Changing Your Perspective on Success as an Engineering Leader – Advice from a former Military Prison Inmate

The following is a summary of Episode 34 of my podcast, The Engineering Career Coach (TECC) Podcast. I will summarize the main points in this post; however, you can also listen to the show through the player below or by subscribing on iTunes. I offer a career-changing tip at the end of each podcast session.

In this session of the TECC Podcast, I interview Matt Tenney, a social entrepreneur and the author of Serve to Be Great: Leadership Lessons from a Prison, a Monastery, and a Boardroom. Matt has served a five and a half year sentence in a military prison and has used this time to transform his life and career to where he is today. Now, Matt is an international keynote speaker, a trainer, and a leadership consultant.

From his experience, Matt says that most people define success as being rich or having a lot of money. People get too focused and obsessed with goals but end up burning bridges and neglecting relationships in the process of pursuing them. In this episode, you can learn how you can be happy and transform the absolute worst situation in your engineering career and life that is successful in a purposeful way.

When you are faced with a challenging situation, always consider the following:

• What good can you see in the situation?
• What can you learn from these things that are happening?
• How can you be of service to others?
• What can you do to make the biggest impact to others?

These questions will help you to be more positive, cultivate a servant’s attitude, help you transform your biggest challenges into opportunities, and give you a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

Here are some strategies on how to achieve success and happiness as an engineering leader:

• Make serving others a priority. As a leader, this approach will help you better connect to people. Making serving others a higher priority, can directly translate to more long-term success in your career and life because the people you interact with will be more engaged and more productive.
• Be open and honest about your faults and failures. People are usually ashamed of or embarrassed by their failures. Instead, be transparent and vulnerable. People will appreciate this and it will allow them to connect with you more easily. People will see you as a normal human being, even with all of your shortcomings, and you will become someone that they can trust.
• Instead of focusing only on achieving your goals, focus on building relationships along the way. Instead of being so focused on achieving your goals, focus more on the process.  During the process, try to build and nurture your relationships, which will eventually give you a more meaningful life and happiness.
• Be mindful. Our mind is the source of our anxiety; it can limit our thinking, and undermine our ability to succeed. Spend time training your mind to be totally aware of what the body is doing and attempt to sustain those thought patterns without being distracted. Meditate and observe yourself doing what you’re doing, and sustain that for minutes at a time. This will help you to focus more and appreciate what’s going on around you.
• Align your productivity with what’s truly important to you. We usually get caught up in what’s urgent and neglect what’s important. Productivity should not solely be checking off your to-do items but prioritizing and performing the tasks that are the most important to you. 

What can you change today that can make you a better, happier and more successful engineering leader?

Anthony Fasano, PE, author of Engineer Your Own Success, found success as an engineer at a very early age and now writes and podcasts to help other engineers do the same. Visit Anthony’s website at EngineeringCareerCoach.com to access all of the free engineering career resources he has created to help engineers succeed.