Vision boards are all the rage in direct sales and performance teams worldwide. As a Mary Kay Sales Director, I began every new Seminar year with my unit making vision boards for what they wanted to accomplish in the upcoming year and beyond. Rarely did the visions materialize as envisioned.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe in the power of visualization. I believe in invoking all our senses to create the life we desire before it happens. The challenge with this visioning exercise is that it’s too often conducted with only the end in mind. It’s all about where you’re going and by when. There is rarely anything about WHY you are going there, which is why the same goals and life visions so often end up on a person’s board every year, unattained.
Expanding on last week’s message a bit here, the why is the most vital piece of the puzzle! It’s so much more important than the what, where, or when. The Colonel often said, “If you know where you’re going and WHY you’re going there, it won’t matter how or when you get there.”
You see, there are whys with a small w, like “Why do I go to work? To get paid so I can pay my bills. That’s why I go to work.” But there are also WHYs in all caps. These are larger umbrella WHYs that affect your sense of significance and your ability to stick with the vision when the seas of life get rough. Maybe you are working extra shifts and using those wages to donate to the orphanage in Uganda you visited on a mission trip. Maybe you’re building a business that you can work from home, so you can be the primary caregiver to your spouse who is suffering from cancer. These are the all-caps WHYs.
In your career, if you don’t know why you are showing up, it’s all too easy to let small, petty setbacks get in the way. It’s all too easy not to show up at all. Dad pushed his daughters to always look to the WHY and only reset the time frame as necessary. Because when you can’t be stopped from pursuing the big WHY, even if how you achieve it, or when you achieve it changes, you know for certain that you will achieve it.
Read Lauren’s Whitepaper on The Nine Essentials of Significant Leadership.