Happy Hew Year to you. I wish you a very prosperous 2017 and trust you had a joyful holiday season. I was fortunate enough to have some well deserved time off and managed to spend some quality time with my horses. This meant I’ve been fortunate to witness some amazing sunrises and sunsets, as well as the frosty mornings and a good dose of fog thrown in to.
Up here in Yorkshire the foggy mornings are surreal. On one particular morning the fog was so enveloping I could barely see past the front of my car. It was a strange experience because there was a comfort in that space, even though I had no idea where I was going and felt really disconnected from everything around me. However, of course the downside was I had no clarity. It was really difficult to get to the yard and find the horses, and everything took forever. I simply couldn’t get any momentum and speed as I had to be super cautious in everything I was doing. And this got me to thinking about business, and how often we experience our own fog.
Fog in business comes from having no focus and clarity. It comes form not being certain what we are doing and having no clear direction. Often I find the fog is worst with business owners who are have become disconnected from their purpose. They have forgotten why they went into business and the impact they wanted to make. They get easily distracted and suffer from what I call Entrepreneurial Attention Deficit Disorder. Everything new is exciting and they don’t stay committed to one thing. As a result they go round and round in circles as they can’t find their way out of the fog filled vacuum they are in.
When this occurs, when you are stuck in the fog haze, the only solution is get clarity. Get connected to your purpose and create an inspiring vision. Vision then becomes the focus button that propels you forward. Commit and then start taking small steps towards that vision. It won’t take long but soon the fog will begin to lift and then you are easily able to gather speed and go faster.
On that foggy morning the horses simply couldn’t see me. It meant we both stumbled around in the dark trying to find each other. Contrast that to yesterday morning which was bright and clear and so when the horses saw me they came galloping towards me. And isn’t that the same in business. When potential clients can’t see you they don’t know you are there, and so you stumble around in the dark looking for them. Contract that to a situation where you are embody clarity, everyone can see you and knows what you offer. It’s so much easier then for the clients to find you, just like my horses did.
If you feel you are lacking any focus in your business right now, stop and re-calibrate. Take some time to re-connect with the vision for your business and its purpose. Once you have done that then everything flows effortlessly from here. This is the reason that purpose and vision are at the heart of the business strategies that I help my clients create. We work together to create a living, actionable document on just one page that provides you with a road map of where you are going. This lifts the fog from your business and ensures you have focus and clarity, which means that each and every day you know exactly what to do, and so in the process it eliminates Entrepreneurial ADD.
So, if you’d like to explore how I can help you create your strategy on a page for 2017, please connect with me for a chat and let’s help you get focused so you can create the vision button for your business.
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
