The Female Leader. Sonja Becker

experience will either enrich or diminish you. The rest is explanation and vindication. If you really learn something from it your vitality will increase. Your mind will sometimes be confused. That means that you are entering new mental territory. Your mission can be realized when you step out from under the shadow of melancholia and exchange it for the great game of life. Then get to it.

      Often when your plans threaten to break down or when your life takes a turn to the negative side, you will be able to recognize whether you have measured up to these challenges and can pull yourself out of this mire with the help of your own personality by looking in the mirror. Once your mission is clear, nothing can drag you down.

      YOUR GOALS

      “The North Sea will sooner look for water than a woman be lost for words.“

      (Jutland saying)

       Values give a vision a basis. And missions give values a system of coordinates. Goals are the definition of your intentions in concrete, measurable results. The verb “to define” comes from the Latin “finis” (“end” or “goal”). A de-finition is a predestination of an ultimate plan.

      As your mission develops, your business game will become immensely exciting and attractive for others as well as for yourself. Your company is an exclusive party, and “parties are meant to last”, as Prince already pointed out in his song “1999”. Even this once utopian year is some time ago, and we must honestly and sincerely realize that there is nothing more dreadful than a never ending party. Not only because we are getting older, not on account of the effort connected with it, but because we get lost in it and don’t get any further. It has no prospect and “lasts” without changing itself or anything else. Fortunately every party eventually reaches a certain stage of exhaustion. The same goes for your business party, as it lacks something crucial: energy reserves.

      If your mission progressively comes true your business game will take on bigger and bigger dimensions along with it. It depends above all on the zeal with which you pursue it. Your enthusiasm is the magnet of your business. Your new-found charisma and your interest will connect the interest of other people to your activities. If you stand behind what you do your efforts will automatically be linked to the right people.

      You set goals as soon as you resolve to do your own thing. But sometimes you are not at all conscious of them. The problem is the party. It goes on, but it has no goal, no end, and no definition. If no idea dominates what should come of your intentions, there is gaping emptiness. Is your business also woven like that?

      Business and relationships

      W

      e can now quite simply ask, what is your goal? This is one of the elementary questions in coaching, and of course it can be answered in different ways. But first let’s bear in mind what it means to have no goal.

      The average German “relationship”, an invention of the problem orientated and freedom seeking eighties when marriage was out of favor, is generally distinguished by its lack of commitment and aimlessness. Language and phrases reveal this wonderfully: “Since I’ve been in a new relationship, we solve mutual problems that I never had before.” Standard expressions are, “Give me time”, or, “We have to talk”. Talk? Try loving!

       A prescribed terminology that can nip any kind of passion in the bud. One imagines a young, yearning love other than unhappy evenings drowned in red wine that you don’t want to end in which misunderstandings are cleared up, things that were said are analyzed and commented on, where once again something is said that wasn’t meant like that, what has to be explained once more, and so on. To quote Prince again: “revolving every word that is being spoken”.

      Or the actor Vincent Gallo, who once defined a relationship in three phases: “hysteria, self-abandonment, exhaustion.”

      Or let’s take the satirist Wiglaf Droste, whose characterization of a relationship is reflected in the functional word “Versöhnungsvögeln”or “VV” (“the forgive-me-fuck”), which often follows a bitter argument. We don’t really want to go through all the psycho-games and bizarre ,patterns of behavior in a difficult relationship again. A passionate and sincere “pardon, honey” looks somewhat different anyway. How quickly can it be discussed to death. Such a constellation, sinking in mediocrity and artificiality, has come to such a desperate state because it has no purpose, no aim.

      Immanuel Kant defined the human being as “its own purpose”, which underlies what distinguishes each individual, who has hidden within himself his own unique, large, distinctive goal, the pursuit of which lasts his lifetime.

      Nobody else has this one goal, for everyone has a different one. According to Kant, to discover it and cultivate it defines individual life. When a relationship has a goal - and many people resist this idea, because it supposedly doesn’t involve emotions any more – or when both partners complement each other in their aims, then you have a “power couple”, an unbeatable team, that nourishes itself on the greatest source of human energy that there is: love, which is different from a mediocre “relationship” that is always dependent on moods.

      Whatever you undertake, i.e. really go for, you do it because you want to reach a goal. Sometimes it isn’t so completely clear. The party mood you are in betrays plenty of emotionality. Christopher Columbus didn’t just set to sea to have a look around a bit. He wanted to find the sea route to India. This idea gave him strength.