“Life is better than the alternative”
Claus Møller is one of the leading management consultants in the world and has been credited with inventing some of the most important management concepts over the last 50 years – as well as being an inspirational speaker who has consistently outscored the likes of Tom Peters and Steven Covey at management events where all of the “gurus” have spoken.
Inka Ruishalme, our Director of Product, is currently attending Claus’s 6-day “Practical Leadership” seminar held in a beautiful part of Provence in Southern France, after Malene Nielsen, our Managing Director, attended last year. Below you will find her thoughts on the seminar as it unfolds:
Day one on a weeklong practical leadership training course: To set the scene and a foundation to all the more detailed management skills and frameworks, we talked about general attitudes to life and work. The way we view the world has a huge impact on what we get out of life and how happy or successful we become.
Claus Møller, our seminar leader, talked about how much our personal attitudes affect our experience of life. We cannot be successful as leaders or managers if we are not first ‘successful’ as individuals. Success being the wrong word here perhaps, but the sentiment is that we must first come to terms with who we are as individuals as otherwise we will not make very good employees or managers let alone being happy in life.
To put things into perspective, Claus shared some stories from his own life with us including an experience from a time when he was diagnosed with a life threatening illness. I think his comment here summed up the general disposition on life very well, he said: “I chose life because it was better than the alternative”. Looking at challenges both in private as well as in professional life through this lens helps put them into perspective.
When you realise that life is not so bad, it is then easier to start enjoying all the good things and to work on the negatives. Personal choice is a big factor in happiness and fulfilment. If the starting point is that you choose life over ‘the alternative’, then you can start to see that none of the things that may seem so impossible to overcome are actually indefinitely imposed upon you but you have a choice. If you don’t like something in your life or there are things that make you unhappy, why not change them then? That’s better than going on with what Claus described as ‘self-inflicted suffering’. And then you can start working on your management skills!
To find out more about Claus Møller, please see his web site or to find out specifically about the “Practical Leadership” seminar you can see this page. The dates for next year’s seminars will be added later on this week.
We’ve even managed to get some special prices for our clients and newsletter subscribers who would like to attend the “Practical Leadership” seminar themselves. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to find out more.