Where Is It That You Want Your Business To Be?
The way into a thing is the way out of a thing.
Let’s say you’re driving down a winding country road and you get lost. You struggle trying to find the way back but every turn you take just takes you down another wrong path and you become even more confused and unsure. Nightfall is upon you and the gas tank is nearing empty; fear sets in.
So is our journey in life at times. Have you ever hit an obstacle in your life and you don’t know which way to turn? You start taking one action after another in an attempt to remedy the situation and it just gets worse. Soon you become completely bewildered and confused; you are at the effect of choices that you made along the way. Your actions had good intent in that they sought to provide you with pleasure and comfort vs. pain; normal responses as we journey down our life’s path in a reaction mode. But now you are stuck, stuck in old patterns and internal blocks that once seemed useful, but now present as a collection of debris stopping the creative flow in our life at best, and at worst, causing paralyzing fear.
So it is that the way we got into a thing is the way out of the thing. Simply logical but so difficult to implement.
Why Your Business Struggles
Businesses are no different. Business success or failure is the sum total of the collective consciousness of each individual within and surrounding that business. If we encounter internal blocks that confuse and distress us as individuals, imagine the energetic challenge a business faces as problems and road blocks arise. How does that show up? What does that look like? Most of the time it means that there is a lot of coping, hiding (hoping things will get better), making decisions in a vacuum (without a review of each variable), reacting (no vision, value awareness or plan) and not communicating effectively, leading to a lack of productivity, ineffectiveness, lack of positive flow and ultimately decreased profit potential, and in the case of the individual, a lot of frustration and feeling stuck.
What’s Stopping You?
So back to this idea that “the way we got into a thing is the way out of the thing”. When things get bad enough and we have had enough, either on an individual level or within an organization, and if we’re smart, we realize that the sum total of all our external actions have created our current disaster, so we stop and begin to take a look within and start to ask ourselves repeatedly and earnestly: ‘how did I/we get here, in this current situation’? This process is deep and sometimes very arduous, but also very liberating if we stay the course. As we trace our steps, and start to see how we got into a situation, we can now reverse the process and back our way out—discovering what it took to find our way there is what it will take to find our way out.
The good news is that we can consciously create our reality and lead our lives and businesses going forward through awareness based choice. By taking stock of our ultimate vision, seeing what it is we as individuals and organizations value and by creating a plan that is vision and value based, we will have a road map to guide us through the process of conscious choice. With map in hand, our actions will take us where it is that we choose to go, not where it is that we simply end up.