Beyond Beauty! By Emmanuel Afiawari

Without doubts, beauty has its place, timing and season. However, a common fact which most people fail to realize is no matter how long your outward beauty lasts, you can never be on that stage longer than is necessary.

There are degrees of beauty, and like an old literary sage puts it, a thing of beauty is to be treasured for ever more. To remain an all-timer on the beauty stage requires a lot of work, none of which includes the vanity of time invested in makeups at the expense of value.

A 21st century sage has said, “You don’t look beautiful until you wear a smile,” and I agree with him in totality. Smiling carries its own gracefulness which is contagious. This gracefulness comes from a deep-seated knowledge who and whose you are.

An appreciable knowledge of who and whose you are determines what forms your priorities and gives direction and expression to your actions and inactions. It propels you in pursuit of values and virtues, rather than vanity.

Truly beautiful people are those who invest appreciable time in developing their minds, discovering new horizons to attain and giving expression to the inner dreams of their hearts. They are those given to impacting their world positively by turning a destitute into an institution.

A truly beautiful person brings order to a disordered world through their ideas, desires, gifting and personality. Their beauty is that fresh idea incubated in the furnace of their minds that bridges the gap between night and day. Their beauty is the rallying point of life for others. It is like the blazing camp-fire around which people will gather. It provides light, energy, warmth and unity.

Their beauty creates power. This power creates enthusiasm and leads to greater productivity for those it touches. The influence from the power of their beauty is dynamic and drives every successful idea in others. This dynamic beauty power creates life for dying dreams in others.

A truly beautiful person exudes inner light that determines their outward relevance. In their beauty is a treasure of knowledge that answers to every problem around them. This inner beauty helps them set realistic, reachable goals which they commit themselves to pursue and influence others todo same.

Their beauty distinguishes them from others by the quality of answers they give. Their beauty makes them proactive. Proactive people are people of vision. Vision gives them a mission and makes them approach their task with a sense of purpose and assignment. Vision inspires ideas and only people with ideas rule! Vision gives them an insight and understanding into the various stages of challenges. It reveals the end from the beginning. It makes them remain resolute in search for an answer even when others cannot make any sense of what they do.

On the contrary, those who are only conscious of outward beauty are reactive people who respond only to stimulus. They never realise that between stimulus and response is their ability to choose. The freedom of choice endows you with the unique potential of self—awareness and imagination, that is, the ability to create in your minds beyond the present reality.

Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment — if the weather is good, they feel good; if it is not, it affects their attitude and performance. But proactive people can carry their own weather with them! Weather makes no difference to them. They are value—driven and that’s all they care about.

Reactive people are also affected by their social environment — when people treat them well, they feel well; but when poorly treated, they become defensive and offensive. Reactive people empower the weaknesses of others to control them.

Proactive people have the ability to subordinate an impulse to a value. While the reactive person is driven by feelings, circumstances and by their environment, the proactive person is driven by values that are carefully thought through, selected and internalized. That is not to say that proactive people are not influenced by external factors — physical, social or psychological. The difference is that their response to these external factors is value—based response.

While proactive people are people with a lot of creative energy who take initiative, taking initiative does not in any way mean being pushy or aggressive. Rather, it means recognizing their responsibility to make things happen. They understand that man, by nature, is to act, and not to be acted upon. Proactive people understand a very vital paradigm in business success, that is, solution selling. They don’t ever want to be acted upon but to act! They know that if they wait to be acted upon, they sure will be acted upon. And development and opportunity consequences attend either road.


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