embracing excellence to live your best life

 

[Note: This is Positively Present's very first guest post. I'm honored to have Celestine Chua, author of the very popular The Personal Excellence Blog, as my first guest blogger. Thank you, Celes, for taking the time to write this fabulous post!]

When Dani asked me to guest post at Positively Present, I was excited. I've been reading Positively Present since a few months back and have been fascinated by the consistent quality of her writing. So I began looking through the archives at Positively Present as I thought about what to write. As all of you readers already know by heart, Positively Present is all about optimism, happiness, and living life to the fullest now. I wondered what I could write to add value to the mix, especially since Dani is already doing such an excellent job writing. Then I suddenly thought of a perfect topic, one which resonates with my core value as a person and the theme of happiness. I have several core values, but if anyone is to ask me to just name one, I'd say it's excellence. Excellence is the centerpiece of me. This extends itself in everything I do -- my blog centers on theme of personal excellence. I coach people to become better as they achieve their goals and dreams. I'm starting a school of personal excellence later this year for people passionate about achieving personal excellence.

Why am I so passionate about excellence? Because I see excellence as the path towards living your best life. To strive for anything less is to deny ourselves of living the life we are meant to live. Deep in my heart, I truly believe every single one of us is born to achieve greatness. We have unlimited potential which is waiting to be unleashed. As we pursue excellence, we grow and become better. We become wiser, more knowledgeable, and more conscious. We connect more and more with our higher selves -- our true selves. As long as we keep being the best we can be, we will be living our best possible life at every moment.

However, in my journey towards excellence, it has not been uncommon to see people adverse toward the whole notion. Some see excellence to be the path towards unhappiness, because it's just "stressful" and "taking things too hard." Some become intimidated by the thought of excellence, saying they'd rather lead a simple and worry-free life. On the whole, they see excellence to be a polarizing quality that denies them of happiness. These aversions come really from a misunderstanding of what excellence entails. What does excellence really mean?

• Excellence means recognizing the unlimited potential in you. This means knowing that you are capable of anything in the world. This means going full out on your goals and dreams, simply because you can.
• Excellence means embracing adversity as a part of growth and living. The word "adversity" has been too overrated. People have come to associate adversity with negativity and they get paralyzed in the face of it. If you recognize you have unlimited potential in you (see #1), you'll understand that adversity is nothing but just something that exists to let you grow and become better. Adversity is merely a challenge for you to overcome. It's part and parcel in life. It definitely isn't synonymous with negativity. The only reason why it's negative to people is because they chose to associate it as such.
• Excellence means loving yourself and taking good care of yourself. Some look at cases of people burning out and nearly killing themselves in pursuit of excellence and form a negative mental image of "excellence." The thing is, the people who abuse themselves aren't being true to what excellence really is. They don't recognize that to be able to truly pursue excellence one must first properly take care of oneself to successfully achieve excellence. We are the ones who will be going through the whole journey of life, so if we're not even in the right shape, how can we then achieve excellence?
• Excellence means to live your best life. As I mentioned above, as you pursue excellence, you literally become better and wiser. Living life as a better and wiser you translates into a better life compared to if you were living without growing.

As you can see, excellence isn't mutually exclusive with happiness. It's really synonymous. To be excellent is to live a life of fulfillment and of happiness. As long as you embrace and pursue excellence, you are living your best life. Here are some of my personal adages in pursuing personal excellence:

• Go for BHAGs: Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals. Don't settle for small, moderate, or safe goals. Go for your wildest imaginations -- the kind of dreams you can only dream about. These are the goals that will truly make you come alive. Just to share one of my BHAGs -- my long-term vision for my personal excellence school is to achieve an international scale and magnitude like that of Xavier's school (anyone watches X-Men here?). A good counterpart will be Hogwart's School from Harry Potter :D
• Surround yourself with the best. The people around you play a significant role in shaping who you become. I've written an article on my blog before on how you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Consciously select who you want to be around. Limit the time spent around energy vampires (also known as negative people).
• Learn from the best. There's no way to jumpstart your learning curve than to learn directly from the best in the field. Seek them out fervently and be like a sponge -- absorbing all the knowledge they have to offer.
• Never stop improving. The journey of excellence never ends -- it's a constant path of learning, growing, and being better. Always keep your eyes peeled for how you can be better. Keep looking inward to uncover blind spots and work on them. This has become something ingrained in me. I'm a very introspective person by default and being a coach reinforces the importance of introspecting and self-improving even more, since there are more lives than just mine in question.

Do try them out for yourself -- I'd love to know how they work out for you :). I'll end off this article with one of my favorite quotes by Teddy Roosevelt: "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."


Celestine Chua writes at her popular The Personal Excellence Blog for people who are passionate about achieving excellence. She has been featured frequently in press and is a highly sought-after excellence coach, helping others achieve their goals and dreams. Some of her top articles among readers are: 50 Ways to Boost Your Productivity, 101 Most Inspiring Quotes of All Time, and Cultivate Good Habits in 21 Days.

Comments

[Hilary]

Hi Dani and Celes - what a brilliant first guest post .. Celes - you embody what you are promoting. I loved the way you've set the post out and let us know very simply that striving for excellence, amongst other things, is not killing ourselves in the process. Sometimes our expectations of what we believe others expect of us are just too much - I know I did that a lot for many years. Now I have to maintain my health and therefore I do what I can do within the other things that are going on in my life.

Thanks - that's really well put! and just what I needed to hear.
Hilary Melton-Butcher
Positive Letters Inspirational Stories

[J.D. Meier]

Beautiful tips and I'm a fan of surround yourself with the best. A friend told me you're the average of the 10 people you spend time with.

[Stephen Mills]

Celestine and Dani, that Teddy Roosevelt quote is one of my favorites too! :-)

I think the problem many people have with excellence is confusing it with perfectionism. Perfectionism is a problem in my mind, while I agree with you that excellence is a virtue of the highest value.

[Hilda]

Hi Celestine and Dani,

I love this post. I'm completely on board with your philosphies, particularly embracing the learning from adversity (if not the adversity itself;-), taking excellent care of ourselves in order to be able to give the best of ourselves, and of course living our best lives. We're not here to live a mediocre one...

[Srinivas Rao]

This is an excellent guest post (no pun intended). I think you nailed the pursuit of excellence. I love the idea of big audacious goals. We get so caught in being realistic that we don't dream the way we used to when we were kids. Surrounding yourself with the best and learning from the best is so important because it's like building a car from high quality parts. Of course, the journey is something that never ends. It's life long, and once we realize that we can enjoy the journey rather than obsess over the end goal.

[Dayne]

What an excellent post. The part regarding adversity and learning from from our tough times is spot on. And of course, big goals are also a good idea! Thank you for the great article Celestine! :)

Dayne
http://www.TheHappySelf.com

[Ia]

I really enjoyed this guest post! In fact, I'm now poking through the Personal Excellence Blog. :) I'm definately one of those people that's afraid of the word 'excellence' - I've always associated it with 'stress' But putting it into this context, I feel much better about the whole idea, and I love the idea of a school. :) And yes- The mention of X-men made my fangirl squeal with delight! Thanks again for a great post. :)

[Dawn]

Great post...I am surrounded by doubting Thomas's...they all want to drag me down...expecially when I'm happy.

Thank you for the reminders...

[Chelsea Talks Smack]

Love this, so fantastic and so true.

[Lynn]

Okay, so this is the second guest post I have read from Celes in the last 5 minutes. I'm heading over to her blog right now and will add to my positive resources blogroll.

Thanks for reminding me about excellence - something I had stopped striving for because I didn't have much hope in my current situation. However, after reading this, I am back on the wagon!!!

[All Women Stalker]

This is an excellent post! Will be rereading and rereading this :)

-meream

[therapydoc]

Excellent!

[Kaushik]

Big audacious hairy goals--I love that and certainly gets the point across. It's so energizing when we are inspired by big things. Thanks for an excellent post!

[Global Samba]

Love this post! Point #1 is my die by philosophy! Thanks for sharing and keeping us positive!!!

[Darren Sproat]

What a great read and timely considering my recent thought focus and writings. I am one who believes in being present for one's self and these reminders, some of them so simple to do, are clear steps towards 'being present for you'.

Thanks again for the wonderful post.
Darren Sproat

[Diggy - Upgradereality.com]

Excellent post ;)!!

I agree totally, when doing something, don't do something Half! Do it to your fullest 100%, strive for it to be as perfect as perfect can be.

Aim for the stars and reach the treetops kind of thing.

The beauty is, that once you get into this habit of doing things as perfectly as possible, you will stick with it and it will become automatic, however, it will also be a bit of a curse, because you will not feel comfortable leaving the smallest things in a mess or unperfect when you know you can do it better!

Have a rockin' Day!
Diggy

[Megan Bord]

Great guest post! I never thought about excellence in quite this way before; thank you for offering a fresh perspective. I'm off to achieve excellence today!

[Celes]

Wow, I'm greatly warmed by the enthusiasm and positivity of the readers here!! :) Dani, you have a great community here!! Thanks guys for all your feedback and to those who went ahead to connect with me on twitter/facebook! :) You guys are all amazing and I'm glad this post resonated with you on a certain level!

Dani, once again for giving me the honor to write the first guest post on your blog! Words can't express how I feel!! :)

[positively present]

Thank you all for your comments on this post. Celes did such a great job as my first guest blogger and it was an honor to have her write for Positively Present. Though I did not respond individually to each comment, I read them all and truly appreciate the feedback on Celes's post. And, Celes, thank YOU for taking the time to write this and for sharing your great wisdom about excellence here on Positively Present! :)

[Walter]

I people could only explore their own excellence then no human in this world will ever live in squalor. I became aware of this gift of excellence few years ago and it feels very liberating. It is astonishing to discover that we have more power than we can ever imagine. :-)