SESSION FIVE Forming Your Vision

SESSION FIVE Forming Your Vision

We are stronger than we know. Like deep wells, we have a capacity for sustained creative action. Our lost dream can come home to us. Julia Cameron, Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance

Focus: The Journey? You are in the midst of a journey. A Dream is critical to the journey; a Vision is essential for the Dream to become a reality; this is the Journey. Like all adventurous journeys, you never know what s going to happen to you along the way if you did, it would be called a trip. To successfully complete this Journey, this entrepreneurial odyssey, you need to be passionately invested in creating something remarkable. So now is a good time to do a reality check on your commitment to this Journey. 1. Does the Idea for your business exceed anything you have ever imagined doing before? Y N 2. Is your Dream bigger than anything you have believed yourself capable of before this moment? Y N 3. Does your Dream have the potential of transforming a large number of people s lives? Y N 4. Does your Dream challenge you sufficiently to risk everything you have to make it a reality? Y N 5. Are you ready and willing to change the world no matter what might happen to you, so help you God? Y N 501

The Thinker: Designing The How When the Dreamer is done, the Thinker comes onstage. Where the Dreamer is all about the What, the Thinker is all about the How. The Dreamer, of course, is never really done. But there is that exquisite moment when every Dreamer knows its time to hand off the Dream to the Thinker, without whose active engagement the Dream will float adrift. The relationship between your Dreamer and your Thinker is a very delicate one. If the Dreamer becomes overwhelmed by the Thinker s incredible leftbrain energy, the whole enterprise can quickly come tumbling down. To prevent that, you must take your Dream apart, study every minute detail, and then put it back together again to see what it looks like. So when you, the Dreamer, begin to doubt your judgement, ask this question, What do I want? Ask it as frequently as you can. Your Dream is more important at this point than your Vision. More important than anything else. Your Dream is everything. It will form the justification for your enterprise. You need to develop as many ways to express your Dream as possible. You need to find the reason for the world to say, So this is why you re so passionate about your Dream. Aha, I get it. You need also to pay attention to your Dream every day. Tell stories about your Dream every day. Especially now when you ve invited your Thinker to help you left-brain it. The Thinker is the left-brained side of the right-brained Dreamer who, as a now intelligently emerging and evolving creator, is beginning the rich, incredibly creative process of inventing your new enterprise your taking of an ordinary business and doing it extraordinary. Your Thinker is now ready to embark on the Journey to answer the questions about your business: What does it do? How does it do it? Why does it do it that way? How does it make money? 502

Taking The Dream Apart Again How do you move from Dream to Vision? Say your Dream is to transform the way medical services are provided to senior citizens. Start thinking about it. Do you start by doing research on medical services for senior citizens? Or do you start by thinking about what it feels like to be a senior citizen? And what kind of senior citizens are we talking about? A senior citizen with few financial problems, who is well insured, or a senior citizen who is not insured and has little discretionary income? Are we speaking about a senior citizen who lives with his or her family, or a senior citizen who is living on his or her own? Are we thinking about a senior citizen who is living in a rest home or an assisted-care center? Are we talking about a senior citizen who is active, or a senior citizen who has stopped participating in their community? Wouldn t you want to begin by talking to a lot of senior citizens who fit the model of senior citizen who will benefit from your Dream of transforming the medical services they receive? What does it feel like to them as they make an appointment with their medical care provider? What s going on in their minds? What does it feel like to be waiting for the doctor s conclusions? What does it feel like to be them following their visit, going home, being who they are, elderly people approaching the end of their lives? What questions, fears, and thoughts do they have on their mind? There are a host of questions we need to ask as we begin the process of converting our Dream into a moving and intelligent Vision. And it is here where we are attempting to bring our Dream down to earth where we can see it, touch it, feel it, and do it. 503

Focus: Notes To Myself As you journey from Dreamer to Thinker, you are going to be bombarded with ideas, answers to questions, and more questions and more answers. Get in the habit of writing down, saving and tracking your ideas now! It s said that Stephen King kept a drawer full of scraps of paper. Each paper contained a thought or a story idea that he would later use in one of his stories. Whenever he felt the need for inspiration, King would open his drawer of ideas and pull a scrap of paper out. You can never take too many notes. Write notes wherever you are. Get a memo pad and call it Notes to Myself. As you continue this workshop, write Notes to Myself, reflecting on the insights you are accumulating. Insights. Insights. Insight. Start now. Write whatever comes into your head. Don t think about it. Just write it down. Now. 504

Ten Pillars There are 10 Pillars that are essential to transforming your Dream for your ordinary business done extraordinarily into a Vision. (Your Facilitator will review each of these with you). The First Pillar: All businesses require a Vision. A business without a Vision has no soul; a business without a soul has no heart, no passion. A business without passion is a business whose demise has already been foretold. The Second Pillar: All Visions are both personal and impersonal. A Vision is comprised of your primary aim and your strategic objective. The first is the Vision for your life. The second is the Vision for your business. Together, these two Visions make one Vision that will become the driving force for the growth of your business. The Third Pillar: Every company is an organization. It is an organization of work, and subsequently, an organization of people. That calls for the development of an organization chart. The Fourth Pillar: An organization is an organization of systems. Within the organization chart there are actions for each and every component of the chart, for each component of every function: how-wedo-this and how-we-do-that the mechanics of the business. The Fifth Pillar: There is no such thing as customer service. There is only customer commitment which comes down to making an outrageous promise to your customer that you keep every single time. That outrageous promise becomes your brand. The Sixth Pillar: Master the money. From the bottom of your business to the top of your business, everyone in your business must become a Master of Money. The Seventh Pillar: Your people are not your business. Your business is its own reality, which includes your people, but is not your people. Your Vision must possess a way of providing your people with what they need, provided they give your business what it needs this is where standards and rules of the game come into play. 505

The Eighth Pillar: Your business is an idea. It is either a great idea or a bad idea. There are no other ideas worth talking about. The Ninth Pillar: You know more about your business than anyone else does. You can t hire people who know as much as about your business as well as you do. If you can, you are in the wrong business. The Tenth Pillar: A business must mean something. For your business to mean something, it has to do something that means something. The meaning of your business is directly tied to the results it produces. 506

Focus: Ten More Questions When you move from the Dream to the Vision, the form of your company becomes specific as opposed to general. That specificity begs you to ask more questions than you re capable of answering at this point. So, as you read through these questions, simply write down whatever comes to your heart and hand. Don t think about it. Just write. 1. What is the core Vision of your company? What is the one thing it must do, and do extraordinarily, for your Dream to be realized? 2a. What do you want for your life? 2b. What do you want for your business? 507

3. You will be creating an Organization Chart later. For now, write down the primary and secondary functions within your business. 4. Again, you will be creating a Systems list later. For now, write down the primary and secondary systems that will accomplish the functions of your business. 5. What is your outrageous promise to your customers; the promise that you will keep every single time and that will become your brand? 508

6. How does your business make money? 7. What is the business philosophy that provides your people with what they want, provided they give your business what it needs? 8. Is your business idea a great Idea? (If you answer No, get out now). What makes it a great idea? 509

9. How will you inspire, educate, train and coach your people to know what you know about your business? 10. What do the results your business produce mean? Keep asking these questions. Never stop asking these questions. And when you get answers, and you will, write them down in your Notes to Myself. 510

Assignment 6: Models of Success To successfully answer more questions than you re capable of answering, look for others who have done so successfully look for models of success. Success leaves clues. Modeling does not mean imitation. It means finding answers that you want to make entirely your own. Select an ordinary business done extraordinarily upon which to model your business. Be ready to leap beyond what you already believe you know to be success strategies and step into a world of possibilities. Take the risk to model a business that might be outside of your comfort zone. Be prepared to do something you have not done before in order to get the extraordinary result you have not had before. Remember Einstein: Insanity is to do something in the same way you have always done it in order to get a different result. Over the next week, look for examples of unlikely excellence. Look for these examples all the time. In magazines, in the news, on the street. Pick one and describe it below. Bring your thoughts to the next Dreaming Room session. 1. Who or what is your success model? 511

2. Why is it your success model? How does your success model answer the Ten More Questions? 512

3. What are the characteristics of your success model that make it your success model? 513

4. What are you saying to the world about your new idea for a company that works better than any other...so that it becomes clear to the people you are speaking to that yes, of course, that is surely incredible, there is no doubt about it, if you could do that, why, of course, it would be great? 514