Are you taking the long and winding road to success?
Tomorrow I’m heading to the Banff Centre in the heart of the rocky mountains to attend an alumni retreat for Leadership Calgary, a community leadership program I took in 2004. It’s going to be an immersive weekend filled with insight, deep questioning and connection (here’s a taste – our pre-work included reading this and this).
I’ve been to Banff many times, so I’m clear on the fastest path to get there. I know which roads I’ll take, first to Starbucks, then to pick up my fellow alum, past client and close friend Chantel, and then to hit the highway. We’ve got to be there by 8:30 tomorrow morning, so there’s no time for taking side roads or just hoping we’ll find our way.
I’m sharing this, not to bore you with my travel details, but to draw a rather obvious comparison between driving from point A to point B in travel, and getting from point A to point B in your business.
We naturally understand that unless we’re on a casual road trip for the heck of it, it serves us best to map out the straightest path between destination A and destination B. It will save us time, money and resources and will make for a less stressful trip.
But why in business do we often over-complicate things and take the longest and hardest path to our destination?
If we’re at point A, we somehow feel the need to go from A to G to M back to C then to W with a pit-stop at O and finally ending at our destination of B (or abandoning the trip mid-way and circling back to A).
I see this again and again (and I’ve taken this circuitous route before too). Can you relate?
You make things way harder than you need to by taking the most indirect path to success. Sometimes it’s simply because you don’t know what the direct path would be, and other times it’s because there’s a limiting belief there (even if it’s subconscious) that success has to be hard and long. And still other times it’s simply because that’s the way you’ve always done it.
But success doesn’t have to be a long and winding road. And chances are good, that your path there is much closer than you think – you’ve just got to stop taking side roads and making detours.
I want you to focus on building a straight line to success.
How do you do this? Here’s my approach:
- Define success. It’s hard to map out a clear path to success if you don’t know what success looks like. Everyone’s definition is different, and it changes depending on where you’re at in your business and life. Take 10 minutes and make some notes about what success looks like for you, right here and right now.
- Get clear on what matters most. It’s easy to get trapped into thinking that to have success you’ve got to have a lot going on. Often, the opposite is true. What’s right in front of you that you could enhance and then leverage? What’s already working well that you could simply turn the volume up on? Look at your current business and get honest about, “If I invested 90 days into focusing on these things, my business would grow.” Avoid more and new. Use what you’ve got and make it work better for you.
- Narrow it down to 1-3 things. If you’ve got 10 priorities, then you have no priorities. Pick a window of time (I like 90 days or 6 months) and decide what you’ll focus on for that time period. Everything else gets tabled until you get to the other side of these three things.
- Map out the shortest path. Ask yourself, “What is my shortest path to achieve these priorities?” When you’re forced to tighten up your route, your creative brain will kick in and you’ll find new ways forward that aren’t as complicated as the ones you originally thought up.
- F.O.C.U.S. Now it’s time to stay on the route you mapped. Make pit-stops to refuel where necessary, but stay off the side roads and ignore the alluring signs that encourage you to get off course (no enchanted forest or world’s largest hamburgers for you). F.O.C.U.S = Follow One Course Until Successful. The most direct path to success is in direct correlation with your ability to follow through with what you map out in steps #1-4. Every side step means it takes longer, feels harder and delays success. Stay the course.
As the leader of your business, it’s your responsibility and opportunity to achieve your business goals faster and more efficiently. When you do this, you can bring in more resources (read: money) into your business, thereby equipping you with the capacity to serve better, impact more and stay in your zone of genius.
What’s your straight line to success? I promise it’s right there if you simply get out your map, grab a highlighter and commit to the course.
