If you are a member of a team, and your team goes out to play in a match, you will want every player in your team to have the same objectives - to score goals against the opponent, but to protect your own goal from attack. In this way, each player performs with a "common goal". Having a similar objective, does not, however, make each individual player the same. If it did, a football team may field eleven centre forwards, and you can just imagine the chaos, not to mention the heavy defeat that would ensue!
In order for any team to function optimally, it requires a blend of vastly differing skills that combine in a common cause to produce an overall winning combination. Teams find these skills by either developing people with the right characteristics, or searching for individuals who have independently acquired the skills demanded. So the formula for a successful team, roughly is a blend of individuals with complimentary skills combining with the identical objectives - or both.
The point is that working towards a common objective has little relationship to turning you in to a clone, it is in fact quite the opposite. It is the forging of teams of individuals with complimentary skills into harmonious performance that makes team enhancement processes so rewarding. But how do we select the right skills to compliment the team?
Some of the most costly and intense research in the field of recruitment has gone in to identifying the traits that make individuals, like you, unique, so that they can be matched to a career that best suits natural talents and preferences - research that is currently ongoing.
Genetically speaking, each of us has entered the world with an absolutely unique DNA profile - our own completely flawless set of characteristics. During our lifetime, which incidently begins at conception and not birth as some would believe, we are exposed to influences which modify our behaviour in to habits that create patterns to which we become addicted. Due to the influences to which we're exposed, people with extraordinary DNA profiles can be led down a path of uselessness, and folk with far less mental computing power can become extraordinary achievers beyond belief. It is upon this that I base my theory that intelligence has zero to do with success. This exemplifies the irony, and the unrestricted possibilities of human life.
Due to our extraordinary inherent abilities, many people overcome limiting and often destructive influences and conditioning to become great at whatever they choose to do. Why, and how?
By sheer willpower, good judgement and the exercising of choice. I can no longer understand why any person who has discovered their own creative abilities accept limiting beliefs imposed by others in their pasts, without discarding them.
We all have choices. Some of us enjoy vastly greater freedoms than others, but within our circumstances, we all have choices. By exercising them we can, through persistence, alter those circumstances if we want to badly enough. If you combine your choices with your own unique set of characteristcs your possibilities are limitless. And by sheer weight of the laws of influence, you will be able to affect the lives of countless numbers of people - hopefully in a positive sense! You can not do this when you are stripped of any influence by limiting beliefs.
So, if you're standing up to give a speech, it's great to be well trained - it gives you an enormous advantage. But, your greatest advantage is the uniqueness of your own extraordinary character. So use it - and rejoice in it. If you've decided to be a leader, it is up to you to identify the traits in your unique character that will be make this quest successful. There is no one remotely like you. You can be yourself, be hugely creative, and still function perfectly normally, productively and efficiently individually or in the context of a team - whether as a member or leader. The only thing that can limit your progress is your thinking.
Amazingly, it is your thinking that will manifest any possibilities you entertain. Depends how you use your mind. That's your choice too.
Paul du Toit
Professional Speaker, Mindset Shifter, Presentation Skills Expert, Facilitator, Coach, Long Distance Runner... and addicted to Dadhood.
