Through personal experience and observation over 5 decades I understand what it takes to construct a life that is, in the end, looked back upon with satisfaction. Today my team and I at Outfluence teach youngsters, young professionals and business leaders how to build a life of which they will be proud, a life that will be filled with achievements large and small, that will make them happy and fulfilled. Their path from here to fulfillment won't be easy. It never is. But if we can create awareness in them so that when they do fall down, an a-ha! moment will reveal itself and they will know how to recover and move forward. Awareness is what will help them to avoid the long delays in their journey to fulfillment brought on by mistakes that are compounded by bad decisions.
We teach our audiences that one bad decision, a relationship decision, for example, can cost them 5 years or more of pain and delay.
A fulfilled life is composed of knowledge, communication skills and performance. Within those 3 components are numerous skills that must be learned and absorbed into daily living. They include message development from the perspective of both the sender and the receiver. They include personal development skills such as decision-making, time and money management, leadership. They include learning how to inspire a performance in all of its aspects. These examples only scratch the surface of the knowledge to be gained and the skills to be acquired.
We are so easily thrown off track in our quest to live a life that is fulfilling to us. Ego, jealousy, misunderstanding, excessive competition, overreaction to unfortunate experiences and following misleading influences all contribute to delayed or unrealized fulfillment.
As we work to construct lives that are fulfilling the question becomes how much of who and what we are can we control? What influences us more, nature or nurture? As written in Simple Psychology magazine, "Nature is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception e.g. the product of exposure, experience and learning on an individual."
If we were fortunate enough to have grown up in a loving and nurturing environment, we have a leg up in constructing our life. If our early years were painful and frustrating, we can certainly construct the life we want. We just might need a bit more help and it may take a little longer.
Outfluence takes people where we find them developmentally. We help them to discover, or re-discover, their genius. Then we show them how to build on that genius and take it where they want to go.
