Ask people what is success and they come up with all kind of things. Frequently, I hear people say that success is to have a great and rewarding career, a house, a car, beautiful and smart children, a wife, education and so on.
Is this really success? What will you think when you are 65 or 75 and summarise your life. Oh - my life was successful, because I drove 5 different car models, one better than the other, because my career was very rewarding, I have a beautiful wife, and so on?
What is success? It is not easily defined if you define it apart from possessions that you own. Try it!
"For the Malay female, success apparently is to have children. "In the nationwide study among 1,000 women aged 15 to 67 years, 96% said having children was the biggest success indicator."
It also seems that the females are in a conflict. "Malay women in the country faced a conflict between career and family. 'They want to be assertive and successful but, at the same time, there are cultural constraints. They feel if they’re doing too much or being too aggressive, their feminine side will be lost."
How do you feel about this? Reading those findings, there are always questions on mind:
- First, where is the conflict? Is it possible to do both?
- What is the connection between assertive and succussful? Can you be assertive without being successful? Successful and not assertive?
- How do you define cultural constraints? Are there any differences between culture in KL, Penang, Pahang or East Malaysia, for example? Between the races?
- How do you define "femine side" and why should it be lost when you go for a career? Not every women needs to develop into a Marget Thatcher, just because she starts to work - there are plenty of women around me at my workplace and they seem pretty okay.
Whatever the findings it is a clear sign that the Malaysian society is undergoing change. Change is often about being "torn apart" between more "traditional values" and "modern aspirations". As such, I welcome the discussions that currently take place in Malaysia. Only that it is necessary to take care in forming associations between different values, and behaviour that don't necessarily go with each other.
But try it as an exercise on your own. Who are you? Think, what success means to you and how do you define your life, your identity and your legacy.
(NLP in Asia)
nlp
neuro linguistic programming
mind
business coaching
personal coaching
malaysia
hypnotherapy
hypnosis
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Accepted definitions of success vary from culture to culture. NLP comes from the USA; do you think it might have American definitions of success embeded in it?
Great comment, Ian. It always is a challenge to "impose" different systems on other cultures or even people, since definitions vary. I have posted a response to your comment here http://www.alwayswow.com/archive/2006/04/nlp_making_sens_1.html
Executive Coaching is about helping individuals understand the basic rules of success by learning to be assertive without being obnoxious and ambitious without being aggressive.
Executive coaching Toronto
Post a Comment