to work long hours or on weekends when your family is waiting for you at home, and only have a couple of “shoppers” stop by or be stood up for an appointment someone made with you.
It’s tough to make telephone calls, only to be met with hostile and rude people on the other end who curse at you or slam the phone down.
It’s discouraging to set goals, schedule interviews, explain the technical aspects and benefits of the products and services you provide, overcome customer’s objections and misconceptions, and go out of your way to give exceptional service, only to have your customer go elsewhere because they found the same product or service for a few dollars less.
Enough of these experiences can be discouraging for anyone. And after a while, some people just quit trying.
They find it easier to adjust their standard of living downward to match their income, than to adjust their income upward to create their desired standard of living.
They are no longer in control. Inflation dictates the price of things they buy, and competition and luck determine how much they have to spend. Fortunately for them, many of their competitors are in the same situation… so everyone’s results are stalled.
Vision, ideas and strategies alone, won’t create results. You’ve got to take action on them, if you expect anything different than what you’re currently getting.
And that Action needs to have a purpose – creating a result, both for yourself and particularly for others – a service it’s delivering. That means laying out Goals towards achieving the Vision.
For lack of Goals, we each get pulled off focus, day in and day out. Our attention gets snagged by distractions, so we don’t think things through to completion and take effective action on them in a timely manner.
The breakdowns get even worse as they’re magnified by the size of the company and team.
If no one on your team knows what goals they ALL should be working towards, every decision takes four times as long as it needs to, and often they aren’t even heading in the same direction.
What is it that gets you into action when that list is sitting there in front of you?
For my clients and course members, and me too, it takes one fundamental grounding point to get our attention and energy focused, inspired and into action. That is recognizing how our time and energy and attention are serving others. And how the results of our service to others will help us create a life we want to live.
But here’s a trick that gets left out of the conversation about ‘service’. Vision isn’t enough.
On a grand scale, for lack of a Vision, we spend our days in motion without direction. Without Goals there is no progress in achieving a Vision in and of itself.
