The Female Leader. Sonja Becker

A manager on her own will create a bureaucracy that will collapse under its own weight. Success comes from team players who know their place

       and their function in the organization and have the necessary respect for one another. But we have not got that far yet. You are still on your own. Your curiosity and your desires should be your stimulation. The maverick and pop star Madonna who is dedicated to music (her own label is called “Maverick”) was right in the quotation above when she said that most people don’t say what they want. Even if it was in another context. Next to the text she is portrayed nude carrying a whip.

      YOUR VALUES

      „Live your life, as if you’re gonna die.“

      William Shatner

      (singer, actor („Star Track“)

      What are values?

      A woman is sitting with a cup of coffee in front of her and has nothing more to lose. She is divorced, a single mother, has no job, gets no support from her ex-husband and no child care. She gets 69 pounds a week from welfare. She looks at her sleeping daughter. She can’t give her anything. She can barely pay for the cup of coffee.

      It was the beginning of a unique career. Today she is one of the richest women in the world.

      This has nothing to do with blood sugar or with your value as a “useful member of society”. “Values” in the sense used here are the motives for our actions. We all live in a system of values that we are more or less conscious of. Our parents and teachers, as well as our ancestors and the culture in which we live, have created values out of which our way of life has arisen. Cultures are complex systems of values that first make an action possible within a social space. Everything that lies outside this framework is the atavistic and the bestial in us.

      There are absolute values and personal values. Absolute values are those which last through generations. Personal values are the principles which make your life worth living. They are the foundation of our actions. You have to dig very deep to be aware of these personal values. Or you have to fall far.

      This is where we have got to: in the eye of a maelstrom that rages around you while within everything appears placid as you are pulled under remorselessly by an unseen power. Personal values are not to be found outside you, but deep within you. Whoever has discovered the values that move them to the depths of their being, has secured the instructions by which they can attain the greatest satisfaction.

      As the above example shows, there is frequently a great crisis at the beginning of a discovery of values. Only through it are our deepest interests revealed to us. But then we find the principles that will guide us for the rest of our lives.

      Whenever the old fears and worries appear, we can rely on our values. This is why values are the first step into action and into the beginning of what can be called a career.

      Personal values are the signposts of your career

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      nyone who passes general values off as personal ones is a hypocrite. Of course we all want peace, think war is evil and famine dreadful. Of course we want everything to be all right in the world and for everyone to get along with each other. There is nothing worse and more hypocritical than someone who passes these values off as their own – as if they were the pope.

      Death is a good yardstick to get to know your personal values. Not just any death - but your own. The philosopher Martin Heidegger once pointed out that we never experience our own death, only those of others. If we envision our death, we move into another sphere.

      We leave everyday life and its commonality with its rituals, conventions and clichés – what Heidegger calls the “inessential core of being” - completely behind and encounter the essence of our character and recognize what is real and what we live for: our values

      It is not by chance that a deep personal experience is often at the beginning of a thorough reflection on the value of life. A heavy illness, a sudden redundancy, a difficult break up with a partner or bankruptcy can lead to you thinking for the first time about the real values in life. Possibly you feel disappointed, conned, abandoned, and punished. But why this whining? This is the beginning of the rest of your life. And possibly the real beginning of your success. What will people say about me at my graveside? The answer is synonymous with the contribution you made to the human race: your worth, your values, those attributes for which you want to have the thanks and recognition of your fellow human beings.

      It is only recently, possibly since the end of the industrial age and the beginning of the service age, that work can even be fun. We don’t have to work as hard as before. And we can choose for ourselves what we want to do. If you follow your own way, you don’t have the feeling of working. You feel led on by your sense of curiosity. You aren’t dealing with something, something is dealing with you. If the “background program” consists of your own values, you have your model. Tie this model to your curiosity and your life will pay out in cash. It is not normal in our latitudes to connect economic success with these values. No, it is even considered reprehensible to want to earn money from your personal and social interests. According to the protestant ethic – one of the founding tenets of western civilization – hard work is the only way of being redeemed after death and received into eternal life. Work in this sense is more of a punishment or probation: the exile from paradise is the beginning of the necessity of working, and work is the only way back to heaven. “First comes work and then pleasure” is the well known formula of our social system of values, which vulgarizes this principle. Or: “work is work, beer is beer”. Work in its classic meaning is martyrdom: it causes pain. And it should cause pain. Work, as Karl Marx had already concluded in the 19th century, is alienation from oneself.

      The question is not how you live, but why.

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      or the first time it is possible to abolish the historical separation of “work” and “pleasure”, “9 to 5” and “5 to 9”, working hours and holidays in our modern economy. There are more and more people who are actually able to make use of the German shop opening hours because they are no longer forced to work during this time.

      But you enjoy “working” whenever you want to, including weekends or in the night, if you go your own way. You do what nourishes you, permanently and gladly. Someone who is comfortable with himself knows his worth, his values and the price at which he can sell himself.

      To reach that stage we must go back to death again. How do I feel about the thought of it? Am I frightened of it? What stops me from dying? Is there anything for which I would give my life? To answer such questions to yourself is anything but deadly. It enables you to think about life and its value. If there is anything worth dying for, then it is also worth living for.

      What obsesses you so much that you would dedicate your whole life to it? And why aren’t you doing it? Because we all prefer to play it safe.

      In the classical division between job and pleasure we land in a job after our training that we like more or less, receive compensation for the time we spend there, instead of uniting work and pleasure. We would have to suffer less and would not abandon ourselves to partially senseless occupations, hobbies or chronic partying. What are you waiting for? Your old age pension?

      Use questions about death to discover possibilities. Devote some time to it, a little solitude, and pen and paper. No distractions, no email nearby, no cell phone, not even a normal phone. Rent a hut on an alpine meadow. Do not take your partner with you. If I had only a year to live, what would I do in the time remaining? What should take priority? If the doctor told you that you had only thirty days to live, what would you concentrate on? And what if it were only a day, an hour? And how much time would you spend in self-pity?

      The answers to these questions are the beginning of a lifelong search for the really important things in your life – the much quoted “meaning of life”. Your meaning, your values.

      The secret is this. If there were