No vision = no future.
Without a clear vision and direction your business has no future.
In 11 years coaching and training business owners I have seen it all. And noticed some common themes. One if which is that every successful business has a clear medium or long term vision. Success does not come on a wing and a prayer. It is created by design.
I explain to my clients how with a clear vision you can build a plan, develop your marketing and branding to deliver on that plan and create an insanely good customer journey – drawing the right people to you and helping you turn them into raving fans. And that’s how you start taking your business to the next level.
Research shows that 60% of business owners say they are struggling month to month and I believe they have one thing in common – they don’t have clarity of vision. Without it they don’t create a sustainable business because they are missing all the parts of the plan that flow from the clear vision.
I help by clients create their vision using the key point I outline below:
The Essentials:
First figure out your essentials. As an owner operated business what you want in your personal life is central to your business vision and the plans you create. After all you got into business to do the best for yourself and your family, your community and your clients. Unless it’s all about the money – and then this article is not for you.
To create your Vision you need to understand what your Essentials are in Life and then that flows into your Business.
Life first of course. Essentials are your must haves. Mine are Family and Friends, Health and Wellbeing, Financials (security), Travel and Adventure, Spiritual and Charity.
They are 5 big headings that sum up a part of who I am and what I want. For example Spiritual and Charity sums up what I want and what I do – charity work with my friends in our local community and contributing to charities further afield through the business every time we make a sale. And interlinked is the spiritual and philosophical parts of myself that I cultivate through learning, reading, events etc. This is an Essential part of who I am and what I want to be in my vision for my life. It ties into my Vision for my life and for my business.
I teach clients to only focus on 5 Essentials when creating their vision. Each one can be an amalgamation of related parts like mine or they can be more straightforward. Either works as long as you have determined your CORE essentials. The key is to make sure they are essential to you and who you are and to focus on 5. When you do the Vision process with any more than 5 it becomes cumbersome and hard to focus on what is truly essential. This leads to a vague vision which is no use at all.
The Vision:
Once you have your Essentials sorted out it is time to create the vision. I teach my clients a process to project their time line into the future and then shift into that future. Our brains are problem solving engines that take what they see now as real and present. So give it a clear vision of the future as if it were now and the mind will see it as reality. By building a clear image of that reality you give both your conscious mind and unconscious mind what they need to work with.
The process works best focusing on key points in time – 10 years, 5 years, 2 years and 1 year. Take time to get clear on your vision and write it down in detail. Make it as real as possible so that it becomes your reality.
As you take action and have decisions to make ask yourself, “Will this get me there?”. This is your decision making filter.
By using the decision making filter you will make easier and better decisions, keep on track and you will repeatedly activate the parts of your brain that hold the vision. This reinforces the neural connections in your brain and layers in your Vision.
Achievable Goals – old school/new school
Your Vison is not your Goal. Your goals come from your vision.
Most of us have been taught to set goals in ways that simply do not resonate with us – leaving us thinking we will never achieve them. For years goal setting processes have taught us to set big, scary goals based on what we think we want. They don’t always tap into what we actually want and means we generally set goals that are outside of our control to achieve. So we set a goal and part of us immediately gives up as we have no idea of how to achieve it. It is just too far off and too many things are outside of our control.
Imagine having goals that resonated with us and are under our control. It’s a fact of life that we only have control over what we think and what we do. Everything else is beyond the power of our control. Setting goals that are beyond our control puts in place blockers we struggle to overcome.
Its why I teach my clients to create a big medium and long term vision but only set goals for the short to medium term – and focus on things that are within their control.
A quick example: Don’t set of goal of 10 000 followers, instead make your goal to regularly and consistently creating the content and value that gets you quality followers. You control your output, not how many people choose to follow you. Get the output right and your get the right followers.
How does this work in Business:
Your Essentials, Vision and Goals make up the process I call Reverse Engineering the Future. By focusing on your Essentials, creating Goals you Control and building a clear vision you are able to put in place the steps to achieve the Vision.
In business this clarity of vision helps you move forward with the end in mind and develop a marketing process, sales process and brand that speaks to the right people. It helps you target the right price points with the right products/services, build a customer journey that turns strangers into raving fans and helps you put in place repeatable systems.
This Clarity of Vision is the first step in taking your business to the next level, making it sustainable and giving you more time and money.
Have a great day!
Angus
We help the owners scale up, build a more profitable and sustainable businesses and get more free time. We provide Business Coaching and Training to help you get clear on the route forward, create the plan and develop the systems to take your business to the next level now. With Clarity, Certainty and Confidence.
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Originally posted on angusmaclennan.com