A level of steadfastness
There is always a lot of talk about vision when it comes to leadership and getting what you want out of life. A key question when it comes to managing change, be it at the personal or organisational level surrounds it. Faith, on the other hand is more often associated with things religious or spiritual. They are not mutually exclusive, in fact they go hand in hand for if you are to achieve what you set out to achieve personally or professionally, it requires a level of steadfastness: Never, ever let go of your vision. If you do, you are as good as done for.
Your vision is your cornerstone
A touchstone is a standard or a criteria upon which something is judged; a cornerstone is the quality or feature upon which everything depends. In other words, without your vision, it all falls apart. That begs the question… How clear is your vision? What do you want? What does it look like? You simply cannot know where you are going if you do not have your vision clearly defined. Moreover, for anyone else to have a chance of buying into your vision you must first be clear yourself and remain true to it.
Do you see “what-is” or do you see what you are building?
It is easy to look at a situation for “what it is” rather than taking the long view of what it is you are building. It requires a level of foresight and creativity that frankly, not every possesses and yet as a small child we all had the ability to imagine. Human beings are endowed with the faculty of imagination which serves two purposes. It is both our test universe where we get to play with ideas about what we want to create. It is also how we initiate a pattern; the pattern of things to come that we call into the now from the future. Without this faculty we would never have ventured into space, we would never have attempted to land on the moon. Vision is the bridge from the impossible to the possible and the very ingredient that causes the imagined reality to “show up”. It is not so much without it nothing happens. It is more the case that you will get some default reality without it.
The biggest obstacle is your internal chatter
Human beings all have a little voice inside of our heads that will either make us or break us. What does your little voice say? It is your alley or your foe? Your champion or your nemesis? If you are like most people that voice is out of control and it is up to you to bring it under control and harness it and direct it in service of your vision. It’s like this. You are not responsible for your first thought; thoughts just come to you after all. However, if you honour it with a second and reinforcing thought now you are complicit. If those thought become spoken word you have just taken it up a notch and strengthened the pattern in line with the direction of those thoughts and words. Those thoughts will either take your closer to or further away from what you say you want.
Be mindful of your words
Your words are critical to your achieving your vision or not. Imagine buying a plant from a nursery, bringing it home and giving it pride of place at your front door. At first, it is beautiful, just like your vision. Instead of watering it and fertilising it, you give it a dose of poison from time to time. Even if you give it clean water intermittently or you occasionally fertilise it, what will the net result be, given you are giving it poison? Depending on the amount of poison you administer it will at best cling to life and at worst wither and die. Your thoughts and words are either poison or nourishment to your vision.
You cannot expect the best chance of success if you keep dosing yourself with poison. The logic is inescapable and the choice is your alone to make. In the words of Florence ScoveShinn
“Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.”
What is coming home to roost for you? If it is not what you want, stop paying lip-service and align your words to your vision. It is the single biggest factor you have in bringing it to fruition. The formula goes like this. Thoughts give rise to words and to actions. Those actions are correlated to your thoughts and words. Moreover, so are your results.