Think about the Future

In the last two posts, reflecting on what I was hearing at the National Speakers Association’s annual convention, I reminded you that knowing what to do and doing it will never guarantee you will be as successful as the one telling you what to do. In fact, you might not be successful at all. The simple reason for this is that success is NOT a function of what you DO but a function of WHO YOU ARE! And who are you? That is determined by how you think and operate in the world.

Every truly successful person thinks in a way that is the source of their success. Successful leaders think differently than leaders who are not successful, that is the bottom line. So if you want to be successful and be a successful leader, learn to think like successful people and successful leaders think.

In the last two posts, I pointed to a few differences to pique your interest. Here is another that I was thinking about today:

What do most people spend their time thinking about? If you look, I think it’s likely that your answer is: what’s going on in your life and your business right now, what your challenges are, and what you’re going to do about them or how you’re going to deal with them. Am I off base? My assertion is that this is the pathway to being unsuccessful.

Why? In the simplest of all words, you get more of what you think about. There is no such thing as an idle thought. Every thought creates on some level. So whether you understand how this works or not, what you’re seeing in front of you is simply an out-picturing of your past thoughts. As a result, the consequence of spending your time thinking about your present concerns and challenges and what you’re going to do about them guarantees a future that is very similar to the present with the same or similar concerns and challenges.

Successful leaders think about the future they want to create. They have a clear picture of their vision for the future, they have a strategic objective for how much of that future they will accomplish in the next 3 – 5 years, and they spend their time thinking about and taking action on behalf of that objective. Yes, there are concerns and challenges that have to be dealt with today, but they are dealt with inside of the context created by the strategic objective. So even though you may spend your day in a way that looks the same or similar, since the context is different, the result will also be different.

For many of you, these ideas will be pretty obvious. For those of you for whom they are not, please go to www.UnshackledLeadership.com, read about our philosophy, check out some of the learning resources, or give us a call for some coaching.