When you shift to this mindset…, great changes happen!

You change from a “victim” to a victor of life!

I was studying very hard in schools and then university, the studying result was great but the journey somehow was miserable.

When I was at high school, I would study when riding buffalo or helping my parents in the fields, while cooking or even in the toilet (oh yes, my favourite place). I had everything in my mind and was very prepared before any exam, but I wanted the best result so I sometimes still had some tricks such as writing some key ideas on my arms to have something to help me in the exam. I found most of the time, I didn't use these supporting materials but the fear of not doing the best made me keep doing these tricks. One semester, I even got capped on my whole excellent award because the teacher saw me using the tricks in the exam. And the worst was, I felt bad about it - I studied hard but I suffered myself.  I started again without the tricks and my overall result after my high school was still one of the highest.

When I enrolled to university, I repeated the same pattern - I studied it all, but I still used tricks when attending an exam and I got capped again on that subject to 0 point. I told myself "enough is enough". I started asking myself, there would be a better way for mastering it, to not being that miserable - even studying so hard but still feeling fearful of not doing well so using a little trick to comfort myself. Some of my friends saw me studying hard and often going to the library to research more about the lessons, they asked me to teach them. I loved doing it, I shared with them all that I learned. Interestingly, the subjects that I taught others, I often had good results but most importantly, I felt great because others also passed the exams with good results.

I took that experience to become my slogan - learning by sharing. I took that slogan to study my first Masters degree in Spain, I often shared and helped my classmates with their thinking process to learn and do their assignments - this resulted in my highest performance award for my degree. And again, it was natural and i felt fulfilled because others also got great results.

I learned these thing by heart - learning by sharing and upgraded it to become "learning by serving". When I went to the UK to study my second Master's degree, I told myself - "my success in studying will be measured by the number of people I support and how well they will do in their studying and even their life". With this principle, I would organize discussing session for the whole class every week and would read crazily in the library and on Google. I got scholars to dig deeper into the topics we learned, and yes, not forgetting to ask my professors as much as possible, outside and inside the class and even going to town to learn from entrepreneurs.

My classmates got great results in their studying, and naturally, I got great results because I learned by sharing and serving. Looking back I thought it was the biggest lesson I learned about the power of servant leadership - your success is measured by the success of people you support.

My question today for you will be: What is the daily thing you do to serve better at least one person next to you today? The more you serve, the more successful you become!

P/S: This post is inspired by a dear mentee of mine who has taught me about servant leadership and he has the words “servant leadership” on him to remind him to practice on it everyday.