Revolutionise Your Business Journey: From Vision to Bliss - The Unconventional Path to Entrepreneurial Fulfilment
The creation of a compelling vision of the future is the conventional starting point for most businesses when developing strategy. It provides the strategic direction for decision making, the catalyst for innovation, aligns collective resources and energy, and when matched to a purpose that matters to people, becomes a deep motivational force.
The problem comes when people stop enjoying the journey towards the vision. People can become so fixed on (or even obsessed with) its achievement that they lose sight of the things that matter most to them and gradually take less pleasure from the day-to-day.
The reality about vision is that you may or may not achieve it! Imagine working incredibly hard, doing things that you don’t enjoy and sacrificing a great deal for something that you may never realise – a recipe for stress, overwhelm, frustration, and burnout. It’s this situation that leads many entrepreneurs to fall out of love with their business!
As I’ve already said, vision is important; without it, businesses become rudderless. What’s equally important, however, is that we focus on enjoying the journey and making sure that the business's direction contributes to your and your employees' happiness and well-being.
To create engaged and motivated teams, therefore, requires a focus on aligning business vision, purpose, and goals with personal business and goals.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Ranier Strack, Suzanne Dyrchs, and Allison Bailey identified a series of life satisfaction benchmarks – illustrated below – that demonstrate the point at which people were most satisfied. What this demonstrates is that achieving a balance between the things that matter most to you and making them a part of your journey is likely to make that journey more enjoyable.
Source: Use Strategic Thinking to Create the Life You Want (hbr.org)
Achieving the balance between the achievement of business vision and goals and what’s important to people and makes them happy is a central focus of our work and embedded in programmes such as High-Performance FLOW.
Unlike conventional business programmes which take a business-first approach, we start with the person, then move onto teams and build back to the business. This approach means that the business takes people in the direction that they want to go (often the reason the entrepreneur started the business in the first place), creating a deeper connection with people's own vision, purpose, and goals, raising levels of motivation, innovation, and performance. Achieving this balance makes the realisation of the business’s vision a formality and helps entrepreneurs to stay in love with their business!
You can find out more about High-Performance FLOW and our next course here.
