Strength, Strategy, Success – An inward look towards building momentum.
It was 2017, 5 years into the growth of JMG. I was in a place where the work I was taking in and providing to clients seemed elementary to my growth, experience and in demand that my clients were beginning to request. I was teetering between elevating our service experience all while what felt like scrounging either to retain current clients or find new ones that had a need for some of our basic services. I was exhausted, bored and had entirely lost my motivation. My leadership was feeling halted, and my team vibe was beginning to operate in a monotonous way. I wanted more, but I also knew my company brand had been locked into this positioning that we were limited to what we could offer.
Now JMG is a service business, so our service is our experience and knowledge. ?Essentially, we are knowledge brokers that can project manage to deliver desired outcomes in terms of branding, asset creation, events, and campaigns. We had a plethora of resources to call in to make the desired outcome become a reality. My team was great, but what I recognized 5-6 years into designing my business was I had created a really cool job for myself. Sure, I had employees, an office, a brand, a website, a rate card, and amazing clients that paid me well, but the major a-ha was that I simply created a job for myself and not a business I could lead. I was a high-level project manager, but I knew I was made for more. My desire to deliver beyond a project was festering a burning intensity that was sucking the oxygen out of the room that I was expected to show up in and lead each day. It was getting hard to breathe.
So, for me, I called for help. I needed clarity on what to do to catch my breath for one, and then step into the place where I could thrive and feel successful. But I knew my reality was not what my vision was, and I felt like my hands were tied to keep doing what was I doing as I created. I also knew my vision was very foggy. I needed help to gain clarity, and this was a new level of elevation for me, like uncharted territory.
Everything in my service, team, and leadership has changed in the last 5 years since I began really looking at my vision and what success really meant to me. Here is a look at the three things that really allowed me to level up to my today, and what I am using to embrace into what my next transformation and growth will provide, STRENGTH, STRATEGY and SUCCESS.
STRENGTH
Strength comes from your VISION, your solid and discerning commitment to your goals, desired outcomes, impact, lifestyle, and emotional wellbeing.
And our VISION will test our strength in a way to keep us connected to our core values, hold us accountable and push us to full commit when we let it.
Our commitment to building a business that lights us up is determined by the strength we carry in our commitment to our vision. What we want to invite in our strength is permission to challenge how we will get there. That statement of what got us here won’t get us there rings true in this discernment.
Today, I do a lot with Vision Mapping with clients, because if we don’t know where we are going, we will make decisions that keep us stagnant, or take us off path.
Embracing and honoring our strength is where things will impact us most. I learned and continue to learn that when we don’t know what to do, our vision does. It gives us the foundation to navigate new ideas, different approaches, and new technology, forcing along new efficiencies and a solid check and balance on what we have in place.
Ask yourself this: Is how you are showing up today, supporting an old version of life or vision that is no longer aligned with your desired vision of today? Vision is supposed to change, so shouldn’t our approach to our business creation and leadership too?
STRATEGY
Now we need to leverage our strength in our vision and get to work!! Strategy time, the plan of ACTION based on your desired outcome!
This is where we would reverse engineer a road map from where we stand today to where we are going. Keep in mind, this is just a guide. If we come up against a challenge and we don’t know what to do, our vision knows!
We need to lean into the thinking and creative design, dreaming and etching of options, so we can make a decision that allows us to continue moving toward the desired outcome.
Strategy essentially is the journey, the data, the feedback, and is effective only when we are accountable to the truth of what we are seeing, hearing, and experiencing within the confines of our actions.
Let’s remember though to be careful of our tendency to move right into strategy to achieve. Sometimes, there is more in the trust, the knowing and the operation over the strategy. If we are narrowed in on a specific path to grow or achieve, we will miss the budding opportunities that may just make the journey and the speed of progress EASY!!
Three Types of Strategy
1. Business Strategy- How a company will approach the marketplace, taking their products/service to the community.
2. Operational Strategy – the action plan to implement the business strategy. Asking questions like…
What processes do we need to have or improve?
What capabilities do we have or do we need?
What technologies do we need?
What are the human resources we need, and what is the desired outcome they are responsible for?
3. Transformational Strategy – The strategy we most avoid, that delivers the greatest result. The strategy of disrupting and questioning everything from systems, operations, people and approach; essentially to really test if that is what it will take to reach the desired outcome or is it an old pattern that is no longer driving success.
And, of course, this all leads us to the end game…
SUCCESS
Ultimately, this is seeing the reality of your desired outcome manifest!
Let me tell you, I was committed to the business strategy for years, with the same operational strategy that I defined to support my original vision, and I worked to perfect that system. It was a beautiful system for my old vision, but it was clearly not working to support my burning flame and new vision.
My growth came directly from TRANSFORMATIONAL strategy. It was when I got so uncomfortable with what was comfortable but not delivering what I most desired, that I finally committed to questioning everything. What I did was begin to take my new elevated vision and question if my system supported the path to achieve success. Let me tell you it was loud and clear that it did not and would not, so I had to make the decision to go all in.
Everything changed, my services, my team, my technology, my personal actions, my brand and how I needed to show up and make different decisions in a new way to get the results I needed.
Let me encourage you, in any way, any vision (big or small), leverage the strength of your desired outcome, and embrace transformational strategy to guide you toward new possibilities and success is to follow.