Is Your Natural Personality Sabotaging Your Success?

This is the last of my nuggets from the conference last week—I think I have milked it long enough. Back to my favorite speaker who also talked about what it takes to succeed. Though he gave the example of professional success, this applies to all all areas of your life.

A few years ago, he realized he had to make some changes to save his business from collapse. His business was successful because he was a successful sales rep. However, when he lost several key accounts, he realized that the business he had built could not survive without him.

He had built the wrong business. Instead he needed to build his business in such a way that he was not the "star revenue producer". He had to take a step back and develop his employees, train and support his sales reps to be successful.

Once he realized what he had to do, he rose to the challenge and tried to do exactly that. However, he wasn't making any progress. It took him awhile to realize that who "he was naturally was very different from who he was required to be professionally".

Naturally, he is individualistic, very competitive, not a team-sports-kind-of-guy. That kind of personality was responsible for his success as a sales rep. It did not serve him well when he tried to build a company.

For him to build a successful company he had to adopt a "different" personality. He has had to learn: to be a team leader, to delegate, to rely on others, to watch others on his team fail and learn from their failures instead of stepping in to fix the problem. Now he sees himself not as an individual but as the team leader of the greatest company in his niche.

There is a an important lesson here for all of us. Many times we hide behind our natural personalities even when they do not serve us well. If you are an individualist you may need to learn to be a team player. And if you are a team player you may need to learn to be an individualist and not always hide behind the team.

To be successful as an adult, a spouse, a parent, an employee, sometimes requires that we have to work against our intrinsic nature to develop the qualities that will make our personal lives richer and our professional lives more successful.