Have you ever been told to write down a vision for your life?
Have you actually done it?
Do you read that vision every day and have a plan for making that vision become reality?
Typically, when we ask these questions at team workshops, we’re facilitating for our clients. By the third question, never more than two people are nodding their heads.
Why is that though?
Why is it that so many of us know the fundamental process to achieving the life we want (write it down, visualise it daily, and make a plan to achieve it), but so few of us actually take the necessary actions?
Why do we procrastinate on, get too busy for, or simply ignore doing the one thing that has been proven time and time again to work?
As business coaches for over 18 years, we think it comes down to just one core reason – in our heart-of-hearts, we don’t believe it’s possible for us to create the life we truly want.
There is a universal quirk in human thinking which assumes how we are today is how it will always be. We have a tendency to see ourselves and our circumstances as constant and unchanging.
Don’t believe us? Think about how dramatically your thinking has shifted on something as minor as booking an international flight. Prior to the pandemic, would you have ever questioned booking an international flight months ahead of when you intended to fly? Sure, you probably took out travel insurance just to be safe, but did you really think you’d not be getting on that flight? Likely not, otherwise you wouldn’t have booked it in the first place.
Most business owners spend the majority of their time reacting to what’s happening in their business. Their days are so filled with putting out fires, managing employees and trying to get ahead, that they feel like they can’t take a step back, otherwise everything they’ve worked so hard to build will come crashing down.
Because they feel trapped by what’s happening in their business, they inevitably search ‘quick-fixes’ and ‘silver-bullets’.
Here are some of the ‘quick-fixes’ our clients tried before coming to Kaibizzen.
One sent their key staff out of the office for ‘leadership training’, only to soon notice that nothing from the course had been sustainably implemented.
Another invested more than $50,000 dollars on a new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Software. This promised to streamline their production process and give the owner a ‘dashboard’ from which they can operate their business remotely. Not long after, it was completely abandoned when they realised it didn’t suit the workflow specific to their company.
Another also invested thousands of dollars on a variety of personal development courses, leadership courses, and business masterminds. Although there was always a random collection of great ideas on how to improve their business, they struggled to implement them. With each failed new idea, their employees became less and less trusting of their ability to manage the business, and a culture of mistrust and apathy set in.
For the vast majority of our clients, our PPP Methodtm process is the first time they’ve seriously considered what lifestyle they truly want to live. For almost all of them, it’s certainly the first time they’ve written it down in such a way they can clearly visualise it. Unsurprisingly then, it’s also typically the first time they’ve created a plan which maps out how they’ll get from where they are to where they ultimately want to be.
When clients start with us for business coaching, we’d guess over 95 per cent of them feel completely disconnected from their future self. They see very little, if any, correlation between who they are now, and who they will be in the future. Hence, they put off taking the sometimes hard and often uncomfortable actions they need to do now, in order to have what they want in the future.
For example, many business owners say that ‘someday’ they’d like to work less, but the actions they’re taking today simply won’t create that reality.
Here are a few examples of common actions business owners take that keep them stuck in their current reality:
We understand you know that holding your people accountable, delegation, and effective leadership are critical to your business success. And yet, time after time, you put off doing what you know you ‘should’ be doing.
You put it off because you’re not actually invested in the outcome for your future self.
A quick straw poll of how connected our clients feel to their ‘future self’ yielded some interesting results.
We spoke with clients and asked them to rate their relationship with their future self on a scale of 1 to 7. All of them rated themselves between 4 to 6, and mentioned that if we had asked them six months earlier, they would have rated their relationship at a 1 or 2.
Our unique PPP Methodtm helps our clients uncover the life they truly want to lead – a life in accordance with their highest values. By building this vision on the foundations of their highest values, they immediately feel more connected to this future version of themselves.
To deepen their connection with their future self, each client is instructed to make reading their life story a daily habit. The more they read and connect with their vision, the more they think and talk about it and evidently the more real it becomes to them. As a result, they will become more committed to doing whatever they have to do to achieve it.
To quote Nietzsche, ‘he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.’ Your life story is your why. The plan you make to achieve it becomes your how. If you’re fed up with not getting the life you want why not contact us at Kaibizzen? As business coaches, we would love to guide and support you as you create the life and business you deserve for you and your family.
What does it take to actually remove yourself from the day-to-day grind of business? Learn from our panel of Business Owners who've Been There, Done That.
