Follow Your Inner Compass to Personal Excellence

by Mark S. Fulton

My wife and I love Sedona, Arizona. Red rock country. Our first time there we decided to hike the trail around Bell Rock. It’s about an hourhike through quiet, beautiful wilderness. About an hour and a half into the hike we realized we had missed a trail marker and wandered off into the wilds of Sedona.

Clearly, this was a situation that called for a man’s superior sense of direction. After studying the map and calculating our average hiking speed, I determined the direction in which we should go.

A half hour later, with no sign of the trail in sight, my wife said, “Let’s go that way,” pointing in a direction I was sure would take us deeper into Sedona’s back country. We were back in our car in 10 minutes.

New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up someplace else.” If you’re out hiking, winding up someplace else can lead to hours of wandering in the wilderness. If you’re a corporate executive or business owner, winding up someplace else can mean disaster for your career or your company.

How can you avoid winding up someplace else? By developing and following what I call your “inner compass,” your most valuable tool for plotting a course to personal and professional excellence. Your inner compass can help you choose a direction for your company, find your way around a roadblock and avoid the road to ruin.

In order to use your inner compass effectively, you must first understand how it works. Here are six key components of your inner compass:

• Intellect - Your ability to learn, reason and create is determined by genetics to some degree. However, science has proven that you only use a small portion of your brain’s capacity. The good news is that you can goose your gray matter with exercises that boost your vocabulary, broaden your sensory perception, deepen your concentration and sharpen
your logic. Improving your intellect will make it easier to abandon conventional thinking (how others say you should to do something) and solve problems more effectively.

• Common Sense - Think of your common sense as a special type of intelligence. It is your natural wisdom––your ability to make perceptive judgments. Common sense enables you to consider the probable results of your behavior, resist the impulse to make rash decisions and ponder the moral and social repercussions of an action. Common sense engages your critical thinking skills and dismisses political correctness. The foremost example of common sense that I can think of is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

• Intuition - Rational thought is fine, but there’s something mystical and exotic about intuition. Your power to sense things that aren’t linked to reason can take you down some strange paths. However, great rewards can come from tuning in to what writer Penney Peirce calls “the mind in the heart that lies just below the surface of our logic.” Peirce says activating your intuition requires you to “tone down your domineering, talk-addicted mind, which arrogantly thinks it knows how the world works without ever observing what’s happening in the freshly occurring present moment.”

• Knowledge - Your understanding based on information grows with each new piece of data you add to your memory bank. Reading is the best way to build your database. I recommend taking a disciplined approach that includes newspapers, magazines and books that cover a broad spectrum of topics. Television is another potential source of knowledge, but in my opinion you have to be willing to wade through too many Jerry Springer freak shows, exercise equipment infomercials and cooking demonstrations to find anything of value.

• Experience - Your understanding based on the events of your life plays a huge role in how you evaluate and respond to daily circumstances. The saying that experience is the greatest teacher is true. From childhood through adulthood we catalog the events of our lives and consider them when we evaluate current relationships and initiatives. My best advice is to make every experience, good or bad, a learning opportunity. Ask yourself what you can discover that will guide you in the future.

• Spirit - What is the force that animates you? Depending on your outlook on life, you may call it your spirit, soul or psyche. Think of it as your inner light. James Fenimore Cooper called it “a spark of the never-dying flame that separates man from all the other beings of the earth.” Even if you don’t believe in the spiritual dimension of life, you still probably adhere to a philosophy or code of ethics that informs your decision making. Your spirit is the home of your values.

These six components all working together form the guidance system for your life. Think about what you can do to develop each part. A finely tuned inner compass is your most valuable tool for keeping you on the path to personal and professional excellence––and not someplace else.

NOTE: If you have suggestions for developing your inner compass, please e-mail them to mark@coachcare.com. I’d be pleased to share them in future columns.

Copyright 2002 © Mark S. Fulton