To Achieve Your Vision, Surround Yourself with Personal Champions
Category: Physician Career Resilience, Physicians Aligned with Core Values, Physicians Leading Transformation
by Francine R. Gaillour, MD, MBA, FACPE
Do you have a vision of personal success? Are you working on a business, personal or leadership goal? Do you have a fuzzy picture of what you want your life to look like?
If you answered “yes,” to any of these questions, then I encourage you to help make that personal vision a reality by visually and verbally supporting your intention: Surround yourself every day with words of encouragement and inspiration that reflect how you feel in your “most optimistic” moments. Get some high-powered “personal champions.”
While the idea of posting “affirmation cards” or “success posters” might sound corny, or may feel too much like corporate-speak, I ask you to take this leap of faith and surround your private environment—such as your office or bulletin board—with words of wisdom and encouragement from modern and ancient sages.
Saying, seeing or hearing the inspiring words of great leaders, teachers, healers, philosophers have their own kind of special “energy” that helps pull you along your personal path.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes that I routinely post around a conference room when I conduct leadership workshops. I recommend that you chose 3 to 5—from among these or from your own collection— and make them a visual “support” in your day to day life.
You are the company that you keep, Right?
So why not choose great personal champions to keep your energy high and focused on what you really want in life!
Never lose a holy curiosity |
—Albert Einstein |
Sit, walk or run. Just don’t wobble. |
—Zen saying |
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear. |
Mark Twain |
It is not our abilities that show who we truly are; it is our choices. |
—Professor Dumbeldore |
The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are. |
Marcus Aurelius |
You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make |
Jane Goodall |
Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. |
Albert Einstein |
You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are. |
Anna Quindlen |
He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it. |
Confucius |
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. |
Martin Luther King Jr. |
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. |
Mahatma Gandhi |
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do. |
Eleanor Roosevelt |
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. |
Maya Angelou |
Who are your “personal champions?” I invite you to send me your favorite quotes to share with our Daring Doctors readers. One of your colleagues just might be waiting for the right words of inspiration to move them forward. Perhaps YOUR personal champion has those words.