The Female Leader. Sonja Becker

of telling others what we want, we learn to create greater values for others.

       A better quality of life raises the value of our lives. We lead a healthier, more conscious and more dignified life than our forefathers. Once you have established your values, you will know what service or product to offer. It is what people and the human race in general have been waiting for.

      To arrive at this point you have to face up to a couple of hard questions: what people will say about you after your death and how you deal with your real and not your constructed reality.

      We strive after perfection in this new, positive environment. We expect perfect service everywhere, or we go somewhere else. We look for quality and are prepared to pay a higher price for it. Humanity in the sense of putting yourself in the place of others sets a new standard of excellence.

      Only the best service counts. In Japan for example the level of service is considerably higher than in the “service desert Germany”. Japanese or Americans feel among us as we do in Bulgaria. The service ideas are lying in the street. There is a lot to do. Pick them up.

      A person who lives according to his highest values knows no fear. Of course you will experience moments of fear, but you can look them in the eye. You aren’t standing in front of a gaping hole.

      Values are the wires along which you can pass over the conflicts, dangers and obstacles in life with the sureness of a sleepwalker. It is said that when we are at the threshold of death an inner film of our lives passes before us. You can be the director. It doesn’t even have to be death. Fear of losing your livelihood is enough. Short term hardships like cash flow problems are sufficient. They are resolved by interim solutions and don’t challenge you to reflect on which point in your life you have arrived at.

      Necessity creates discovery. Our mother at the beginning of the chapter is at the end: at the same moment she is standing at the beginning. The moment she began to tell a story, she discovered the greatest talent that life has given her. She has continued the story up to this very day and she has become one of the richest women in the world. She is Joanne K. Rowling. Apparently she still likes to write in cafes.

      Sources:

      Marriott, J.W. Jr. & Brown, Kathi Ann. The Spirit to Serve: Marriott’s Way.

      Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations.

      Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Mandeville, Bernard de. The Parable of the Bees.

      YOUR MISSION

      „Roll out your guns, let’s pretend, it’s fun to lose.“

       (Nirvana, „Smells like teen spirit“)

      Ladies, if there is one thing that we can do it is talk. Whereas men waste about 2000 words every day and try to keep it short, we easily, fluently and chattily raise the number to roughly 9000. Further evolutionary and biological reasons can no doubt be found for the fact.

      But we find that we should enjoy and capitalize on this ability and a few others as well. What was it that Lisa Stansfield sang so cutely? “I’m no classy lady, but I’m all woman.” In modern business you can be both lady and all woman. Why that is the case and how it functions emerges during this somewhat pragmatic phase when you find your mission.

      What is a mission? The Englishwoman Anita Roddick also probably didn’t know exactly at the beginning of her career. But she had a sweet little idea that had amusing consequences at first: she had scarcely opened her first shop when she drew down on herself the energetic protests of the countless funeral homes on the same street.

      Her shop had absolutely nothing to do with funeral homes. On the contrary, she had called it “The Body Shop” because of living bodies. But that alone would be nothing new. She brought two things together: her idea of the world harmonized completely with nature (which was very revolutionary and avant garde at that time) combined with products made from natural ingredients that enhance the lives of human beings, who are part of nature, after all.

      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.

      Mission and melancholia

      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.

      Charisma: the power of women

      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