Are You Focusing On The Message? (What The 2008 Presidential Election Can Teach Us about Living on the Offense)

As I watch the U.S. presidential campaigns — complete with polls, interviews, focus groups, and pundits — it occurs to me that each candidate’s basic message has been lost.

When you’re starting out in business, or in sales, you’re taught to focus on one solid message, and to share this message time and time again… often for a year or more before moving onto anything else.

The Presidential Candidates haven’t done this. Each may have started off strong, but with the field day that the media is having, they’ve since been diverted by other peoples’ expectations.

They hear that one group of people is affected, and they tailor a TV add to try to sway that group. One candidate attacks the other, so the attacked candidate films a rebuttal. This goes on in a never-ending digression until the candidate’s message: his/her values, beliefs, and visions — are totally lost and covered up by all the extraneous bull.

This is the exact type of thing that we’re taught to avoid. Remember the advice: don’t be petty, take the high road, turn the other cheek, don’t let other people bring you down?
Sadly, the presidential candidates are too busy playing media ping-pong to remember what they stand for and share that message with the American people.

Life is very much like that.
• What is YOUR basic message?
• Do you know what you stand for?
• Do you know what your values are?

In life… are you ACTING with intention, or are you REACTING to what others around you are doing and saying?

Are you basing your decisions and actions on what YOU believe?
Or are you just going along, trying to be a crowd pleaser?
There are all kinds of people out there offering you advice: short-cuts to success. “Prescriptions” to happiness.
But success doesn't often come easily, and happiness is individual.

What you need to do, time and time again as your life and the world around you changes, is to focus on your values. Bring more of the things you treasure into your life and get rid of the things that don’t work for you.

When you find out what success means to you and how to go about getting it… happiness follows.

What are you campaigning for?