Accepting Responsibility Creates Opportunities of Advancements

“Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” John F. Kennedy

Living the life intended for you may be a struggle. Many times within our lives we find that someone or something has prevented us from obtaining a goal we have decided to achieve. However, instead of accepting someone else’s condition into your life’s existence or allowing something to prevent your dreams from becoming your reality; remember to focus pointing the finger at yourself. What did you do that allowed someone or something to interfere with your goal? Use every situation as an opportunity to learn and advance for the next battle you are to face. Blame is generational and unfortunately for those that continue its’ use, it can be destructive. Destructive to the very essence of your ethics and more importantly of your sense of self-worth. Although it may be true that your boss is a racist, your husband or wife might be a liar and a cheater, your mother may have been a drug addict, but, in light of those circumstances, you have to decided to assume your right to live the life that has been intended for you thru God's purpose.

The first challenge to addressing yourself within blame is to develop a strategy that focuses on where you are going, what you would like to see happen, rather than having your face attached to the rearview mirror, always looking back at what was done and who did it. Therefore, developing a strategy that is based on destiny and not history is vital. Focusing only on what was wrong in your childhood will only leave you frustrated and stuck in the past. Look forward in your life. You have the power to lift yourself beyond any dismal realities that you may face.

It is important to know that we were created to be leaders, innately and instinctively. Humans are leader, exceeding any other living being. GOD has placed us within the position to be living species who can continue to work on ourselves. We have the power to evolve, transform, develop, relocate, rebuild, reinvent, or do whatever else is necessary to achieve our goals. We who have been victimized by someone else’s decision can sit like lepers and die at the gate of blame and complain or we can emerge with a strategy that enables us to say, “I am too valuable to die, too tenacious to wait on anyone’s mercy, and too creative to accept your neglect as my destiny.” Blaming yourself is not necessarily positive, but refusing to blame others and deciding to take responsibility for you, for your situation, can empower you to make choices and decisions that you will never regret and face forward towards your goals.
Jakes, T. (2008). Before You Do: Making Great Decisions That You Won’t Regret

Having ‘Decision’ Power Over Your Life

“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”

Napoleon Bonaparte

I can trace every success or failure in my life back to something I did or didn’t decide effectively. Whether in the course of developing relationships, doing business, selecting investments, or accepting invitations, I’ve found a direct correlation between my location on life’s highway and my decisions to turn, exit, stop, and start.

If we are to be good stewards of great opportunities, we must show respect for those opportunities by the level of diligence to which we prepare for the next move. Relationship decisions are among the most opportune choices in your life. No others leave as many footprints alongside your own on life’s journey as those you make to unite yourself with another person emotionally, sexually and or spiritually. Many times we make poor decisions because we have decided what success looks like instead of what it entails. Due diligence must include a heart check. Is the goal good looks or good character? Wealth or happiness? Safety or excitement?

To those of us who often procrastinate on the decision because we feel intimidated by lack of education or any area of weakness: it is not how much you know that arms you with the tools of great decision making, but rather how much you ask of those tools. My point? Ask questions. This is the first step you can take in making your decision power influence your life and create changes within your life's options.

Jakes, T. (2008). Before You Do:Making Great Decisions That You Won't Regret

The Hidden Strengths of Minority Leadership

Minority professionals often hold leadership roles outside work, serving as pillars of their communities and churches and doing more than their share of mentoring. If you know many minority professionals (particularly women of color) then you know that these are the people who are called upon inordinately to lend their energies, perspectives, and guidance to activities outside their jobs. Because they have “made it,” and because often they have done so against heavy odds, they are mentors of choice to young people in their surrounding communities.
Within their workplaces, they serve on numerous diversity seeking task forces and spearhead minority recruitment efforts. They play high-profile volunteer roles in their towns, schools, and churches, and the amount of time they invest in these roles is substantial. In the words of Ella Bell, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, “Minorities comprise the backbone of religious organizations and provide a significant part of the energy driving community service in the United States.”

For many minority professionals, involvement in such activities is an important, inherently satisfying part of their lives. For some, it’s a way of giving back and or, more accurately, giving in turn the kind of help that benefited them early on. But it’s also a fertile source of continued personal growth. In these myriad roles, minority professionals own valuable leadership skills.
For example, Sheryl Battles is an African-American Vice President of corporate communications at a major global corporation. In addition to her primary responsibility managing executive and investor communications, she coordinates the corporation’s communications on issues of diversity and in that capacity supports 30 to 40 events a year. It’s a task that constitutes just 5% of her official job description but consumes roughly 25% of her 50-hour workweek. In her personal life, she speaks at community events and career seminars for minority students and is involved in the church that she, her husband, and their daughter attend. She is also on the board of a local organization for the arts and has been active in its African-American Cultural Heritage Series since its inception over a decade ago.

Over the years, Sheryl Battles has accumulated substantial cultural capital. Cultural capital is impossible to measure with any precision but is undeniably vital for anyone who wishes to exert influence through leadership in a neighborhood, a company, or a nation. Everyone accumulates a measure of cultural capital in their lives, but in the case of minority professionals, it is unusually rich. West, C. (2005). Leadership in Your Midst: Tapping the Hidden Strengths of Minority Executives. Harvard Business Review. 113-115 (2), 113-117.

You too can tap into your leadership capabilities through acknowledgement and gained cultural capital. Ask yourself, what are you doing to add value and encouragement towards society and better yet; your current surroundings?

“A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.” Frederick Douglass

Empower Your Life Now With POSITIVITY

Positive thinking can enable you to balance your emotional, physical and social surroundings and awareness by diverting adverse contradictions to those opportunities you want to achieve. Positive thinking includes the gained feelings of gratitude, hope, faith and most importantly love. With the attained balance positive thinking incorporates, your acquire possibilities advancing your capabilities and leading to your ensured abilities.

While at first, positive thinking is not an easy tool to inherit, with preparation of time commitment and constant development affirmations you can be successful in reaching positivism’s maximum potentiality.

It is important for anyone to gain positive thinking because:
Grants a person to view all prospects within alternate possibilities and outcomes of any situation they face (whether positive or negative)
Acknowledges a better allowance of openness to other people socially and encourages you to become more helpful to their needs
Concedes a person to have greater and more prosperous reactions to outcomes of life (whether in business, school or home)
Allows higher sales in business through acceptance of competition and new opportunities
Encourages a faster and more willingness for growth in education through an openness to new educational challenges

So now you may be asking how I can empower my life with positive thinking. The answer is simple; take my 3 to 1 ratio challenge. Decide from today and throughout your life’s future for every negative occurrence to or thru you, you will implement at least three positive events, thoughts or actions. Though this challenge may be hard at first, the benefits of its continual occurrence will secure better rewards for balancing your emotional, physical and social surroundings and awareness; by the empowerment of controlling your own ability to shift and shape your thoughts.