The Female Leader. Sonja Becker

of thinking, the “silent dialogue of the soul with itself”; Sigmund Freud spoke of the “super-ego”, Adam Smith of the “impartial spectator”. If you are not clear about your values, unforeseen feelings accompany your life.

      If you draw up clear, lasting values for yourself you are capable of perceiving and deciding. Your actions are in tune with your being. Success always arises out of the basis of clarity. As long as you have no clear perception of reality, your business will remain stuck in fantasy or pessimism.

      But whoever discovers their own true values has already found on the conception side of the performance scale what they find on top of the action side: the motives for going into service for other people and finding complete self-fulfillment. That is why the overlap between total collapse and enlarged self-perception is a terrific experience – and often the beginning of a unique and true life.

      How do you find values?

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      e develop tactics with which we deceive ourselves a little to survive everyday life. We find compromises or white lies. We play for time, pretend to be stupid, although we could do better. On holiday, in a lonely cottage, or after a disastrous business experience, there are often moments when it is too late to fool yourself, when you are led or forced into clarity.

      The reasons why you do this or that or want to do this or that appear again from behind the grey wallpaper of everyday life. In the morning everything often appears so clear and simple. A few minutes later the motives of your actions are swallowed by the duties of everyday life. You need absolute peace in order to contemplate your values.

      What is the most important thing in life? What do you want most? Why do you live and what makes life worth living? What is most desirable? The easiest answers come first: money or love, a fulfilling sex life, fame and honor etc. These are abstract values without content. They have nothing to do with your real life. If you decide on money, you should marry into a rich family or play the lottery. Is that your life? Recognizing your values means to think beyond costs and returns on investments. Many middle class people regard prosperity as a genuine value in their lives, only to discover that it has nothing to do with their own lives once they have earned their money through a huge investment of time and sacrifices. There is little time left to enjoy life. Values are the measure of things that are more important to you than money. Which values are important to you?

      How much value do you place on your health? When you are sick you suddenly discover the values on which you depend. Then all the money in the world becomes of matter of indifference: the main thing is to get well again. People are not cars on a production line. Each person has his integral temperament. There are great differences in sensibility, character and in the level of activity. Active people find their salvation in movement; passive people love peace and contemplation. But common to both is their disposition. Hopes and fears form our characters. Our need to grow and interact with other people is a fixed integral part of our system. Unconscious feelings steer our consciousness. Many people who have grown up in poverty for example never lose their fear of losing everything, regardless of how much money they have.

      Personal values are the secret spices in the recipe for prosperity. If you can train yourself to develop courage, humility and awareness, you will be in a position to change to the winning side.

      Many people who have grown up in a successful business family imbibe certain values with their mother’s milk. Others – most of us – look for models that can help us to develop perspectives. But the majority of people train their brains to find excuses for their existence or put the blame on others, such as politicians or their boss, for their situation. If they spent only half the time they spend in regret and finding out where they went wrong on producing results they would be rich.

      Every time you obtain personal success a blemish in your personal system always threatens to bring your best plans to nothing: vanity, pride, arrogance, presumptuousness and haughtiness arise. Your faults appear as soon as you come into close contact with other people. Life is simply too short to iron out all your faults. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is to know the advantages and defects of your character. It concerns your positive as well as your negative values. The outcome of this is your talent. You can integrate them into the structure of your character as you earn money.

      Often it can even be the negative influences that lead to a business. One of our clients was a loser in private, but a winner in public. Wherever he went he opened his big mouth to show that he was the greatest – to the distress of his fellow human beings who knew him better.

       As far as they were concerned he was a pure exhibitionist who by any means and with a lot of shamming annoyed everyone so much until all eyes were fixed up on him. He failed interviews regularly because he made requests and demands that bore no relation to his actual accomplishments.

      Of course the coaches didn’t know anything about this. It came out during the session that he was on the wrong side in his chosen profession, the media. He was a complete actor, who belonged in front of rather than behind the camera: a limelight hogger! No sooner had he discovered this for himself when he found an honest and deep relationship. Now he is working on a personal project which he will stage one day; and he works willingly and hard on it, so he can get his well-earned applause.

      Character, persona, personality

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      our talent determines your personal success. The personality determines the goal. The personality often changes when you undergo a deep crisis – as the example above shows.

      During a crisis you encounter your self-deception and discover what you believe to be right in the innermost part of your unconsciousness. Many people have a dichotomy inside themselves that they carry for all of their life, and are too occupied to notice it. There is the type who always questions others, criticizing and commenting on their actions – without ever giving himself away. That is to say he knows like no other of the danger and must have had bitter experiences with it. Now he is paying the others back by pumping them for information and questioning the reasons for their doings and not doings - without noticing it himself. He has a special talent for looking for mistakes and rubbing more salt into the wounds. The interlocutors in his life are constantly forced to give an account of themselves, and it seems that they are living their lives the wrong and he the right way. Many avoid him – not least because he never opens up to them, and doesn’t do himself what he demands from his fellow human beings.

      A client of ours told us about one of his own clients, who cultivated a very serious and correct business jargon, only to fall into the wildest linguistic excesses outside working hours: he couldn’t be foul-mouthed enough. When after a drunken, backslapping, all mates together evening he introduced this vocabulary into an email his client was stunned by his sleaziness and found his personal style vulgar and obsequious. And that was the last he heard from him.

       This is the pathological side of values. Such people have genuinely not found their inner self. They combine contradictions without noticing it. The inner divisions in human beings first have to be discovered both in order to analyze them and eliminate them (the job of the psychoanalyst), or to push them open without realizing it and to make them as fruitful as possible (the job of the coach). Normally one always assumes that one is right and everyone else wrong. This is a very costly argument. There is a saying in America that “you can be right or you can be rich”.

      Personality values are mostly especially intractable because our pig-headedness prefers us to appear as we would wish to be. You are convinced that you are a nice person and put great trust in your own press. Unconsciously you expect that other people will like you and treat you well because of it. But you don’t know what other people think and say about you. Very few people take the trouble to find out and prefer to fall in love with their reflection. It would be unpleasant if a “personality” who acts like Louis XIV, but in reality is totally unpopular had to lead his team out of a crisis. Only then do the true values that are hiding behind the mask of the ego appear.

      “Public virtue, private vice” is what the 18th century doctor and philosopher Bernhard Mandeville called the phenomenon whereby even the