GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

What makes you effective? Is it your knowledge and experience? Is it your commitment? Is it perhaps luck sometimes? Simply put: Being effective is about making what you want to happen, happen. It’s about shaping the world around you to fit your hopes and dreams, and aspirations. About creating your desired future. That means something needs to change, or why bother, right? And when something needs to change, what you’re really doing is a form of innovation.

Your innovativeness and your effectiveness are closely intertwined. Becoming more innovative makes you more effective and therefore more successful. Both personal attributes are enhanced as you become more creative, imaginative, resourceful and observant. As you become more skilled at managing the inevitable changes we all confront, you’re better positioned to find—and lead—your way through them.

Innovation and effectiveness both demand that you’re able to somehow account for the realities you face, while at the same time shifting those realities. This world is a dynamic place, it’s always fluid and evolving. You need to align with those changes, even as you attempt to make changes.

Whether you’re launching a new product or venture, trying to advance your career, or maybe start—or repair—a personal relationship, your challenge is not to just go do what needs to be done. It’s to figure out what needs to be done, to get to where you want to be. In other words, effectiveness and innovativeness are complementary. To be effective, you need to be innovative, and the more innovative you are, the more effective you’re likely to be.

Here is a video version of this post:

The Innovator Mindset YouTube channel brings you weekly tips, tricks and insights into how to be more creative, innovative, resourceful imaginative and open–all the things that innovation requires, and that you need to be effective.

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