The Female Leader. Sonja Becker

      YOUR ROAD

      “A lot of people don’t get what they want because they don’t say what they want.“

      Madonna, in: “SEX”

      What shall I do?

      So, what is your goal? What does your career look like? Is it your passion? Your life? These are not easy questions. But the right way. There is no happiness: as soon as you have obtained it, you become unhappy. But there is satisfaction. If you can answer these questions easily, you can be satisfied.

      You don’t just “acquire” satisfaction. A lot of people follow whatever undertaking and believe that one day they will achieve happiness. Others believe that one day the meaning of their lives will become clear. One day? Why not now? It is essential to be satisfied here and now.

      True happiness consists in following your passion. In one moment you live in every moment.

      Satisfaction doesn’t consist in finding the meaning of life, but in feeling alive. Here and now.

      You have two means: time and money. Forget the idea that you don’t have time.

      Forget the saying that money can’t buy happiness. You have all the time in the world when you follow your own goal. That means making your passion your life. And then you will get all the money in the world. It is that simple. And that hard.

      We all have a task: to make the best out of our lives. Each of us has something unique within us: our individual brilliance. Both of these ideas were formulated by Immanuel Kant in the sentence: “Every human being is his/her own purpose”. By “purpose” he meant “goal”. Every human being is therefore a goal. “His/her own” because it is unique and inviolate. For no one can make others his or her purpose, but they may use other people as a means to an end. That is the basic idea behind the Enlightenment, the “emergence of mankind from his self-inflicted immaturity” (Kant). Whoever reaches this point, where the goal is clear, has decided to lead his own life. Then new questions arise. And here, too, Kant has the basic question formulated: “What should I do?” It is the basic question in ethics. “Ethos” means “attitude”.

      The first small steps

      W

      e all work in order to live. But what kind of work? The time we spend earning our money determines the quality of our lives. Those who can follow their favorite occupation and earn money from it have a sense of having found themselves.

      These people can count themselves as the being among the happiest. It is evident from their energy and liveliness. Not even the most wonderful and long holiday, not even a trip round the world produces such a kick as a calling to a career. Connect your dream with your career, and you will enjoy the road towards your goal as well as the goal itself. Just imagine if you could spend the rest of your life only doing what you like doing best. A life of action, on cloud nine – and according to Kant, your sacred duty!

      Many people know what their goals are, but don’t know how to go about reaching them. They are too far off, and before lies nothing but stumbling blocks and obstacles that keep you from it. First you have to do something. You don’t see your goal for the problems and the humdrum of everyday life. You lose sight of it. But what you don’t see is what is right in front of your nose: the first step. In order to take it, you have to trace the path all the way back from the goal.

      You have to get moving. The Greek word for “way” is “method”. And there is only one right way: your own. To follow it, the point of departure must be clearly defined. For this we have developed a unique road map: the “performance scale”. We start from the premise that a person can only achieve exactly as much as his or her stage of mental development will allow. How to find out and know where you stand as an individual and how to continue on the way up has been shown in Gigi Sage’s excellent book “Hello, Tarzan”. And so you can understand how your career will be an enormous success, the performance scale is graded in the order of the following chapters. And even if you want to defend yourself tooth and nail against earning a lot of money…if you follow your path, it will come almost automatically.

      With the descriptions of scenarios you can discover if this stage in the development of your business sounds familiar and find out in each case where you should go from here: from the values you set up for yourself to the service you provide for others. In any case there is no escape: every single phenomenon is experienced in the growth of a business, every career is built on these steps, and every development is a rung on this ladder. And every time you reach a new stage it gets better and will become more difficult. And it doesn’t matter whether you are dealing with the daily organization, finding customers, building up teams into self-organizing units or serving humanity.

      Entrepreneurship is living your dream. It means that your aims are in tune with your heart. You always work in principle in a tight unit in which you take over the role of leader, whether as a free agent, a lady of leisure, or an executive in a large company. Our society doesn’t make it easy for anyone to realize their dream. It values the mediocre. Our most important influences come from our parents and teachers. And they all praise security to the skies. They expect you to fit in with a system and to become “a useful member of society”. And that you will become – but at the end, not at the beginning. First you will become wild and unruly, you will recover your own curiosity, and with it your lust for life.

      So entrepreneurship is a stony and exhausting path. But there are no easy paths. Either you fight it out or fight for all of your life against the tedium of a life of security and without passion. In Germany we still live in luxury that we can barely afford: provided or subsidized by the state. The result is not only a certain laziness, but also a lack of passion amounting to lethargy. And a poor quality.

      The somewhat anarchic but lively and passionate filmmaker Klaus Lemke believes that Germany would be Europe’s number one film making country if films weren’t subsidized. Not only because you get the money in advance, but also chiefly because a crowd of investors and skeptics incessantly point to the script, demand that the characters be explained to them, and so subsequently everything has to be rewritten. “Everything has already been explained to death before the shooting, so nothing happens in the film anymore”, said Lemke. “I would like to say to filmmakers, do your own, small thing without money. At least it’s your own then!”

      We are all colleagues, fathers, mothers, sons, grandchildren. Even if we play the role expected of us perfectly, we will always lose something. We are not in the world to play out roles or to give in to the pressure of custom. Our bodies are aware of that. They send out signals of our condition: aches and pains, illnesses, feelings of hopelessness, despair, disappointment. You can read disappointment in particular in many faces, because the great dream of their lives has at some time been put aside and they have then found themselves somewhere where they didn’t want to be. No problem. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Many people are suddenly a lot happier when they take the first step towards becoming completely free in order to live their dream and pursue their goals. Often illness, redundancy, divorce or bankruptcy open people’s eyes to recognizing the value of their lives and to pay heed to the time that is left to them to do the right thing. We teach this awakening experience in our self-awareness seminars. We research the curiosity in people, delve into the sources and recommend to them projects, out of which small and then large companies grow.

      You can create a life that is based round your personal interests and whatever is close to your heart. “The female leader” shows you your career and shows you that the road is worth it. If you turn things which you love the most into products and services that benefit others, you will soon discover what it feels like to be genuinely financially independent. And you will have found the inner peace that goes with it. Yes, money does bring happiness. And a career brings satisfaction.

      “The female leader” is not a “how-to-” book. It tells you the rules of the game of entrepreneurship and when to change gear so that you can move forward. Business is not simple, and so we don’t simplify it by giving you helpful hints that you can’t