Resilience, kind candidness, and collaboration: Three principles for personal growth

Striving for personal growth is an ongoing and never-ending activity and I encourage everyone to spend dedicated time on it. When talking about personal growth I typically share my three guiding principles, as they have helped me along the way:

Combine candidness with compassion & kindness. We easily spend 25% of our time at work. It can be stressful. Customers are not always angels. We make an effort to create a stimulating work environment in which everyone feels valued and respected. We give each other candid feedback, but always with compassion & kindness

Rooted in: Dutch culture combined with Vipassana, one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation. Vipassana means “to see things as they really are”

Grow by enabling and helping others. Teamwork & collaboration. Build on each others skills and experience, elevate the people around you and elevate yourself

Rooted in: Deeply embedded in personal experience, but there also is a lot of literature to back this up

Practice resilience and self-control. From Cicero’s writing: But it takes a brave and resolute spirit not to be disconcerted in times of difficulty or ruffled and thrown off one’s feet, as the saying is, but to keep one’s presence of mind and one’s self-possession and not to swerve from the path of reason.

Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed experiences at first impeded, then deepened, and finally decisively molded their leadership.

Rooted in: Stoic teachings by Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and others. Beautifully narrated by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book Leadership in Turbulent Times