Today, let’s simplify. Vision, Execution, Analysis, Reinvention; these four simple themes, cornerstones of business excellence that they are, they flow.
Let’s feel that flow, now. When you search for a vision, it is a vision of what? Yes, of transformation and glory, of course. Of victory achieved. Of battles won, challenges overcome. Yes, by all means! But how? By execution. Let’s turn that into a rule:
A vision without execution is not worth the effort of visualization.
The rule works two ways. If you don’t execute on your vision, you wasted all your effort in visualizing. But, more profoundly, your vision itself must be OF execution. Let’s say this one additional way.
As downhill is to water, so must execution be to vision.
You see victory, but you also see the executed steps that lead to that victory. Then, vision in place, you instantly flow into immediate execution. Isn’t that how it is supposed to be? And, isn’t that lovely?
For all four steps in our cycle, the same downhill forces must follow forward, flowing. With any form of completed execution in hand, be it glorious victory or ignominious defeat, we must awaken our analytical mind to play and replay the inner video tapes of our work. If we won, how did we do it and most of all, what must we repeat? If we lost, what caused the defeat and what must we change? It’s tempting to flow back uphill to vision, but that would be a mistake. Why?
We’re told in the wisdom of India that the same man never steps twice into a river, and the river he steps into is never the same, either. Your second step into the river is not the same as your first step. You never take your first step a second time, nor do you ever take your second step a second (or third!) time either. Each experience changes you. Every single one.
To be awake means to engage you mind as much as your hands in your work. Thus, rather than fighting or resisting change, clinging to false sense of comfort or familiarity, embrace your own reinvention. Take charge. Don’t just see your coming victory, see the greater, better, stronger, deeper, wiser and mightier you that wins that victory.
But, what is it to reinvent? Why, of course, it is to see the new you doing new things. It is to envision a better way and the better performer who executes that better way.
Do you follow the flow? Can you feel the gravitational pull down, like mountain water finding its way to the plain?
We’ll follow our metaphor of water’s journey further tomorrow. Today, start anywhere you like, with any of these steps. As you do, note also the coming step and feel its drawing force gently enticing you forward.
Isn’t progress wonderful?
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