Reality
“This is a very important lesson: You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end (which you can never afford to lose) with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.”
- General Stockdale
If you are going to make it anywhere, there are two crucial pieces of data that you must have: where you are going and where you are. Google Maps requires my destination and then it either assumes my current location as a starting point or asks me to supply one.
Given that I spend most of my coaching hours with entrepreneurs and visionaries, I hear a lot about bold and dynamic destinations and cool possibilities. Their ability to see a preferable future and envision opportunities that others haven’t claimed is what has made them so successful. That essential coordinate in the mapping process they have down pat.
An honest assessment of where they are currently is not where they seem to spend a lot of time. The cold shower of present challenges and problems is typically why they are spending so much time focused on that ethereal destination. But knowing where you are is the most fundamental initial data set if you are going to make that journey.
Whether it is in our LifePlan process (you really have to attend one of these if you haven’t already!) or our strategic business coaching process, we require that stock be taken on what is going well and what’s not. We force both individuals and organizations to take a deep hard look at where they are currently utilizing a series of diagnostics.
Funny little coaching secret: not only does everyone already know what their problems are, but with a little questioning, discussion, and direction, they know what the solutions are as well. Brutal honestly about the current challenges allow you to remove the obstacles keeping you from getting to that inspired future.
When we survey teams, we can typically affinitize their responses into 3-5 core issues that almost all other problems are sourced from. Just giving them focus on a handful of things versus the hundreds of problems they feel like they are trying to solve is a real rescue.
For most leaders, they look at their companies and circumstance like watching a movie in a theater one inch from the screen. It is hard to see the whole picture or look at anything with real context. The tyranny of the urgent and the overwhelming requirements of day-to-day responsibilities consume their thoughts and minds.
But if they and their leadership can take a step back. If they could elevate above the morass of all that urgency, things can start to look a lot clearer. While driving the highway between here and Colorado, the trip was reduced to a series of dozens of individual turns that sequenced one after another on my phone. But when I would widen the map, I could see the larger story of the journey we were on, the progress we had made, and how much closer we were to those beloved mountains.
Consider
Are you clear on the destination you are working toward?
Have you done the difficult work of getting honest about your current situation?
Do you know what the handful of core issues you need to work on that will likely resolve most of the rest?
What is it costing you to not have this kind of clarity?