In mid-December we wrote one of our year end, “get ready for next year” blog posts called, “Creating Your Bold Vision.” Now that we are moving in to the second half of the year we are wondering - how’s that working for you?

Traditionally at the end of the year the majority of our clients and friends are working on “what’s next.”  The effort ranges from New Year’s resolutions, to budgets, to creating an entirely new vision and, (hopefully), strategy to go with it. Often somewhere in the first quarter, (if not actually in January), these “best of intentions” fall to the wayside. As the economy continues to be challenging and the levels of stress seem to be in an unprecedented range we thought now would be a good time to “look up and out” and revisit the idea of a bold vision in 2011.

Most of the time, when we talk about “bold vision” we find these efforts produce plans based on past experience, rather than launching a truly bold vision. So to clarify what we mean, we say vision has more to do with a dream for the future than what’s happened in the past.  This is a really critical point. When teams go to create a vision they really think they are working on the future, but this “predictions based on the past” almost always dominates the conversation and people aren’t even aware of it. (Next time you are in a high level strategy session or meeting about vision, see if you can detect what we are pointing to here. If you need more clarity, we talk a lot about the differences in our book, Accelerate, in the section on Leadership Choice Point.) 

In the book we also emphasize that most ”leadership” activity is based on looking backwards, reviewing results to-date, and building a plan forwards from that past.  There is nothing wrong with this. As human beings our minds and memories are constructed to have a “database” that builds on past experience. If we didn’t have a “cumulative learning ability” we would be helpless. Every moment would be new. We wouldn’t be able to find home at night, wouldn’t recognize it when we got there, and strangers would occupy it if we couldn’t draw effectively from our past experience.  That’s the good news part.

The bad news part is that past-based predictions also keep us enslaved to what’s stored in our mental database, (or what we fondly call “the mental File Cabinet.”)  It keeps our attention on our limitations. For example, we know the story of a head-hunter who was working on a placement. He had spoken with a potential candidate and told him, “I can’t present you for this CEO job, for which you are an excellent candidate, because you don’t have a chemistry degree.” The last CEO of the particular company had failed. He had a chemistry degree and the Board of Directors insisted on the new candidates having one also. So it’s an interesting issue. In this example, if a chemistry degree could predict and determine success, why did the previous guy fail? Why does it make it a given that this other outstanding candidate would fail because he doesn’t have one? Somewhere in the past, this notion became a “predictor of success” and even in the face of evidence to the contrary, it’s still being pursued. (This is why we used the strong language “enslaved” in the first sentence of this paragraph.)

It gets worse when we are in this ”predictive state” and also creating and executing on a vision. Check your own thoughts here and see how often you can be truly creative and go for something that is not a projection of the current path of your life, your resume, your finances, your job…you see where this is going.  Borrowing from the article I will cite below, we could call this “remembering the future.”

The Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition on 12-12-10 included an article, “Why The Mind Sees the Future in the Past Tense,” by Matt Ridley in which the author points out that recent neuroscience studies show the same parts of the mind hold our episodic memories and our imagined futures. Given the evidence here, it’s no wonder the “predictable” dominates our thinking.

What excited me about the article were the studies that show that, “the more unexpected something is, the more conscious we are of it.”  Your brain has to work harder when what shows up doesn’t match prediction, or expectation. What this means to me is that the most highly leveraged way to get yourself and your team in to powerful action is to start throwing new stuff in front of your collective brains. Create a BOLD vision that you can’t prove based on the past. You will be stimulated, more conscious, and therefore more present. You will be unleashing creativity instead of invoking your past experience, circumstances, knowledge, (or lack of it), and limitations.

I am not being “Pollyanna” or encouraging “woo-woo” here. Once your new bold vision, or as we call it, “Yonder Star” is created, it’s time to be responsible for the past. It’s time to get very clear about your situation – “the way that it is and the way that it isn’t.”  If you start looking from the perspective of your Yonder Star as if it is already fulfilled, your mind will start discovering what it did to get there. It will get very excited about remembering. (Our partner, Alanna Levenson, calls that “creating future memories.”)

In his blog post, “Strategy Slam’”, a long-time colleague, Russ Phillips, recommends going to Denny’s by yourself with a pen and pad to do your creative thinking. I am much more creative in dialogue with other committed players.  Many people wait for adversity to set in, and it will, sooner or later, to force themselves and their associates to get creative…”sort of a create or die strategy.” There are lots of ways to “get yourself there.” What gets you in action for a bold inquiry?  What’s your most creative environment? What calls forth your commitment? What stops you? These may be the most powerful questions you can ask yourself as you revisit, resurrect, or invent for the first time your bold vision for 2011!

This is the time of year when the majority of our clients and friends are working on “what’s next.”

Most often, we find these efforts produce predictions based on past experience, rather than launching a truly bold vision. Vision has more to do with a dream for the future than what’s happened in the past.  (We talk a lot about the differences in our book, Accelerate, in the section on Leadership Choice Point.) 

In the book we emphasize that most ”leadership” activity is based on looking backwards, reviewing results to-date, and building a plan forwards from that past.  There is nothing wrong with this. As human beings our minds and memories are constructed to have a “database” that builds on past experience. If we didn’t have a “cumulative learning ability” we would be helpless. Every moment would be new. We wouldn’t be able to find home at night, wouldn’t recognize it when we got there, and strangers would occupy it if we couldn’t draw effectively from our past experience.  That’s the good news part.

The bad news part is that past-based predictions also keep us enslaved to what’s stored in our mental database, (or what we fondly call “the mental File Cabinet.”)  It keeps our attention on our limitations.  For example, we know of a current head-hunter who is working on a placement. He has recently talked with a potential candidate and told him, “I can’t present you for this CEO job, for which you are an excellent candidate, because you don’t have a chemistry degree.” By the way, the last CEO, (who failed),  had a chemistry degree and the Board of Directors insists on the new candidates having one also. So it’s an interesting issue. In this example, if a chemistry degree could predict and determine success, why did the previous guy fail? Why does it make it a given that this other outstanding candidate will fail because he doesn’t have one? Somewhere in the past, this notion became a “predictor of success” and even in the face of evidence to the contrary, it’s still being pursued. (This is why we used the strong language “enslaved” in the first sentence of this paragraph.)

It gets worse when we are in this predictive state and also creating and executing on a vision. Check your own thoughts here and see how often you can be truly creative and go for something that is not a projection of the current path of your life, your resume, your finances, your job – you know the drill…  Borrowing from the article I will cite below, this is simply “remembering the future.”

The Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition on 12-12-10 included an article, “Why The Mind Sees the Future in the Past Tense,” by Matt Ridley in which the author points out that recent neuroscience studies show that the same parts of the mind hold our episodic memories and or imagined futures. Given the evidence here, it’s no wonder the “predictable” dominates our thinking.

What excited me about the article were the studies that show that, “the more unexpected something is, the more conscious we are of it.”  Your brain has to work harder when what shows up doesn’t match prediction, or expectation. What this means to me is that the most highly leveraged way to get yourself and your team in to powerful action is to start throwing new stuff in front of your collective brains. Create a BOLD vision that you can’t prove based on the past. You will be stimulated, more conscious, and therefore more present. You will be unleashing creativity instead of invoking your past experience, circumstances, knowledge (or lack of it), and limitations.

I am not being “Pollyanna” or encouraging “woo-woo” here. Once your new bold vision, or as we call it, “Yonder Star” is created, it’s time to be responsible for the past. It’s time to get very clear about your situation – “the way that it is and the way that it isn’t.”  Looking from your Yonder Star as if it is already fulfilled, your mind will start discovering what it did to get there. It will get very excited about remembering. (Our partner, Alanna Levenson, calls that “creating future memories.”)

In his blog post, “Strategy Slam’”, a long-time colleague, Russ Phillips, recommends going to Denny’s by yourself with a pen and pad to do your creative thinking. I am much more creative in dialogue with other committed players.  Many people wait for adversity to set in, and it will, sooner or later, to force themselves and their associates to get creative…”sort of a create or die strategy”…There are lots of ways to “get yourself there.” What gets you in action for a bold inquiry?  What’s your most creative environment? What calls forth your commitment? What stops you? These may be the most powerful questions you can ask yourself as you start planning for the next year.

In the opening ceremony, I did a quick scan of the global picture of women’s leadership in the highest positions. I outlined a simple process to follow to make you most effective in your pursuits. I then pointed out a series of qualities for you to bring to your work to be successful. Lastly, I addressed the requirements for men to be most supportive of a woman’s passion and purpose. I declared that in the end both women and men must listen to their hearts and trust themselves. Identify your vision or “Yonder Star” and the path to it and get to work! Be courageous, authentic, collaborative, compassionaite, patient and persistent. The joy in in the journey and the learning along the way.

In this session, let’s dig deeper. Let’s get down to what it’s really going to take to live a life you love and produce outcomes that have you shouting “YES!”

As you will experience, life gets harder in the middle as things like jobs, family, housing, school, and medical expenses take your energy. It will be hard to remember what you said you were committed to when you were in college. You have to step out into the world and be defeated a few times to test your resolve. Can you get back up, shake yourself off, and continue to pursue your vision or will you step to the side and only make gestures? Will you let your circumstances or situation determine your life and just complain about it? Perhaps you will just suffer in silence, hoping you can do better in your next lifetime? Do you know anyone like that?  They didn’t plan their lives to turn out that way!  So what happened?

Life happened. Circumstances happened. As you go along, the evidence and the agreement of others stacks up about how hard it really is to make a difference. In your lifetime it will be even more challenging. In an age of uncertainty, rapid change, volatility, the rapid spread of instant information, and the breakdown of traditional practices and culture, it will be more confusing than ever.

I see all of this as great news for you. The more the past ways are losing their grip, the more freedom you will have to innovate and the greater that demand will be for your courageous leadership. Please note an emphasis on courageous and recall how I used David Whyte’s definition of courage in the opening ceremony, “developing a friendship with the unknown.”  Why is that so important?

When the pressure is on and circumstances are pressing in on you, it is very normal to fall back to what you know from your past. The problem for leaders is that your past won’t help when what you need to accomplish your Yonder Star are bold new strategies and partnerships that are different from past practices. To get your passion and purpose back on the path to leadership, you will have to get comfortable with not knowing what to do. You will have to stay uncertain long enough to discover new strategies and new team members that can lead you beyond the world you and others knew and find comfortable. You will have to learn to become very comfortable with being uncomfortable!

So let’s get specific. Here is an example of a really big vision or Yonder Star. Applicants for next year’s World Forum For The Future of Women were asked to write a brief essay on women’s lives in a perfect world. Part of what one woman said was,  “In a perfect world, women are really equal with men. They do not have to lose weight in order to get the praise of their boyfriends. A woman is a god of herself, not her boyfriend, family or someone else. She is totally free and her spirits are strong. She makes her own life colorful and has a say in society. She belongs to herself. She belongs to the world too. She thinks for the animals, the children, even our beautiful world. Her eyesight is so big. Life is full of ups and downs, but she always keeps her heart basking in the sun. She knows that every dawn will present a fine prospect for her to unfold and the world will always be about new hopes in her eyes.”

Does that Yonder Star call to you?  What do you think it will take to make that vision real in the world? If it fits you, what will you have to change about yourself and the way you have dealt with life in the past? If you answered “I don’t know,” you are wise. No one knows today what it will take to fulfill such a bold vision. To be successful with such a vision, you will learn to become comfortable with being uncomfortable or not knowing. 

The other critical aspect of being able to fulfill your Yonder Star is to make it very, very public and develop lots of partners in your vision. The more people you include, the more creative input you will get. More importantly, there will be more people to remind you about your commitment when you forget.

Now I want to remind you that the only powerful vision or Yonder Star for you is the one you choose.  No project is too big or small if it is truly yours. This is one of the hard parts of leadership. There are so many social agreements on what’s right or wrong or what gets recognition at the moment and what does not. Unfortunately, many really important ideas are not appreciated by others when they are created. Many famous artists, for example, died before their work was recognized and many social reformers never lived to see the improvements that came from their lifetime of commitment and hard work.

You cannot live a life of true significance and also worry about whether you are getting lots of credit at the moment. You will have to find other sources of strength. You will have to become completely comfortable with your own vision and ideas and completely willing to own the consequences of your actions and inactions. You will have to be completely willing to deal with your circumstances.

For the women in the audience – to be a visionary, you will have to be very patient. It may be a struggle to bring men along with you on your path. Some of you may find it easier to stay single and simply focus on your work.  In some ways that will make your life much simpler. On the other hand, you will miss out on many of life’s joys including children and real partnership.

For the men-if you intend to be a partner with a highly committed and passionate woman leader, be prepared for surprises. At times, your emotions may swing from very excited to wanting to give up. To be an equal partner will mean that much of what you have learned by listening and watching other boys and men while you were growing up will not be valid or useful in partnering. These old ways of relating to women may even cause you great pain.

For both of you, your guide will be the Yonder Star vision you share and your respect and love for each other. Beyond that, you and your partner will both be on a path of exploration. If you are frequently uncertain or confronted, you are probably doing the right work. If you are very comfortable, you may not fulfill your vision!

So what I have talked about are one or two very basic ideas it will take for you to be truly successful in fulfilling your Yonder Star or vision. It will be hard at times. It will take courage. You will forget your vision, you may not be able to find your commitment, and will have to be reminded. Your relationships can often be confronting, frustrating, or just disappointing. Discovering the joy and satisfaction of equal partnership as you express your passion and purpose on the path to leadership will make it all worthwhile.

As I summarized in my keynote it will ultimately come down to listening to your heart and trusting yourself.  Identify your Yonder Star and the next steps on your path to fulfilling it and get to work. Be courageous, authentic, collaborative, compassionate, patient, and persistent. The joy is in the journey and the learning along the way. Be thankful that you are one of the people who will have the opportunity to live a meaningful life!

About half the class from the World Academy of Women

This week I am privileged to be speaking to the women of  The World Academy for the Future of Women at SIAS International University in Xinzheng City, Henan Province, People’s Republic of China.  For the past 18 months or so we have been working with Global Interactions and their President Jerrie Ueberle, (as well as others),  to co-create curriculum and a program for The Academy. In conjunction with this, their 4th Annual Women’s Symposium is also being held and my speech will be part of that symposium. Suzanne and I will be teaching at The Academy and participating in the symposium. This project has had an enormous impact on us here at 2130 Partners and has been an amazing learning experience.

The symposium is titled “Women Making a World of Difference: Putting Your Passion and Purpose on the Path to Leadership“ and I was asked to address the subject of  “Being Heard In A Man’s World.” I have to confess to some trepidation to doing this speech. What do I as an older Western male have to say to brand new graduates of a women’s academy in  China? I thought long and hard about this. Given my more than 30+ years experience as an investor activist for the end of world hunger I firmly believe the education and empowerment of women around the world is absolutely crucial to our collective global future. So after much reflection, here is the speech I will be giving:

Putting your Passion and Purpose on the Path to Leadership will require that you speak up, take risks, and be heard to move your goals from a dream to reality.  You will not be alone! Bold women around the world are stepping up and challenging traditional ways, with major consequences at the individual, family, community, and societal levels. They are insisting on being heard in a world where women’s voices have long been marginalized or ignored.

Pursuing your path to fulfillment will bring you up against many barriers and pitfalls and will require you to deal with things you can barely imagine now.

Today, I will outline a simple process to follow to make you most effective in your pursuits.  I will then point out a series of qualities for you to bring to your work to be successful. Lastly, I will address what will be required of men to be most supportive of you passion and purpose.  The work is hard and confronting, however, the satisfaction and rewards are enormous.

Women are clearing a path for you by moving into top leadership roles on a worldwide basis, more so in government than in large corporations. With the recent election of Laura Chinchilla as President of Costa Rica, the world has 26 women heads of state and government.  India passed a law in 1993 that required that 33% of all positions in local government, called Panchayati Raj, be women.  That law has allowed 1,000,000 women at the local level to take on leadership roles in their communities, which means more women in public office in India than in all of the reset of the world put together.  In addition, the Indian Parliament is currently debating a new law that would extend the 33% requirement to the national level in its own lower house.  China has 21% women in its National People’s Congress.  By contrast, the percentage of women in the US Congress and State Governors positions averages 17%. Representation of women among top corporate executives in the 1,000 largest US firms averages 15.7%.  While these numbers still don’t reflect the fact that women make up one-half of the world’s population and “hold up half the sky,” they do represent a significant number of women in influential roles.

As women achieve more powerful roles and higher incomes, however, a combination of old and new threats must be dealt with.  Traditional cultural practices are still producing great discrimination against women and girls, from employment and educational opportunities right down to the aborting of female fetuses and abandonment of female babies in very large numbers.  Estimates are that there would be over 100 million more women in the world if this were not taking place. In addition, fundamentalist religious sects are going to great lengths to suppress women across the world.  At the personal level, pressures for conformity to old ways exist in every community.

So what is the appropriate action?

First and foremost, you must pay close attention to these existing conditions we’re talking briefly about here today.  The work you will do to successfully fulfill your vision will take place in these conditions.  To be effective, you cannot wish them away, simply ignore them, or fight violently against them.

The process that will make you most effective is simple but it is not easy:

1)Develop a very clear expression of what your purpose and passion look like in the world when fully expressed.  In our company we call that your vision or your “Yonder Star.”

2)Make full, clear, and accurate account of the conditions that exist and in which you will be working.

3)Ask “what’s missing from my picture of my fulfilled vision today?” “Which of those issue would produce the most results in the shortest time and with the least effort if I get to work on it?”

4)Design projects to address that issue and get to work.

5)Monitor progress and redesign as necessary to fulfill your projects.

6)Keep going until you are building capacities and moving successfully toward your vision.

Remember, the key to effectiveness is to have your vision, pay attention to current circumstances, and focus your work in the gap between the two.

What will be required of you?

1) First and foremost, summon your courage. The courage that will be most valuable is what author and speaker David Whyte calls “developing a friendship with the unknown.”  Once you start on your path, you will have left your traditional, familiar surroundings and ways of relating to others and will be in unknown territory. If you are unwilling to be in that state and learn to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, don’t bother to get started.  You will be stepping out of historic roles and relationships and you will be insisting on what can and must be done to produce meaningful change.

2) Second, you must be willing to accept the consequences of your actions.  This does not mean, “be a victim.”  It simply says that all actions and even failure to act have consequences.  To be free to act effectively, you must be aware of the potential consequences and feel that the results are worth it. You must give up avoiding being criticized or thought of as weird. You will have to deal with rejection and pushback without taking it personally. The questions to ask are “what stops me now?” “Am I willing to focus on my vision and go past that barrier?” “Am I willing to have all of the consequences and not just the ones that are safe or that I call good?”

3) Third, focus on collaboration.  Develop strong alliances with other women who share your objectives.  Work together and support each other, especially when your courage is faltering, you can’t find your passion, and your purpose is blurred.  Find courageous men and teach them how to be your partners.  It won’t work to make men wrong, as that will just create a wall of resistance.  Success will involve teaching and enrolling them in how they will be better off by collaborating with you.  It works – my wife and I are living examples of equal partners who make great contributions to each other and our clients and community.

4) Fourth, summon compassion.  When you are causing change, some of the people around you, both men and women, will be threatened.  They won’t necessarily understand what you are doing or why.  Your family members may fear for your safety or that you will leave them.  Others may have their beliefs threatened or feel that they will be harmed in some way. Change of any kind, even good change, is an upset for people.  Forgive them for their resistance and help them understand the benefits.

5) Be patient.  Allow those around you to re-shape their relationship with you and with the changing roles of women in general. Balance the rate at which you are attempting to accomplish your work with their ability to absorb the changes you are bringing.

6) Develop and maintain your clarity- how do you intend your life to unfold?  What is the best path for expressing your passion and purpose? Remember, it is your life, so any path you freely choose is fine.  There are no right answers other than that!

7) Be authentic. The world has actually been waiting for you.  Be fully yourself, fully self-expressed, and let the world choose how much of you it wants and for what roles. You are the only person who has been genetically encoded to deliver what you offer by being fully you.

8 Be persistent. You will be amazed at how many excuses and seemingly very good reasons you will come up with to change or give up. Stay on your path (strategy) or get back on it when you stray.

9) Surrender.  If you have a really big passion and purpose, you will be immediately and often confronted by thoughts like “I’m insufficient,” “I don’t know how,” “I’m scared to death,” and “I’ll never get good enough fast enough to reach my Yonder Star!”  Success will require that you reach out to find team members and identify successful strategies.  When you get stuck, ask, “Who are my missing team members?” and “What are the missing strategies?”

What does this require of men?

1)  Enlightenment.  To receive the benefits of having powerful, effective women in their lives, men will have to be willing to be open to the opportunity and to not know how it is going to turn out. They will have to suspend their instant, automatic, and unexamined beliefs about women and the roles women should play.  They will have to be present to the opportunities before them.

2) Recognition.  To be able to partner effectively with women and benefit from their newfound power, men must realize and own that they discount or ignore women’s voices.  This will be extremely difficult for many men, as they do not realize that they do it currently.  The adjustment may be threatening or painful and they may experience a sense of loss.

3) Courage. Men who step up to being real partners with women may still face times when they feel threatened by the situation or the strength of the woman or women around them.  Further, they may have to stand the ridicule of other men who see them as weak or stupid. As with women, it will require developing a friendship with the unknown.  They won’t necessarily know what to expect from women or how to handle what is being said or done to them.

4) Action. In addition to all else, men will have to see and act on the opportunity offered by being in equal relationship with women whether as romantic partners, co-workers, or members of their community.

Ultimately, for both women and men, it will come down to listening to your heart and trusting yourself.  Identify your Yonder Star and the path to it and get to work. Be courageous, authentic, collaborative, compassionate, patient, and persistent. The joy is in the journey and the learning along the way. Go forth and prosper!

As with the OODA Loop, we find the elegance of the summary of such sophisticated insight and thought truly exciting.  From our work in 2130 Partners to our participation in the global non-profit The Hunger Project, we find that transforming an existing condition or paradigm is what is at the heart of real, meaningful and lasting change. Processes like the OODA loop and those in the COIN field manual can be used to alter paradigms.  As summarized by Thomas Barnett, the COIN field manual outlines the process as:

1. Diagnose – environments’ deficits
2. Dialogue – with locals about how to address them
3. Design – programs
4. Learn – from application
5. Redesign – programs over and over until local capacity has been built up

As usual, the process is simple at its core and not easy in its real world execution.

In practice in your organization it looks something like this:

1. With your strategic vision or “Yonder Star” clearly in mind, examine the present and ask “What’s Missing – from our Yonder Star today that is most important to work on?”
2. Engage with your leadership team, colleagues, or fellow community leaders, regarding their insights and proposals.  In working with The Hunger Project we say, “We stand with the hungry people as the solution, not the problem!” What shifts will occur if you relate to your associates the same way? In other words, how would you engage in conversations differently if you considered your employees, and colleagues as part of the solution, not the problem?
3. Develop a shared understanding of the approaches, strategies, and actions that will have the highest leverage in moving towards fulfillment of the Yonder Star.
4. Get to work and conduct regular reviews of effectiveness. What’s working and what’s not?  Where is course correction called for?
5. Redesign and redirect the action until desired results are happening.
6. Engage with each other regarding the growth and development of team members individually and collectively.  We call the shared knowledge and capabilities within the team “Collaborative Capacities.”

We particularly call your attention to the last phrase of the COIN field manual “until local capacity has been built up.”  To us, that is the most critical notion of all when it comes to sustainability.  Command-and-control leadership and traditional service delivery models for development are fatally flawed in this regard. If local collaborative capacity building has not taken place, whether in a village in Afghanistan, or on the factory floor, programs fall apart as soon as the “top down providers” leave.

Here are some thoughts to jog your thinking about how this model can help you lead:

How does this “formula” give you new access to diagnosing your individual and collective leadership challenges?

How can you apply the “formula” to altering your historic way of operating and fill in missing steps in the empowerment process?

Are you willing to take the “formula” and actually get to work on accelerating your productivity and the effectiveness of your interactions?

Have you given your full attention to collaborative capacity building with your executive team? Your employees?

If you have never taken the time to sit down and map out your Yonder Star, you might start by doing some thinking about real, meaningful New Year’s resolutions. You don’t necessarily have to think of something new and different that you have never tried before. Most of us have “chronic resolutions,” which are ones that we promise ourselves every year and at some point they get lost along the way. The difference this year should be to create an action plan and a timeline to go with your resolutions/goals. Breaking your vision down into the action steps you need to take to make it a reality will help you see each step of the path. Often big visions are not as daunting when you break them down into manageable pieces. The other key is timing. Create timeframes for your goals that are realistic for you. After you have written it, take your plan and keep it somewhere visible where you can refer to it often. If you bury it in a drawer or file somewhere it will just slip away beneath the current of your life.

One way to help yourself succeed is to make your resolutions “public” to others. To put more wind in your sails, promise others that you will deliver! You can ask someone you trust to be a “committed listener.” This involves a commitment from them to listen to you as you talk about the status of your plans, your struggles and your successes. It does not involve them giving advice or telling you what to do next, (unless you make a specific request for it).

Another way to succeed is to hire a coach. Someone who is trained to support people in achieving their dreams and plans.

If you are a bit more experienced at this process, take a step up in rigor and create a set of goals for the different areas of your life. Categories you might include are:
1) Career/Financial
2) Well-Being or Health
3) Relationships
4) Spiritual
5) Personal
6) Wild Card

How bold are you willing to be setting your goals? If you are completely certain you can make the goals, are you stretching yourself enough? Focus on designing the most catalytic, highly leveraged action steps you can. By catalytic we mean that your actions produce the intended results without your being used up in the process. By highly leveraged, we mean you produce very big results with minimal resources.

If you’ve been successful at this level of work and/or are ready to take on your first effort at a Strategic Plan for your company or affiliation, we suggest using what we call our “2130 Partners Hot Wired Strategic Plan.” We call it Hot Wired because it covers many of the levels and topics of an elaborate plan and yet you can produce a decent draft in a couple of hours. The first pass can then be developed to whatever level of detail you wish. The key, however, is to get the initial draft knocked out in as short a time as you can so that you shift your paradigm about goals and actions as you develop the more detailed plans. You can download the worksheet for our 2130 Partners Hot Wired plan by clicking here.