solutions-Oriented
Allow-Accept-Appreciate
Forward-Facing
I like to write at one of our local coffee shops, and the other day I couldn’t help but overhear a young lady talking to someone about how all of her bank accounts had been cleaned out and were now overdrawn and her husband was in Paris and the credit cards had also been charged to the limit fraudulently. I also couldn’t help but notice how calm she was, relatively speaking. I imagine that she and her husband are accomplished people in whatever line of vocation they have chosen, because instead of dwelling on what had happened, she was dealing with reality and not only facing forward, but solutions oriented.
Katie and I formally adopted this philosophy back in 2018 when I was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. The only way to get through it was to face it and deal with it, and we realized that in all our successful endeavors in life, we’d done that. So, the first crucial element of meaningful personal accomplishment is to be forward facing. Deal with what is right in front of you. But don’t get wrapped up in the infinite possible futures. Deal with tomorrow when it comes. Deal with today right now, and let the past be in the past where it belongs.
In other words, live IN the moment, but not FOR the moment. Live FOR the future but not IN the future. Work hard, have goals, save money, eat healthy and exercise, all that. But wherever you are right now, whatever is your situation, embrace it fully. As Byron Katie says, if you fight reality, you’ll always lose.
That brings us to the next crucial element.
Mission-Driven
Have you ever seen a coworker or friend intently walking toward someone’s office or the bathroom, so focused they can’t be distracted, and you or someone else says, “Wow. They’re on a mission.”
I’ve worked with companies on mission, vision, and values for about forty years now, and my wife does strategic planning for a living. I used to play this game with my business students where I would redact identifying names from mission statements and they would have to guess the company. I even went through the Franklin-Covey mission statement builder for myself, but came out with some fluffy generalized jargon that I can’t remember and so it was not that motivating. It wasn’t personal to me.
Finally, after cancer treatment, with an uncertain future, I dove deep and looked into my past, back twenty years earlier to a leadership retreat I’d been privileged to attend, and I asked myself: what really is my mission? After 62 years on the earth, what is it I came here to do?
The answer was simple: to entertain and inspire.
I’d been doing that as a business professor, but at heart I am a writer. So, today, I serve my mission by writing. And it feels like real mission. Like an assignment I cannot refuse. I’ve been trained and gained the experience and now it is my duty to entertain and inspire through the written word. It’s so simple and straight-forward it’s like marching orders.
The Universe says to me, just do it.
I worked with this not-for-profit director who prided herself in being an “Idea Person.” She claimed to have a hundred great business ideas every morning in the shower, and they went right down the drain. That was a visual I didn’t need. However, her great ideas led to her embezzling Federal funds but nothing else of import. The Feds closed down her NPO and I doubt anything came of any of her thousands of “great ideas”.
The point is, a solid, definite mission is your focus. It’s what you do and has to be clear. Then you can create an action plan to accomplish the mission.
Which leads to the third crucial element.
Goal-Focused
Katie got her college degree recently after a “gap quarter” (quarter of a century!) It was and is a huge accomplishment, and there’s a hidden reward in any college degree that isn’t obvious at first. Getting a college degree was a goal. Katie’s mission is to empower other women in business, which she does very well, but she felt she lacked some credibility in some circles, and that her college degree would help her be more effective and therefore was mission critical. So, she dived in. It became a goal, and of course she accomplished it and graduated summa cum laude with accolades and started her graduate degree before her business (mission) grew too large to balance with grad school (MBA degree postponed, but not forgotten).
In addition to the skills learned in the classroom, college is a great example of how to create a plan of actionable steps (courses) that lead to the accomplishment of a meaningful goal (degree). Steps are further broken down into even more bite-sized chunks (assignments, lectures, exams) and if your plan is solid (hopefully you have/had a good advisor) the steps inevitably lead to success.
What I learned as a teacher was that even students facing incredible obstacles could be successful if they followed the plan. I had a student who called me asking for an extension of time for his exam because he suffered from end-stage renal failure and was scheduled for dialysis during the exam time. I have had students in prison, students with disabilities, students supporting an extended family. All graduated because they completed the plan.
It's important to pick goals that align with your mission and then to pursue them with that mission-driven mindset. Head down, plowing forward despite any and all obstacles.
Which leads to the fourth element.
Solutions-Oriented
The woman on the phone at the coffee shop was working with the bank on finding solutions. Canceling the cards. Getting a bridge loan. I didn’t even hear her whining or complaining. Finding out who did it would come later. At that moment, she was dealing with what was right in front of her and not what had happened. Time for that later.
Katie and I were in Office Depot, the Friday before Labor Day, in the aisle with binders and dividers, when we got a call from the Washington State Charter School Commission. The state Supreme Court, which was anti-charter school, had just overturned the enabling legislation on a technicality. We’d been working on this project for three years, and had created one of the strongest applications the national reviewers had ever seen. Willow School would have caught the middle schoolers who were bound to slip through the cracks and drop out before high school and would help close the achievement gap so more kids would be successful in high school. There was a huge need in our town, and for that matter in the state, and Willow would have been the flagship and a model for the nation.
When we got the news that all charter schools in the state were immediately shut down, we were buying some supplies to take back to the office where the five-year lease for our building sat on my desk for my signature as president of the board of directors. Willow would have opened the next school year.
We grieved a bit and then Katie got to work, lobbying for a new, stronger law that the Supreme Court would be unable to overturn. It took all spring, and so we had to find another building, and many other obstacles popped up, but she imbued the organization with a culture of being solutions oriented and forward facing, and so, in the year I was battling cancer, she opened the school, juggling caregiving with a more-than-full-time job.
All of this is just common sense, I know. Imagine you are in charge of the household and your mission is to care for your family. Your goal is a chicken dinner. The chicken you had in the fridge went bad, so you get in the car and head to the store, focused on your goal. The store is out of whole chickens. You buy one already cut up. Better even than having to chop it up when you get home. All of this you do every day, at work, at home, in your leisure time. Think back to the analogy of the college degree: you set goals, work the plan, overcome obstacles, graduate.
Allow-Accept-Appreciate
The fifth crucial mindset is really numbers five, six, and seven, but they all go together nicely in one package: to allow, to accept, and to appreciate.
ALLOW
How many times have we seen someone turn down a promotion or a job opportunity in favor of the status quo, or stay in a dreary or even abusive relationship? We can’t always see the way out of our current situation. Sometimes we are deep in a hole, and we can sense the sunlight above us, but resist the climb out. If you ever get the chance to visit a recovery meeting, you might hear the following, or see signs pasted to the wall: Relax. Let go. Take it easy.
Recovery, one of the deepest and most slippery holes to climb out of, depends on the person to both accept the predicament and to allow recovery to happen. It takes patience and self-awareness, and as simple as it sounds, to simply allow life to happen, we humans tend to fight reality. Allowing means that good things are going to happen, as well as things we don’t see as good. Some of life is painful, no matter how successful we become. Everyone has challenges. As my stem cell transplant coordinator said, “Those who do best are the ones who can find the gift in the situation.” It sounds harsh, and “easy for you to say”, but it’s a Universal truth.
ACCEPT
To accept does not mean to lay down, roll over, and give up. When I suggest acceptance, I am once again proposing to stop fighting what is. This could also be part of the Forward-Facing mindset, but more importantly, it defines our ability to gracefully and gratefully receive the gifts that we are offered, whatever they may be. We have to be especially receptive to allowing and accepting the achievements and accomplishments we are focused on. It’s possible and even common for people to work and work and work toward a goal, only to give up just before reaching it.
In addition, we must train our minds to visualize success, to articulate our mission and our goals and to expect them, to treat them as already accomplished and to accept the harvest from the seeds we have sown and the nurturing we have committed to.
APPRECIATE
Finally, as every success guru will tell you, we must be grateful for whatever we have accomplished. This is why when Katie and I stand on top of the mountain above Santa Fe, relishing the bright sun above us and the snow under our skis, we say two things: “We worked hard to get here,” and “We have arranged our lives to be this way.” We say that when we finally take a break and stand at the beach, and we say that in the morning when we get up and sit quietly next to each other, on the couch or in front of the fire in the pit in the back yard. And we FEEL, in the core of our being, a deep sense of gratitude for everything we have accomplished, and for everything the future holds for us, despite setbacks, failures, and challenges that sometimes feel or felt insurmountable. Even laying in the hospital, being hit with lethal doses of chemo, and especially when we got back home after five weeks in Seattle undergoing stem cell transplant with no idea what the future held, we found so much to be grateful for. In fact, even the smallest things seemed more important and valuable. The street in front of our house. Just to be back in our own bed. The October sun on the front porch. Coffee on our own couch in the morning.
I’ve often found that my list of grudges and complaints is actually the same as my gratitude list. I remember one time I was worried about a tiny oil leak from the primary on my Harley and the Jeep needed new brakes and we were short on money and I was exhausted from cancer and a long list of things, and then I had a moment where I realized I was winding myself up, so I decided to make a gratitude list, and it went something like: I have a Harley. I have a Jeep. Both paid off. I have money in the bank and right now, today, my cancer is in remission and everything is fine right now, right here, in this moment. All the important bills are paid. I have food and shelter and I am okay.”
Gratitude is a mindset, and we have to adopt it and practice it. It’s like physical exercise. It’s a habit. It takes awareness and diligence, but it rewards you with a happier, more peaceful mind that is more open to what the Universe has to offer. These three then are part and parcel to each other: to allow life to happen, to accept reality, and to appreciate what you have.
Bigger accomplishments don’t really even take more focus or drive. It just feels like higher stakes sometimes. But, in essence, any meaningful personal accomplishment depends on five crucial mindsets: Forward-Facing, Mission-Driven, Goal-Focused, Solutions-Oriented, Allow-Accept-Appreciate.