In my profession people frequently ask me how I help my clients and how do people make a change in their careers or businesses?
As a Business & Leadership coach I help professionals with two things:
1) Successfully advance their careers/businesses
2) Redefine or repurpose their careers.
For both sets of clients, I teach very specific principles, steps and share specific tools.
In this post I want to share one important foundation piece that I take my clients through and that is the process of having a VISION.
All my clients go through this process whether it’s a small business owner redefining their business goals, a corporate professional looking to get more clarity or reach their next career milestone, or a director in a Fortune100 organization wanting to make a greater impact. No matter who I’ve worked with, I have taken them through this one step because it’s a critical step that a lot of people fail to recognise the importance of....and that is the process of having a vision.
What do I mean by vision?
A vision helps you know where you're headed. If you don't know where you're headed, how are you going to put a path in place? How are you going to know what steps to take in order to reach that point? It's like having an overarching goal from where everything starts to have meaning and purpose.
You’ve got to know where it is you're going, know what that looks like for you and know what it is you want in your career or business. It’s equally important to know the things that you don't want.
The reason I pay a lot of attention and focus on this right at the very beginning is because it sets the foundation for everything else.
In my former corporate career, this was such a significant turning point in my career. It changed my entire career trajectory when I started to focus on what I wanted my career to look like and started asking the right questions.
- What do I really want in my career?
- What do I want to experience on a day-to-day basis?
I started to really think about these pieces.
I began thinking about:
- How much or how little do I want to travel for work?
- Did I really want live out of a suitcase each week?
- Where do I want to be located?
- What type of work do I want to do?
At that point in my career, I made a decision that I didn't want to be pigeon holed in a technical role anymore. I wanted to step more into the business side of things and expand my skills there because I feel that's where I could best contribute.
I used that vision to make decisions as to what kind of opportunities I was willing to take on and not willing to take on, and really stuck firm to it instead of taking on roles and positions because it paid really well or out of fear because I was worried I may not get anything else!
These are not the right reasons to take on a role or a position. If you really want to create a career that’s going to see you fulfilled, successful, impactful and see you contributing in a way that's natural, using your skills effortlessly, then you’ve got to have a vision in place.
Eventually this process would see me leave my corporate career and start a number of businesses before specialising in leadership development and coaching.
Every client who I've taken through this process has had a complete transformation too, by starting with this core foundation piece. For one client it was admitting to himself what he was capable of doing more, and that he wanted to get involved with larger scale projects and programs.
Another senior executive client had been experiencing stagnation, and recognised he was doing a lot but not necessarily working in the right areas of the business or working to his full capacity. We started looking at what more could he could be doing and how he could be doing things differently.
After working on the vision piece we worked backwards, to see what he needed to start doing in order to fulfill that vision. With some fine-tuning and within a matter of a month he started to get invited to host high visibility meetings and run high profile pieces of work. Everything changed from there on.
For several other clients they realised it was time to change their career direction all together.
A vision has to be something that's in complete alignment to you, one that makes your heart sing, makes you want to wake up every morning knowing that when you go to work you're contributing positively and making a difference in your role, your business or career.
That's the point you'll start seeing the rewards you deserve financially, the recognition you're looking for and your ability to make an impact. All these external attributes become a by-product once you start the process of internalising what is going to work and be in alignment for you and your career.
Having a clear vision is what makes the difference between staying average and becoming stuck in a rut in life versus doing amazing things and getting amazing opportunities and rewards.
Have you thought about your vision lately?
Feeling stuck in your business or career? Ready to redefine success on your terms? Sign up for a Complimentary Planning Session by clicking here: www.ConnectWithShivani.com