Eight is a lot! But who can be too rich? The first three of your treasures date back 2,500 years to an ancient Chinese master named Lao Tzu who wrote a book you need, called the Tao Te Ching.
Here are the three he gives you:
1) Simplicity
2) Patience
3) Compassion
How do you take ownership of your first three treasures? It’s obviously the work of a lifetime. But, to get started, just answer the following three questions. Before I share them, let’s talk about “answering.”
The most powerful way is to share the questions with someone you love and respect, have them ask you, and then take careful note of your answers for you. The second most powerful is to simply write your answers yourself. The least powerful, but still an honest beginning, is to think about them by yourself. Your choice. Here we go:
1) Where your life, your thoughts and emotions, your decisions and actions, are complicated, do they have to be? Is it possible to simplify them, and if so, do you know how?
2) Are you kind to others, and more importantly, to yourself? To be patient is always an act of kindness. Can you slow down, be good to others and yourself, sit for a while, and accept the pace of things as they progress right now?
3) Compassion is an even deeper form of kindness. It is to feel the struggles and pain of others, and yes, of yourself, too. Compassion is to understand that actions so often come from pain. Do you know how to find the pain, heal it, or at least empathize with it, and offer gentleness and soulful consideration even when you can’t offer anything else?
If you’d like to read Master Lao’s thinking about this, you can find a copy of his book online for free and look up chapter 67.
Turning to the remaining treasures, here they are:
4) Destiny
5) Challenge
6) Situation Awareness
7) Friendship
8) Return On Investment – ROI
And here are your questions:
4) If you consider your destiny as your righteous destination, where is that? You know where you are, and where you’ve been. Do you know where you’re going?
5) Between here and there, there will be challenges. Do you already know what some of them are? And how good are you at empowering others to productively challenge you as part of your journey from here to there?
6) Along with present alert attentiveness, situation awareness always includes an honest accounting of your strengths and weaknesses in context of current challenging conditions. Are you fully aware of your situation, including your strengths and weaknesses?
7) Do you have true friends, or are you facing life alone? Assuming you have friends, how honest, utterly and unqualifiedly honest are you with them about your strengths, weaknesses, dreams, needs and limitations? Do you know how to share the journey itself, traveling together?
8) Investment is the key to everything in life. Want a good marriage? Invest into it. Want to be a good parent? You get the idea. You have a wonderful mind. Have you trained it so that the cause-to-effect relationship from investment-to-return is precisely what you’re learning?
To dive more deeply into your treasures, please go to my website, download my Leadership Destiny article, and complete your Leadership Self-Assessment. It won’t discuss your first three treasures, but if you bring them with you, you’ll be certain to be greatly rewarded.
