Speaker #0Hi everyone, Malou speaking. I'm the author of Life's Notebook. Welcome to the Elevation Grit. I speak about career, science and well-being. Okay, enough. Let's talk. Today we're talking about personal excellence. What is personal excellence to start with and why is it important? Personal excellence or the quest for excellence is an inner drive, an unwavering commitment to realize your full potential, irrespective in which area. There are some people who want to be best in their personal life, others prefer professional life or climate change or God knows what. So everyone has his own definition of where he wants to realize his full potential. What is excellence? It's really a lifelong process. It's an ongoing journey of self-discovery and self-improvement. Excellence is not a destination which you reach right now. It's a lifelong process. You are working on it to become better, to become the best version of yourself, which doesn't mean that you need to be perfect. That's impossible, first of all, to become perfect. And you don't need to be perfect in everything. You need to be perfect in the areas which are meaningful to you. where you decide that's where I want to be perfect or the best version of myself. Because you are the comparison, not the other people. You compare yourself to yourself and you want to be a better version of yourself. That's the objective here. And this excellence is accessible to anyone who has the will and the determination, the persistence in their pursuit to become the best version of themselves. It's a prerequisite really for happy, successful people who live a fulfilling life. Because you see, people who achieve personal excellence, they live productive lives, they have healthy relationships, they have a sense of inner satisfaction. This all is very important to be happy with yourself. So now you will ask me, what do you need to be actually excellent? Or what are the steps to follow to become excellent? First of all, you need to know yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses. And you can only build on your strengths. Weaknesses are important and you should acknowledge them. But really... Take care of your strengths and that's really what interests you in life and that's what you should be focusing on. That brings us to the fact that the search for excellence is focus, focus, focus. So don't get distracted by things which are not in your best interest, which are not according to your goals you want to realize in your life. Don't get distracted. And also you have to put up with some pain. There is no glory without pain because it's not easy to become better. So you have to establish a path to excellence, and that is by setting some realistic but ambitious goal. You need the sky as a limit, but you still need to be realistic to some extent because otherwise you will be kind of frustrated at the end if you cannot reach it. Some ambitious measures also need to be measurable, obviously, so that you can achieve them and see if you have achieved your goals. But it's important to name them. So if you name your goals, they become real and you take ownership of them. So you are in charge and you need to make sure that you get there. And as I mentioned before, it's really critical, and it's for me to say this because I'm myself a perfectionist. I know something about that. But it's really not about achieving perfection. It's really a matter of becoming better. Then of course you need to believe in yourself but to believe in yourself is really believing in your ability that you will do the effort and also in your ability to learn because to become better you need to learn new things step by step and then also very important practice some self-compassion Self-compassion is a crucial companion on the path to excellence. Why? Because if you are always angry with yourself that you have not done this and self-critical and so on and so forth, it's very difficult to become better. So practice some self-compassion. Also be selective with whom you associate. Be selective about whom you associate with because we tend to raise our standards to reciprocal admiration. So if I have admiration for somebody and really think, wow, that's a guy I would like to be like him rather than a guy who is an underachiever. That is also important, the association with other people. Last but not least, but also an important point, ignore the bullies, because you always will have people who will be criticizing you for this and that, and you don't care what people think. You really have to go your own path, do what you want, because if you are happy, you can make other people happy. That's the basis line.
