Achieving Personal Greatness: Discover the 10 Powerful Keys to Unlocking Your Potential

By Tim Lavender

For years, a maxim of the United States Army was "Be all that you can be." While that familiar slogan may sound simple, there is great depth to the meaning behind it. in Achieving Personal Greatness, Tim Lavender offers his definition of "personal greatness" through three basic laws, and then shares the seven guiding principles for achieveing it. His practical guide explores ten powerful keys for releasing you potential, including: Get Your Cart Before the Horse, Reach Inside the Invisible World, Embrace a Lifetime of Learning,, and Seek to Influence Rather than Control. Finally, Lavender shares te five commitments that are necessary for producing results.

For those desiring to explore their untapped potiential in all areas of life, Achieveing Personal Greatness is an ideal resource.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: May 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781418579630

Book preview

ACHIEVING

PERSONAL

GREATNESS

ACHIEVING

PERSONAL

GREATNESS

DISCOVER THE 10 POWERFUL KEYS TO

UNLOCKING YOUR POTENTIAL

TIM LAVENDER

s2

Copyright © 2002 by Tim Lavender

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

All Scripture quotations are taken from the NEW KING JAMES VERSION®. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lavender, Tim.

Achieving personal greatness : discover the 10 powerful keys to unlocking your potential / Tim Lavender.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-7852-6556-2

1. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Title.

BF637.S4 L395 2002

158.1—dc21

2002006423

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 BVG 06 05 04 03 02

DEDICATION

To the three great mentors who have shaped my life—Donny, Larry, and Michael. Thank you for using your positive influence to unlock my potential.

To my best friend and wife, Joy. Thank you for believing in me when I was all alone. Your unconditional love has energized my life like nothing else ever could.

To my dear children, Jacob and Rachel. You are my greatest gifts from the hand of God.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Unlock the Greatness Inside You

THE 3 BASIC LAWS OF PERSONAL GREATNESS

Law #1: Potential Plus Positive Influence Produces Personal Greatness

Law #2: Potential Is Greater Than Power

Law #3: You Can Learn to Be Great

THE 7 GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF UNLOCKING YOUR POTENTIAL

Guiding Principle #1: You are Born with God-Given Potential

Guiding Principle #2: You Must Accept the Challenge of Discovering Your Talents and Abilities

Guiding Principle #3: You Must Accept Responsibility for Developing Your Talents

Guiding Principle #4: You Should Pursue Potential with a Sense of Urgency

Guiding Principle #5: You Must Face Down the Fear of Failure

Guiding Principle #6: You Must Use Your Talents or Lose Them

Guiding Principle #7: Fulfilling Your Potential Is a Character Issue

THE 10 POWERFUL KEYS TO RELEASING AND DEVELOPING YOUR POTENTIAL

Key #1: Get Your Cart Before the Horse

Key #2: Blow Your Mind

Key #3: Walk Toward the Barking Dog

Key #4: Reach into the Invisible World

Key #5: Live Life to Make a Point, Not a Profit

Key #6: Embrace a Lifetime of Learning

Key #7: Build a House of Trust

Key #8: Seek to Influence Rather Than Control

Key #9: Harness the Power of Reciprocity

Key #10: Develop a Knockout Punch

PRODUCING RESULTS

A Commitment to Achievement

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

UNLOCK THE GREATNESS INSIDE YOU

ONE SATURDAY WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD, MY best friend invited me to play golf with him. At that time, I was an avid and successful baseball player and, generally speaking, an excellent athlete, but I had never picked up a golf club. My friend, on the other hand, had played golf with his dad every weekend for a couple of years.

I picked up the clubs with the same ten-finger grip I used in baseball and slugged away . . . and after eighteen holes, I had a better score than my friend. I had also fallen in love with the game.

I played golf as often as I was able and slowly but steadily lowered my score. Then I hit a plateau. I was determined to continue to improve, but nothing I tried seemed to help. I sought out a pro at a local club and signed up for a lesson.

The pro took one look at my swing and promptly advised me that the ten-finger grip I had used to hold a baseball bat didn’t work in golf, and that I would need to change my grip if I wanted to play better golf. He showed me the proper grip, and I swung away. Nothing about that grip felt comfortable. The ball didn’t go nearly as far or in the direction I desired. After half a bucket of balls with the new swing, I informed the pro that I couldn’t make the change.

I expected him to offer a Plan B approach to improving my game, but to my surprise, he said, OK, That’s all for today.

I was stunned. All for today? You mean the lesson is over? I asked.

Yes, he said.

But why? That’s all you’re going to teach me in one lesson?

The pro responded, If you don’t change your grip, you’re as good as you’ll ever be. Nothing else I tell you will matter if you don’t change your grip.

I wanted to improve in golf more than I wanted to cling to my old habits, so I made the change. As awkward as it was at first, as unsuccessful as I was at first, as clumsy as the new grip felt at first, I made the change. I practiced and practiced until I could hit the ball with the new grip as well as I had with my old baseball-style grip. And then I began to hit the ball even better.

Years later, I’m still hitting the ball with the proper grip, and I’m still in love with the game. I’ve won fifteen amateur tournaments, and I hope to win more.

If you truly want to unlock the potential for greatness that lies within you, you are going to have to make some changes in the way you think. Perhaps the first change needs to be in the way you think about personal greatness.

EMBRACE YOUR OWN GREATNESS

A friend of mine said to me, You know, I’m not sure about your idea of personal greatness. It sort of makes me feel uncomfortable to tell someone that I think I can be great.

Really? I said. You know, I knew your father, and in some ways, he was the father I never really had. How do you evaluate your dad? How do you rate him when it comes to being great?

Oh, Dad was a great man. No doubt about it! I learned so many things from him, he replied.

What about our mutual friend John? You and I have enjoyed his friendship for many years. What about him? I asked.

Oh, he has been a great friend to me, he said. I think he’s a great guy.

Well, if these people are great in your eyes, don’t you believe you can be great in the eyes of others?

I watched his face closely as I asked this question. It was as if a light went on.

Personal greatness is not about your believing that you can achieve superiority over others. It’s not about developing a proud attitude. It’s not about being better than other people.

Personal greatness is about your becoming foundationally great and great in the eyes of others so that one thing might happen—they might be influenced to be more than they would be without you in their lives.

We seem to use the term great all the time. We talk about great friends and the great times we share with them. We talk about the great teachers we have had over the years and how they influenced our lives. We talk about great pastors we have had, great courses we have taken, great books we have read, great movies we have seen, great songs we have heard, great things we have experienced, and great lessons we have learned.

The idea of greatness is common to us, and we use it to describe people and things that have had a positive influence on our lives. However, most of us don’t use the term great to describe ourselves.

In my nearly three decades of being in business and working with all types of people, I have learned that many, if not most, people believe deep down inside that they can be great. There is a still, small voice telling them that they can be someone special. It’s the inner greatness—the inner desire to be one’s very best—that is at the heart of personal greatness.

Personal greatness has nothing to do with being exceptionally intelligent, rich, famous, or politically successful. It’s about being a person who exerts positive influence on others. Personal greatness is a matter of unlocking your potential and using your potential in such a way that it overflows into other people’s lives to generate a positive result.

This book presents three basic laws of personal greatness, seven guiding principles that are absolutely necessary for you to embrace if you are to unlock your potential, and ten powerful keys that can help you release your potential and turn it into positive influence. Together, these laws, principles, and keys present the way to achieve your very own expression of personal greatness.

I invite you to the adventure.

I invite you to take a step toward the day when other people will call you great because of the wonderful things you have helped unlock in their lives.

THE 3 BASIC LAWS OF PERSONAL GREATNESS

LAW #1

POTENTIAL PLUS POSITIVE INFLUENCE PRODUCES PERSONAL GREATNESS

WHEN I WAS WORKING ON MY MASTER’S DEGREE IN business administration at Southern Methodist University, I had a leadership professor who made this claim in a lecture: Hitler was a great leader. Most of us in the class grimaced. He went on, however, to ask us to argue in favor of that statement. Some of the arguments that emerged were these:

• Great leaders have lots of followers. Hitler certainly had lots of followers.

• Great leaders rise to positions of great power. Hitler certainly did.

• Great leaders control the lives of many people. Hitler certainly controlled the lives of many people—those loyal to him as well as his archenemies.

• Great leaders fill a void in history. They are born into leadership or made leaders by historical circumstances. An argument could be made that Hitler came to leadership in a narrow window of Germany’s history that allowed him to be a leader.

Hitler fills traditional claims about leadership on all accounts. But was he truly a great leader? Nobody in the class was willing to give him that acclaim.

Such arguments tend to emerge and support a theory that leadership is positional. Positional leadership theories are always related to issues of power and control, and they are always related to an organization of some type—whether the organization is an entire nation, culture, religion, or corporation.

I don’t believe that leadership is merely positional, but even more so, I don’t believe that personal greatness is at all positional. In other words, a person is not great because he is in a position of having the most, doing the most, being the top in his field, or head of the company. The foremost reason my fellow students did not want to describe Hitler as a great leader was rooted in their belief that Hitler was not a great person. And the reasons he was not considered a great person had nothing to do with position, power, number of followers, or place in history.

Is there another aspect to greatness?

I strongly believe there is.

CONFRONTING THE FOUR GREAT MYTHS OF PERSONAL GREATNESS

Through the years, I have routinely encountered four claims—which I call myths—about personal greatness:

1. Great people are born, not made.

2. Great people are made by circumstances.

3. Great people have magnetic personalities.

4. Great leaders exert power and control.

At the very outset of this book, let me give you my response to these myths.

Myth #1: Great People Are Born, Not Made

Becoming a great person is a learning and growing process, not a one-time event and not an achievable status. Some people begin to exercise their potential and manifest influence early on. We tend to think of these people as being born leaders or born with greatness. In truth, they were not born into greatness. Rather, they were taught or influenced early in life as to how a person should lead a successful life, and they began early their journey toward personal greatness. The good news, however, is that those who do not begin this process early in life can and often do begin this process later in life.

I strongly believe personal greatness is forged. Greatness is learned, developed, and practiced. Achieving personal greatness is a process available to every person.

Those who believe great people are born also tend to believe that only a select few are designated by fate to become leaders; the rest of us are followers. Leadership is often presented as a model in which one person is out front or on top of the organizational pyramid; all others are on the lower levels of the pyramid as followers. This view of leadership is positional. It is exclusive to a few. It is a matter of power, position, and control.

In contrast, I contend that every person is born with both the capacity and the challenge to lead. Every person is born with talents, an ability to learn, a personality, and an opportunity to grow. If leaders are born, then the logical conclusion must be that those born to lead will eventually rise to leadership. Not everybody, however, turns innate talents, capacities, abilities, and opportunities into strong character. And not everybody applies skills and abilities into useful and positive service to others.

All can achieve personal greatness. Not all choose to become personally great.

All can become leaders. Not all choose to become leaders.

Myth #2: Great People Are Made by Circumstances

I do not believe great people or great leaders are made by the times in which they live or the circumstances in which they find themselves. Rather, they are made to the extent that they choose to make the most of what they have been given, choose to bless others to the greatest ability they have to give, and choose to respond to circumstances with the most energetic exercise of their potential and the most compassionate and positive influence they can exert.

There are those who contend that only certain types of people can rise to genuine leadership. For them, leaders are made by the circumstances of their abilities. In other words, people with great ability become leaders. One prominent leadership expert once said, You can take a leader and train him to manage, but you can never take a manager and train him to lead. Again, I strongly disagree. That may be a man’s theory, but it isn’t the truth. Every person can learn how to lead.

I visualize the process of achieving personal greatness in this way. It starts with opening a large and powerful door, beyond which lies a marvelous pathway. The journey along this pathway lasts a lifetime. There are steps and stages to negotiate along the way, there are decisions to make at various forks in the road, and there is the effort of walking and the perseverance to continue walking when obstacles appear in the path. But the journey is there for all who will open the door and walk the path.

Myth #3: Great People Have Magnetic Personalities

People with great personalities are fun to be around. They can be energizing and motivating. It’s a good thing to have a great personality! The danger, however, for those with magnetic personalities is that they tend to rely on feedback from those around them, and they tend to play to the audience that gives them the most enthusiastic applause. The end result is that they are led by the very masses they are attempting to lead.

A person may be born with a magnetic personality and many gifts. Yet there is no automatic guarantee that such a person will be a great person or a leader. Conversely a person may have a fairly dull personality and only a single gift, but such a person can still achieve personal greatness—and such a person can still become a leader.

Myth #4: Great Leaders Exert Power and Control

The amazing thing about this myth is that it is usually voiced by those who admit—albeit under pressure sometimes—that they are victims of those who exert or are attempting to exert power and control over their lives. People who do not feel themselves bound or limited by a powerful, controlling authority figure rarely hold to this myth.

Personal greatness is not about the number of people who follow you or who are beneath you on an organizational chart. Personal greatness is about knowing who you are, living out your key purpose in life, and influencing as many people as you can for good through willing service and generous giving of yourself.

A NEW APPROACH TO PERSONAL GREATNESS

Personal greatness is about potential and influence. It is not about how powerful a position you may achieve or about how many people you may supervise or have in your camp. Real greatness is about how much of your personal potential you actually achieve and how positive an influence you have upon people in your life.

I advocate this model:

Potential + Positive Influence = Personal Greatness

Most people will never be the leader of a large company or fill a state or national political office. Most people will never play on a world championship team or gain worldwide recognition. Most people will not play on the world stage in a leadership capacity.

The average person is not going to exert great power or control over a large group of people. Every person, however, can be a great leader of himself and those within his immediate circle of family, friends, and colleagues.

Every person has personal potential and the privilege of influencing others. Every person will encounter literally thousands of people over a lifetime and will have the opportunity to impact their lives in some way. Every person will have the opportunity to inspire or motivate others to pursue their personal potential and passions.

POTENTIAL I S DYNAMIC AND EVER-GROWING

Potential is not a static concept. Potential is the composite set of talents and skills that a person has at any given time. Each person is born with a measure of potential (some small, some great)—it is his or her starting point. Very often, that potential is first recognized by objective observers, such as parents, grandparents, teachers, pastors, and others in the young child’s life. To a certain extent, a child first learns of his potential by hearing others tell him that he has, or does not have, potential. The child also has an understanding that he is capable of doing some things—in fact, from a child’s perspective, he usually believes he is capable of doing all things, even flying like