Strategic direction requires knowing
“What is Your Direction, vision or purpose” and “Where You are Now”
Once you understand this then you can start to put the steps in place to get there, which is your strategic direction.
The famous quote “A journey of a thousand smiles begins with a single step” – Lao Tzu.
There are 2 reasons you don’t have a strategic direction:
- 1You set a vision and spend all their time dreaming about it asking themselves constantly “When am I going to get there” and don’t take action to fill in the gap.
- 2You focus on the tasks and actioning all day, they have nothing to aim for. You shy away from setting a dream or vision, because it hasn’t worked in the past and you have been disappointed enough to not try it again.
These are the 2 extremes; the answer lies in a combination of these 2 reasons that you fail.
The first piece of the puzzle lies in the words you use to achieve a combination of vision and task.
The language (wording) is crucial you are using to describe your solution. This sounds very counter intuitive, the work OR & IF allow your brain and mindset to focus on one thing, not a combination. The word AND makes it possible to focus on both, in this case Vision AND the Task.
You need to set up a scenario where you can set a Vision and Take action towards achieving it. Notice the difference one word “and”.
It is not a matter of “this will only work IF I set a strong and clear Vision”,. The other word “I can only focus on tasks to do OR a Vision not both”.
Once you can change your habit to use the more powerful AND you will set better vision and actions.
Now that you are clear that both these can be achieved, the next step is how?
What lies in the Gap, the space between setting your vision and taking action? Most people get lost in this phase. Why is this so?
This phase is a hard part regardless whether you achieve your Vision or not. It's tough to stay motivated to keep completing tasks while sometimes thinking, are you getting there. Persistence is one of the answers to keep motivated but persistence with a structure works even better.
Time to think about what your Strategic Direction is now with a better insight.