As we indicated in the course introduction, being resilient or having grit comes from being passionate and persevering. In this lesson, we look at defining our passion. What is it that we want to achieve? Do you have a personal philosophy a documented definition of your personal philosophy gives you guidelines and boundaries. When you have a personal philosophy, it becomes like your own personal decision making framework that guides you throughout your career. This will guide you in making decisions about where you want to work, and who you want to work with.

It will also guide you in deciding when certain leadership styles and behaviors are not okay for you, and when you need to make a change. I developed my own personal leadership philosophy years ago, when I was first appointed a financial executive. Since then, it has never changed. I have four roles that I try to personally live by, and that I try to embody with the teams I lead number one work should be fun. Always. Number two, we should always learn.

Number three, we should strive for flawless execution, but understand that mistakes will happen. And number four, we must always stand up for what we believe in. Maybe you don't have a personal philosophy, but each of us values something. Our personal values define who we are. Think of a personal value as something you practice regularly based on a fundamental belief. We had the opportunity to listen to drew Dudley talk about the importance of documenting and defining our personal values.

These personal values drive us and can help us develop our resilience when we are clear what they are. In a moment, I'll have you pause the video and go to the workbook to work through exercise number nine, to identify your personal values. The exercise has three steps. Identify three values that you personally hold near and dear to you. If so, One were to follow you around for 30 days and observe your actions. What would they say defines you.

Those are likely your values. For example, let's say that you choose the value of being courageous and define each value specifically, beginning with the phrase a commitment to. This is going to help you really pinpoint what you feel is most important to you. People often identify integrity as a personal value, but rarely do two people come up with the same definition. defining our personal values creates a set of decision criteria to help you every day. The reality is we rarely make short term decisions with these personal values in mind.

Yet we really should to develop our resilience and take proactive measures each day. We need to clear understanding of what those are and to consider the long term ramifications of short term decisions. In the example of being courageous, our definition might read a commitment to taking action Where there is a possibility of loss. And finally, number three, final step is to make each of the three personal values a conscious part of your daily living, it's easier for you to stand up for a value than to actually live it. So what you will do in a moment is take the value you have to find and formulate it into a question for you to answer each day, for example, integrity. What have I done today to enhance my integrity?

The brain hates unanswered questions. So by posing your value in the form of a question each day, it forces you to answer by yourself by asking and answering your personal value questions. This strengthens your resilience and helps you achieve your long term goals. In our example of courageous, we might ask ourselves the question, what did we risk today? And that would remind us to be brave and put ourselves out there more and more each day. If you're taking this course, you may be or aspire to be an executive.

Whether that is a partner at your firm, Chief Financial Officer, or even Chief Executive Officer, that's a high level goal. But it's also a daunting mouthful to swallow all at once, for the same reason that many of our new year's resolutions fall by the wayside by the third week of January. So does a lofty career goal of becoming an executive, the distance between where you are today, and your goal for tomorrow is just too great. Resilience comes from holding a goal for a very long period of time, and by continually focusing toward its achievement. However, if that's all we've got as a goal to become an executive, then we are setting ourselves up for a potential disappointment. And at best a random walk towards that goal.

Duckworth calls this positive fantasizing because there is no plan on how we realistically achieve the big goal we have set for ourselves. Instead, we need to imagine the short term and intermediate goals lead us in the direction of our overall goal. These intermediate steps help us ultimately achieve our big goal and give us a roadmap on how to get there. They force us to consider the obstacles in our path between where we are today and where we ultimately want to be. We don't want to break this down into an overwhelming list of endless to dues. But we do want to dissect this big goal a few different times to get our arms around how we go about achieving it.

If you are a well rounded financial professional today, the six traits of executive presence give you a bit of a roadmap on how to build that aspect of your executive profile. The problem many of you may have arises when you begin this process of self actualization of your longer term goals. As you think of it more and more, your list of career goals grows longer by the minute you need to obtain this designation. You need more operational experience. You need international experience. You need to develop your strategic capability.

And the list of career goals goes on and on. And at the same time, you probably have a list of personal goals. I want to get married, I want to buy the house, I want to have some kids. And sometimes the career and the personal are really conflicting. You can't do everything at the same time. This was an idea borrowed from Warren Buffett, go to your workbook exercise number 10.

Here's what I want you to do. Step one, write down a list of 25 career goals. Pause the video for a few minutes and go do that now. Okay, were you able to come up with 25? For some of you, it was easy. For others, perhaps it took some thought time.

Step two, do some soul searching and circle the five highest priority goals, just five. Pause the video for a moment and do that now. Okay, now for the really interesting part. In Step three, I want to look at the Other 20 goals you didn't circle. Here's the secret to achieving your big career goal. Avoid these 20 goals at all costs.

Because these are the things that distract you eat away at your time and cause you to lose focus on your ultimate goal. This is something Blair and I are practicing with more and more discipline every day. Duckworth agrees, any successful person has to to decide what to do in part by deciding what not to do. So with a much clearer vision of what our goals are, and what we're focused on living each and every day, the seeds of resilience have been planted. In our next lesson, you will learn more about the elements that give us resilience so that we can consciously seek these out in our lives and careers.