My professional purpose is to help you, the broker, maximize your production and help you become and the best version of yourself. Why? Because happy agents sell more real estate. I do that by helping you solve problems that you face every day. If you can effectively solve your problems, you'll be happier in your business and in life.
Today, the problem I want to help you solve is the "how" behind creating clarity and building a vision for your life and business.
So, last week we covered how important it is to be really clear on what you want to create and how difficult it is to operate unless you have a vision for your life.
You need to really take ownership of the 2 big questions that drive everything:
How do you want to live?
Who do you want to become?
Having a vision is literally the spark plug that powers up the engine you'll need to hit all of your goals. But how do you create that clarity and a vision that you will take seriously, that’s meaningful to you and big enough to motivate you on a daily basis? I've created 5 steps that I've followed to "find my north star:”
- Realize the importance of the process. "Type A people think that vision and clarity are fluff. Those who think about vision this way tend to leap past the question of purpose and dive right into action." (Check out "The 12 Week Year" by Brian Moran)
- Understand that it is a thinking game. You could take days, weeks or months, but effort needs to be invested in this process.
- Be intentional about it. Go somewhere that inspires you. "We have to put ourselves in a place to receive the truth. This noisy world we live in with its commitments, deadlines, fix thises, do thats and expectations make it hard to get clarity and peace of mind, famous or not. So we have to consciously put ourselves in a place to receive that clarity. Whether that's prayer, meditation, a walk-about, being in the right company, a road trip or whatever it is for each of us." (Check out "Green Lights" by Matthew McConaughey)
- Journal your thoughts. "How do I want to live? Who do I want to become? "Don't rush it. Like I said, it could take a day, a week or months to really find that idea that gets you super excited to jump out of bed in the morning. Be patient.
- Take all of your thoughts and focus on just the most important items to you. Warren Buffett suggests that you "Create a list of the top 25 things you want to do in your life, delete the bottom 20 and focus on the top 5.” Pare these thoughts down to actionable, easy-to-understand and super meaningful points that you can build your goals around to support your vision. (Stay tuned for more on that next week)
Personally, I am using this process right now as think about the coming years. I'm in inning 7 of a 9-inning career; being an empty nester is not that far off, so the older you get, the more forced you are to "think" about this topic. Within the last few weeks, I've realized that I am quite happy with my current situation and want to maximize my impact over the coming years. So once you have clarity/a vision, you can start to reverse engineer and create quarterly goals, a 3-year goal and a 10-year goal. More on that next week, but I wanted to wrap up today with another excerpt from "Green Lights" by Matthew McConaughey. This is called his "Heaven on Earth Prayer.” He too has chased clarity and he had to find his in the jungles of South America and Africa.
"God, when I cross the truth, give me the awareness to receive it, the consciousness to recognize it, the presence to personalize it, the patience to preserve it and the courage to live it."
Team, if you want to get anywhere in life, you have to put time into an intentionally "visioneering" process. I've used this flight metaphor so much during my "Take Flight" course - if you were a pilot, would you ever start a flight without a destination fully programmed into your in-flight operating system? Right, a pilot would never do that, so why would we try to live our lives not knowing where we want to go? Seems so simple but 97 out of 100 people do exactly that: they wing it.
Your homework: Buy a journal or notebook and start collecting your thoughts. Start this "visioneering" process if you haven't done so already. We'll talk about how to put a plan around it next week.
