The Secret To Getting Crystal Clear On All Your Goals
Dan Sullivan
The following is an excerpt from the book Your Life As A Strategy Circle by Dan Sullivan.
There’s a growth of overall intelligence, creativity, and capability that happens when you fully engage with a goal. And that’s the real transformation.
You don’t achieve your goal—you actually become the goal. You take the obstacles to the goal and use them to transform yourself. The goal is actually just a picture of yourself operating at a higher level. It’s you in the future with different capabilities.
When you have that kind of goal, you become clear on which decisions, communications, plans, and teamwork are truly crucial in order to achieve your particular vision.
Suddenly clear and focused.
You have obstacles that need to be transformed, and your current situation of having the goal and the obstacles will require you to go through all of your memories and experiences, and you’ll become very aware right away of what’s already available to you.
Your engagement with the obstacles will enable you to see exactly what transformations will be required to identify the shortest, fastest, and easiest path forward to achieving your biggest and best goal.
A tension is created between what you want and what stands between you and that goal, and the tension pulls forward every available personal resource, and other people’s resources, in order to transform all the obstacles into actions that will lead you forward.
The obstacles are only there because of your goal, and they’re showing you how to achieve it. You don’t get the payoff for free; you have to engage with both sides.
Accessing past successes.
All of your past successes in achieving goals in your entire life, in all kinds of situations, are now available to you as lessons and indicators that point to how the obstacles to your goals can be transformed.
You don’t have access to your memories unless you’re engaging with your future. This is because your brain wants to take advantage of anything that even looks like it could potentially be a solution to something you’re facing.
If you’re not engaging with a future vision that’s big enough, your memories won’t come into play, and you’ll feel intensely that there are serious obstacles to moving ahead. But your memories are just sitting there, and they hold a lot of experiences in similar types of situations to what you’re facing now. Your brain is very good at spotting anything you’ve already done that might be a solution for your current situation.
There is all of this latent knowledge and wisdom already in your brain that you can suddenly access when you have a future vision of something bigger and better, and corresponding obstacles that you need to overcome.
Ready to start transforming obstacles into strategies? Get your copy of Your Life As A Strategy Circle today to discover the secret power of your own imagination (and see why this one tool launched a coaching revolution!).
Best intelligence and creativity.
When you’re fully engaged with responding to the unique obstacles to a unique goal, you’re at your smartest and most creative. Every time you go through the VOTA process, you’re operating completely inside your own uniquely transformational experience that’s entirely new, fascinating, and motivating.
And whenever you’re in that situation, it means that all of your best intelligence, creativity, and skills are strategically focused on a bigger and better achievement.
You also need to put other people’s skills to the task of transforming the obstacles to achieve your goal, and this requires strength in the category of recognizing the “what” and the “why.”
What’s to be achieved and why.
You have to be prepared to tell other capable people around you exactly what your bigger and better future vision looks like, and to clearly communicate to them exactly why achieving the goal is so important, not only for you, but also for them.
Since you want these other individuals to contribute their skills in order to achieve what you’ve envisioned, you have to communicate your goal so effectively that it also becomes their goal.
Make sure to be clear about exactly what the end result looks like so that no one finds themselves wasting time on working toward achieving something different than the shared goal.
I used to be very good at a whole bunch of “hows,” but I wasn’t very good at expressing the “whats” and the “whys,” and The Strategy Circle has been part of what’s changed that for me. The Strategy Circle has you define what it is that you’re shooting for and apply measurements to it. That’s the “what.”
It’s then the “why” that makes it possible for you to not do all the “hows” by yourself, because by communicating the “what” and the “why,” other people will see exactly what it is that needs to get done.
Your plan creates a team.
You now have a plan for achieving your goals that makes the best integrated use of both your best abilities and those of everyone else who launches into action, including those whose knowledge and skills are required as the project moves toward completion.
You have to put all of the right elements into place in order to get the optimum result. VOTA and The Strategy Circle set up the best possible focused, energetic environment for bringing out everybody’s best intelligence, creativity, and capability.
One of the byproducts of your continued mastery of The Strategy Circle is that you’ll keep attracting better people around you. They’ll hear what it is that you’re up to, they’ll get it, and they’ll go for it as part of your team.
The amount of intelligence and creativity in the teams that I’m a part of is incomparably more than my own intelligence and creativity.
