Brigitte Witzer. Executive Coach, Rednerin und Autorin. Attitude

Imagine this: career as the opportunity to find out more about oneself, and to live accordingly; how to be the best version of yourself; how to integrate work and life – how to get off the treadmill and cast off illusions of control.

The old notion of a work-life balance is outdated and hasn’t proved valuable in everyday management. Since the mid-1980s a new concept – post-heroic management – has changed attitudes and set new standards. The term was coined by Charles Handy, a former Shell executive and founder of the London School of Economics.

The main focus of the paradigm shift is to direct yourself. “Risk intelligence” means steering  powerfully from within and gaining new energy through the process. You use high speed tools: your emotions, your intuition, and your tacit knowledge – your potential as an entrepreneur and as well as a manager.

Women in particular are often unaware of their real talents and progress through industriousness. A sober assessment of the company game rules opens up realistic perspectives. In general, the use of one’s own potential proves to be the best strategy.

Discipline, diligence and commitment are really helpful as soon as the direction is clear. Why be content to play a supporting role in your own film when you could aim at an Oscar for the main character?

“If I had only one year left to live …” Reflecting on this can transform everything. If you know why you get up in the morning and what makes you tick, if you are aware of what makes sense to you and what inspires you – you have found yourself.

What kind of footprint do you want to leave behind? What kind of difference shall your life make in the world? Why are you here? Phrase it as a smart goal. Your life happens here and today, not tomorrow and elsewhere.

The quality of self steerage is equally beneficial to the company. A qualitative vision is ideal, sustainable and resilient. What inspires you and your team to get up and go? What convinces you get into gear along with the best people and with the best that can be developed together?

The clarity of the individual is increasingly on the verge of getting lost, not exclusively but especially in digital business. Often enough, indifference has a habit of presenting a façade. The manager’s ability to detect what is effective, and how, is therefore continuously (and extremely) in demand. Self-reflection helps but often it is not enough.

We all possess instruments for assessing our surroundings. In other words: those who trust their own senses have access to excellent tools. If something irritates you, get to the bottom of the issue! Do not look away, keep going.

We have our emotions, our emotions do not have us. Every sensory perception triggers an emotion. Scared of the dark forest? Brilliant. Go there, with a stick and a torch. Angry at a superior? Great. This energy can carry you through every meeting dedicated to the clarification of the issue.

Emotions are immediately accessible. While the racehorse “logical mind” is still being saddled up in order to enter the race, our system has already found its orientation. The same holds true for the knowledge of experts. If the architect sees a crooked wall,he doesn’t need to check the measurements. The expert “knows”. However, there is also tacit or practical knowledge.

We generate practical knowledge by reflecting and sorting what happens to us, transforming it into scripts. Driving a car or riding a bicycle, swimming and leading are typical kinds of pure tacit knowledge. You can read about them but you can’t learn them from books.

How do you lead? How exactly do you lead yourself and your teams to success? How do you activate your team’s best resources? You have experiences. Sort them, and use them to build your own personal system, ready to enable exactly one person to gain the very best results: you yourself.

Tacit knowledge guarantees uniqueness. Experience is based on your very individual life, your perceptions and your ability to process them. You have no need to fear competition if you rely firmly on your experience and your experiences. Then, you can cooperate with even the strongest of partners.

Emotion, expertise and experience are not only sensationally fast, they can also be retrieved at any time, be it through reasoning or through the intuition that develops in your brain without your active contribution. The tighter your network is woven, the more valid your inklings will become.

To be attentive to yourself is easier said than done, especially during times of change and transformation processes. A wealth of external steering instruments is on offer. They look attractive, but they are hardly ever useful for your inner development.

Inner strength is stability that remains flexible. It is about understanding the knowledge of one’s own strengths, weaknesses and experience as impulses to act. Ask questions, admit that there are things you do not know. Accept risk; refuse sedation.

Vaclav Havel once said: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Develop confidence and hope, even in the most dire situations. Embrace trust; it is the cement of social bonding.

Judgmental appraisals are not very helpful if you want to discover new solutions or perspectives. On the contrary, what you need is an attitude, not merely an opinion. A friendly tolerance for mistakes is helpful; every new mistake will let you grow and mature.

Those who are able to appreciate and direct themselves are able to ensure the same for others. Their lifestyle may become a role model. Presenting a façade, relying on marketing and sweet talk? Superfluous.

A relationship between human beings is determined by closeness and distance. Those who do not master this dance will resort to exaggerated over-valuation or under-valuation in order to maintain orientation. This leads to a polarity in the dynamic between perpetrator and victim, and often enough to hierarchy and the ruthlessness of power.

Competition is based on a hierarchical arrangement. Cooperation turns out to be much more effective in utilising all available resources. However, it requires mature leadership: the readiness to truly renounce dominance and to seriously strive for win-win situations.

Awareness of feelings supports an appreciative behaviour, with empathy and compassion for others. This emotional competence strengthens you and is effective. Others will be convinced and taken along for the ride. Presence and personality instead of power are the new authoritative concepts.

A substantial trait of every real personality is to be true to oneself, even in contrary winds. This is the only basis for sincere cooperation, the only way to achieve the reliability, certainty, and security, which is desired by many.

Crises have a great inherent transformatory power: for knowledge about yourself, for a new level of self-awareness, for release from illusions and increased clarity. Professional support can be perceived as an opportunity to develop.

Whether cancer or crisis: deal with it actively. It is necessary to develop a communication strategy which enables you to take into account the expectations of others and to transform your own expectations into a goal. In all this, remain responsible for your life!

Take risks and create transparency with regards to the available scope for manoeuvre. Risks present this scope, but also require that uncertainty is endured – in contrast to danger which requires an immediate reaction and sustains heroism. Risks offer business opportunities.

To see life as a dark valley that only work can guide us out of is a misleading perspective. Transform your image of development: Isn’t life rather a path which, with increasing age and a growing number of experiences, becomes broader and more comfortable?

If you know the background of the images and stories that determine how you perceive life, you are able to create more balance yourself. Ultimately, continue and develop your own balance. Do not allow polarisations to distract you from your path!

Polarities, such as winner and loser or right and wrong, belong to the old notion of economy. On the way to your steerage from within, unheard-of potentials in resonance with your environment will open up between the contradictions – all the better. Thus, you will play the leading role in your very own movie.

Consider spirituality to be an inner resource. Develop the authority to be able to distinguish things you can change from those you can not change. Stay unperturbed. You can act, and you do not have to exercise control over everything! The balance you achieve on your way will provide you with the necessary energy.

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