The Business Tool Top CEOs Use to Inspire Their Teams

When we've passed our vivid vision to our friends, they're starting to make sentences come true. So the more people that you share the vision for your life or your marriage or your company, they see one or two little sentences and they start to help you make those come true. It's almost like we assume that everybody saw the same movie. You know, if I just, if I walked around assuming that everyone has seen the movie the Sound of Music and I'm making references to the movie the Sound of the Music, you know, with Julie Andrews and the Hills Are Alive. But if you've never seen the movie, you have no idea what I'm talking about. And for the entrepreneur, they're very clear on what their company looks like. They're very clear on what the future is they're building. They're very clear on every aspect of the company and what they want it to be like because it's their vision. And everybody else shows up trying to make the best educated guesses on a day to day basis. Or the employees are focused on a project, they're focused on a goal, they're focused on an okr, but they don't have the whole picture. And that usually is where the confusion lies. Nobody shows up at work trying to make a mistake or trying to do a bad job. But you know, if you've never seen the movie, you're just guessing. Well, without. Well, there's always vision. The problem is that more often than not, the vision is not shared. Right. Again, the entrepreneur, the CEO tends to have a vision, but if they don't share it, everyone else is trying to figure it out. It's like herding cats. So in the absence of vision, you're constantly trying to align people, pull them back in place. You're getting frustrated. Why are you making that stupid decision? So like, have you seen the movie the Sound of Music? So there's a very famous scene in the movie where they're having a picnic and they're up in the Swiss Alps or the Austrian Alps, they're singing and dancing, they have a picnic basket. Julie Andrews is playing guitar and she's singing the Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music. It's a very famous scene. If you've never seen the movie, and I said to you, can you recreate the picnic scene? Is it at a park or at a lake or in the mountains? You might say it's at a park. And then I say, what are the kids doing at the picnic? Are they playing baseball, playing croquet or dancing? You're like oh, they're playing baseball and you know. Where did you get the food? We bought it from the grocery store. If you're trying to recreate a scene and you've never seen the movie, that sounds very plausible. Get the food at a grocery store, get all the kids together, have a pickup game of baseball. We'll have it at a park, maybe on the ocean. Sounds great. Wrong scene, wrong movie. That's what happens in business is entrepreneurs are getting frustrated that these very smart employees, often very aligned employees, are making up guesses because they don't have the rest of the picture. They don't know what the culture is supposed to be like. They don't know what the meeting rhythm is supposed to be like. They don't see what the CEO can see. Yeah, so the mission statement, which was really kind of developed back in the 70s and 80s, was a traditional tool where you would get a group of leaders together, they would all put their favorite inspiring words up on a whiteboard or a flip chart. They would vote and debate on what their favorite words were. They'd end up with seven or eight words and they'd mash them up into one sentence. And that became your mission statement. Right. Go team. Well, the reality was we all felt like it was kind of cheesy, stupid. It was very watered down. It felt very governmenty, frankly. And it didn't actually explain the whole kind of company. Again, if you're building a home and I said build a post modern architectural family home, that's kind of like a mission statement. But if I give you pictures and drawings and sketches, then you understand so much more of what I want the home to look like. It's a three story, it's got lots of glass, it's facing the ocean, it's got room for family. Oh, I see what the furniture looks like. It's very kind of like shabby chic, whatever it's going to be. Right. There's just so much more to the picture than that one sentence. The one page plan, which was a concept developed by Vern Harnish, who originally wrote Rockefeller Habits and then the book Scaling up, and then that was actually even made smaller into the Vision Traction Organizer. The VTO by Gino Wickman in his book Traction and used in the EOS model. Those are good, but they're a series of goals and focal points for a company. So the one page plan, which is actually 11 by 17, it's really two full pages, has things like your five year goals, your one year goal, your rocks, your bhag. Your core values, your vision. It has key metrics, it has all these different operating points, which is very, very critical. But those are kind of the almost like the architectural blueprints or the plans to make the vision come true. The same with the vto. The Vision Traction Organizer is merely a bunch of longer term goals that are going to help you make the vision or the vivid vision come true. What I crafted was that vivid vision concept. We learned it back in 1998, so we've been using it around the world for almost 26 years. This is a different tool that comes before the one page plan and comes before the vto and it massively replaces the mission statement, which is just completely useless. So the vivid vision is a four or five page written description of, of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future. So if we were writing it right now, we'd be leaning out to kind of December 31, 2026, and we'd be describing what our company feels like. Almost as if we hop into the DeLorean time machine, we kind of blast off three years into the future. We get out and we walk around and we describe our company. We don't know how we got there, so we can't explain how we built it. But we can describe every aspect of our company. We can describe what operations looks like, maybe with three or four points. We can describe what marketing looks like. We can describe it. We can describe finance. We can describe customer service. We can talk about our meeting rhythms and our use of dashboards. We can talk about what the customers are writing about us online and what our employees are writing on. Indeed. And Glassdoor. We can talk about our relationships with suppliers and banks. We can talk about the buzz and what the media is crafting about us. We can talk about the entire culture and feeling of our entire company as if we already built it. The key is to only lean out three years. If you go out 10 years or 20 years, you're really kind of starting to think about the bhag. It's just too far out there. It's important to have a bhag, right? To colonize Mars or to crush Adidas or. My BHAG is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. But that's kind of like a one sentence long term, big hairy, audacious goal, the Jim Collins concept. But you're not going to have a plan for something so far out. We don't have a plan to colonize Mars. We have that long term push. The plan is what we're working on kind of over the next one year to make the three year vivid vision come true. I was just speaking with a COO the other day, one of our members of the CEO alliance, and he said his CEO has written about eight pages in rough for the vivid vision. I said, perfect, tell them to stop and let's introduce them to a copywriter that can take those eight pages and kind of consolidate them down to four or five really, really well written pages. And let's get this copywriter to ask the CEO some more questions to better understand some of the areas to really craft something that pops off the page. I've rarely found a entrepreneur who's a great copywriter unless they're kind of in the copywriting or marketing business. Most entrepreneurs, most CEOs can get the vivid vision to a good solid rough series of bullet points or maybe a good solid rough draft. But the copywriter can polish it and make it pop off the page. If I was to stand up and I leaned out, if I lean too far, I fall over. So if you kind of lean too far out into the future, it's so far out there that nobody gets that excited about it because it's still seven years away or 10 years away that there's no tension to start working on it. It also just seems like so esoteric and so different from what you have today that it doesn't even seem plausible. Right? It's kind of like somebody who has never built their first home. Maybe they've painted a home and now they want to build a skyscraper. It's like, let's start with a home first, right? You're describing something that's just too far out there. And if you only go out one year, if you're describing your company one year from today, it probably doesn't look that different from what you have right now. It doesn't again provide enough excitement. So three years tended to feel like about that magic number. We also wanted people to make sure that they don't put the plans in place for three years out. You're going to have the vivid vision for three years. And it's key to make sure that people understand that some parts of it won't come true until the third year, some parts of it won't come true until the second year, some parts will come true in fourth quarter, third quarter, second quarter. The key is to put the plans in place for the first year and then towards the end of first year, you'll put in the second year plans, etc. For third year John Ashraf in the movie the Secret, popularized the concept of the vision board. And the vision board is a tool that is fantastic for one person. But the problem is a picture says a thousand words. So as an example, if I held up a. I don't have my book, a second in command in front of me, I should. But if I held up my first book, which is called Double, Double, and I'm showing you the picture of this book, what do you see on this book now? Maybe all I wanted to show you was the colors of white and red. Maybe this picture illustrated how red was an important color in my life. How the hell are you supposed to know that? Because a picture says a thousand words. So if I have a collage or a vision board with 20 pictures on it, those 20 pictures are going to represent something very powerful for me. My old vision board had a picture of a table with two champagne glasses on it. People might have thought it was like fancy entertaining, fancy dinners. All it meant for me was celebrate. The champagne glasses in the picture represented celebration. So for me, that was a good image. But for you, it might have been saying something completely different. So what I love is to write the vivid vision to share with your customers, your suppliers, your employees. You share it with potential employees. You share it with all the stakeholders. And then you can have each individual employee create a vision board for the pictures that would represent the parts of the vivid vision that they're excited about. So they could create something visual that sits at their desk, hangs over their office, place it up in their bathroom, whatever that vision board is. Something that's very, very powerful as a representational tool for a single person, but not to be shared amongst others. I have a partner who works with companies all over the world around Vivid Vision. Her name is Jennifer Houde. She helps clients craft their vivid visions. She's currently working on a model where we can take every sentence of the vivid vision and we can come up with one or two projects to make every sentence come true. And then you can end up with a laundry list. So let's say you've got 150 sentences in your vivid vision. You might end up with 300 projects to make those 150 sentences come true. Now, you can rank order those projects as to which ones you should work on first. Very similar to building a home. Most homeowners are super excited about putting in the Wolf stove and the beautiful cabinets and the sub zero fridge. But you don't put that in on day one, even though they're excited and they want to see what it looks like, you got to spend months working on the foundation. Then you spend months putting in the walls and the electrical and the plumbing and the framing. But they're all excited about that damn wolf stove and the stupid cabinets. So we have to remind them that parts of their home aren't going to come true until the 12th month, much like building a home. So the vivid vision is this series of projects, or it becomes a series of projects that you can then create the plans to focus on. And employees can now see what specifically we're doing to make each sentence come true. And they can also get excited about specific sentences or specific projects that excite them that are related to their business area. So they're starting to find meaning in their work. And it reminds me of an old story 100 years ago, these three guys sitting out on the dirt in Barcelona, and they're making bricks. And they asked the first guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm making bricks. They said to the second guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm building a wall. I get to make the bricks to build this wall. They asked the third guy, what are you doing? He said, we're building the cathedral called the Sagrada Familiar. It's going to be the most incredible cathedral to worship God. And I get to make the bricks to build the left wall of the cathedral. All three of them were doing the same job, but the one who saw the vivid vision, who understood the plans, saw value and meaning in their individual work as a part of the bigger picture. That's the power of the vivid vision concept and how it aligns people. The next time you have a really good dream at night, like a really great vivid dream, that was like, whoa, that was freaking cool. Try explaining your dream to somebody. You realize pretty quickly it's really hard to tell someone about the dream that you can still see in your. And finally you're like, oh, screw it. It was a great dream. Right? And so what happens for entrepreneurs is they get frustrated that people can't read their minds. Or I explained that to you. But we don't realize that there were all the other missing pieces. So the value here is the alignment. I've coached clients now in 28 countries to craft vivid visions in their countries. Multiple languages, multiple business types. The alignment power that happens from this is really incredible. I've also seen companies that have used their vivid vision to land bank financing because the bank finally understands what the business does. They never understood the business plans. They never understood the pitch deck. They Never understood the spreadsheets, but they read this four or five page description of the company, like, oh, I get it. And they're excited to invest. The second thing is I've seen clients go out or companies go out and land multi million dollar contracts from customers who were so excited about what the company was going to become versus what it is today. So I'm drinking a coffee right now and the lid is by Solo Cups. So do you know who Solo makes lids for coffee cups? I'm not drinking one right now, but they make them for Starbucks. Now if Starbucks back in 1986 went to solo and said, hey, we want you to make cups for our little coffee chain, they would have said, yeah, we're not interested. But if they sold them on the Vision three years later for what Starbucks was going to become, and maybe their vivid vision also explained the BHAG and their corporate they'd be like, I'll bet on you today. That's the power. The Vivid vision also gets employees to quit their jobs and come and work for companies. They'll quit their job and actually walk in a door for a company that isn't what they're going to become, but they're excited about getting to build towards that. The first step is you've got to get out of the box. You can't sit in your office and craft a vivid vision because you get stuck in planning, you get stuck in the how or you get dragged back into email, dragged back into slack, dragged back into discussions. Hey, do you have two minutes? You need to go somewhere where you're inspired. Ideally, I tell people to go somewhere around nature, Go sit near the golf course, go sit near the ocean or a lake or a river, go up in the mountains, go to a park if it's the middle of winter, go sit in some fancy 5 star hotel in the lobby by the fireplace. Sit somewhere where you can relax and it's inspiring and you can allow your mind to dream. And then do not take an iPad or a MacBook or a phone with you. Take an old school notebook and a pen and start to mind map about different aspects of your business. So a mind map is just a series of sections that you're going to jot down ideas about as they come to you, right? So you'll open up a book, you'll write down marketing and you'll scribble down a couple ideas and you'll think about sales, you'll scribble down a couple ideas. Oh, you got another marketing idea, you'll write it down Think about operations, think about customer. You keep scribbling down all these ideas of what your company looks like three years from now almost again, as if you kind of hopped out of the time machine and you walked around like, what would I describe my meetings to look like? How would my meetings be running? How would people be interacting at meetings? What tools are we using in meetings? You describe all of that, but then all of a sudden your brain goes, oh, marketing. We'll go write down a couple more marketing ideas. The key when you're doing this mind map is to spend a few hours doing it, right? If you want to smoke a doobie, smoke a doobie. If you want to put on some headphones and allow your mind to listen to some beautiful music as you're doing it, do that. Anything that gets your creatives to go. I usually inhale rosemary oil, which is an aromatherapy that allows you to open up your creative juices. In fact, that's how I met Simon Sinek, who wrote the book Start with why Simon Read about me in 2003, using rosemary oil as a creative outlet or creative juice. So allow your mind to drift, write down all the ideas. And the key is, don't worry about how it's going to happen. Right When I was getting ready to build a home in Vancouver, I didn't worry about how they were going to do the electrical or how they were going to do the plumbing or how they were going to hang the cabinets. I described the home, and I let the contractors and the teams that the contractor hired figure out how to make my vision come true. My job is to describe it in vivid detail so that others can figure out the how. So the entrepreneur is to figure out where we're going and describe it in enough rough points. After one or two sessions off site, you should have enough to meet with someone like a Jennifer Houde and her team at Conscious Copy to have them really craft out the beautiful, vivid vision for you. Where I used to go and do mine, I was going to pull up a photo to show you, but I would go and lie in my hammock in my backyard and I would put some headphones on and I would listen to the Grateful Dead and I would just allow my mind to drift and think about the future. And just by lying in the hammock for a few hours, I would kind of think about, what are my employees like? And then I'd write down things that inspired me. And it's just by writing down, as you pointed out, a few words, a few rough notes without Worrying about the how without trying to craft it into sentences. You're not trying to write the document. You're just scribbling down ideas for all the different business areas. So think about every business area on your org chart. Think about suppliers, think about customers, think about shareholders, think about core values, think about what it feels like when you're running the company. Describe your company culture, thinking about the business and describing it without again, knowing how it came true. Well, yeah, and you're handing it to somebody who's really, really good at it. So they can do it. They can get it done in a really good way and they can do faster. You know, look, you could go out and paint your own home, but would you, Right. Why would you paint your own home when you can hire somebody who loves to paint homes? And it can be done really quickly? Because we would take us forever to do it. We'd probably screw it up. We'd probably hurt ourselves doing it. It might not look that great when we're done. So it's easier to pay a professional to do it who's done hundreds and hundreds of these things. And again, if you're a trained copywriter, if you're kind of in that 1 or 2% of the entrepreneurs who actually are a trained copywriter, then go for it. By the way, quick sidebar on this, everyone listening. The next time you write a job posting where you're going to post a job to try to hire someone, get the job posting written so that it's 80 or 90% perfect and get a copywriter to polish that or run it through ChatGPT. I would, even though, run your vivid vision through ChatGPT and then get a professional copywriter to write this, because they've done these before. They understand the power of actually kind of crafting this written word in a different way. So the key, as you put it, is it has to be realistic. Right? There has to be. So I use a different acronym for smart goals for most people. For me, the S is shared, meaning when you write down a goal, you have to share it with a coach, share it with a peer, share it with a co worker. Something happens when you share your goals with somebody else. It provides some level of accountability and more commitment. The M for me is measurable. And every goal has to have a dollar sign, a number sign, or a percentage sign in the actual goal. Or it's too hazy. Right. There's no way to measure it. You didn't kind of win the hockey game. You either won or you lost because there's A score being kept. The A means it has to be attainable. So there has to be some way that you can actually make this happen. You have to be able to sit down and look at the goal or look at your vivid vision and start working on some of the plans and go, you know what, there's no way. It's not going to work. We're not going to be able to raise that much money. It's too big a project. And then you pare back the vivid vision into something that's realistic. Yes, it'll still feel like a bit of a stretch, but it actually, it has to feel attainable. The big hairy audacious goal is the very audacious long term stretch. So Jim Collins in his book Good to Great introduced us to this concept of the bhag, the big hairy audacious goal. What it is and it's not a billion lives or a million whatevers, it's not to be measurable. It has to be a long term, 20 or 30 year stretch that from outside the company seems impossible and from inside the company seems plausible. So back in 1972, Nike's BHAG was to crush Adidas, which was freaking crazy back in 72. Google's BHAG in 1997 was to democratize the world's information. Microsoft's BHAG in the late 80s was to put a computer on every desktop. My BHAG is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. So yes, your BHAG can be that very long term stretch and that's what everybody I think is talking about. But you're not going to put a like colonizing Mars is a bhag. But Elon doesn't have the specific vision for how that's all going to happen yet. It's just that aligning, wow, that would be cool. Driving force that we're working towards. The three year plan though is you know, putting all these satellites in space for Starlink. So once your vivid vision is crafted then we are as a company going to switch gears into how to make it come true. Right? Thomas Edison said vision without execution is hallucination. So we can't just craft the vivid vision and hope it comes true. Once we have this vivid vision, we're then going to put the plans in place to make the vision come true. And then we're going to start hiring the people and putting the resources in place to execute the plans to make the vivid vision come true. Much like building my dream home. To build the dream home, I'm absolutely Going to need the blueprints and the architectural drawings, the elevation drawings and the people and the contractors and the stuff to make it come true. But I'm not going to worry about how to do the electrical first. Going to worry about describing the dream home first. Once it's described, then yes, you absolutely switch gears. In fact, my friends, I'm really, really close friends with Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, who wrote the book, who not how. And they talk about the CEO's job is to recognize they don't need to know how to make it come true. They need to find the right who's to make their vivid vision come true. That's hiring the right second command, which why I wrote the book the Second Command. It's growing the skill sets of your management and leadership team. It's why I crafted the invest in your leaders course. When you start getting the right people in the right seats, like Jim Collins talked about, and you give them the skills and the confidence and the connections to do their job, they'll figure out how to make your vivid vision come true. I've always seen things kind of backwards. When I see the goal for something or when I know the finish date, I kind of somehow figure out the steps to get there. And I also figure out the shortcuts, the cheat sheets, or the path of least resistance to get there. For your vivid vision, you're going to start reverse engineering it. And I keep going back to this analogy of building a home. When I'm clear on what my home looks like, I can draw the blueprints. In fact, when I was building the home, if I go back to 2000, 2001, I remember having these sketches and drawings that I handed to our contractor in Vancouver of the fireplace and what I wanted the fireplace to look like. I was so clear on what I wanted it to look and feel like as part of the whole home. And then I don't know, six, seven months into the construction project, I walked into the front door and I turned into the living room and holy, right in front of me was my fireplace. And there was a guy sitting on the ground working on part of it. And I kind of walked up to the fireplace with the same awe that I would have looking at the Sagrada Familia. I was like, so excited. And I said, oh my gosh. And he goes, is it what you wanted? And I go, yes. And he holds up a little picture that I had given the contractor seven months before. And he said, I'm just working from the picture. And what I realized was when your vision is so clear, then an employee that you've never met can execute that vision. And that's the power of this stuff. You have your leadership team, you have your employees, you have your customers, and then you have your accountant, your lawyer, your bankers. So then you also have the potential customers and you have your potential employees, your current customers. You want them to see what you're building so they're excited about it and they can talk about it and they can feel confident with you and stick with you. You want your potential customers to see your vivid vision, so they decide to work with you. They decide to have you work with them. You want your current employees to be inspired and love where they're going or to quit and go somewhere else because they don't love the vivid vision. And you want new, great employees to be excited by what they get to build. And then you want the alignment. You want it to be easier for the leadership team to make decisions and plans. You want your bankers and accountants and lawyers to understand it so they understand how best to support you. So it's all of these different stakeholders have different uses for that vivid vision to help you make your dream come true. My core purpose, and it was funny, Simon Sinek, who I mentioned a while ago, helped me craft my why my core purpose one night sitting in my kitchen in Vancouver, and we came up with. My core purpose has always been to help entrepreneurs make their visions come true. I started coaching entrepreneurs in 1989, way before coaching was even a thing. And I've always wanted to help entrepreneurs make their visions come true, whether that's by growing their COO or growing their leadership team, or helping them with vivid visions or with my speaking, whatever it is, it's always helping them grow that business. So the tool of the vivid vision helps everybody else make the entrepreneur's vision come true in a different way, though. Years ago, I was doing a speaking event in again in Vancouver, Canada, and the company was called Citymax and the CEO's name was Dean Gagnon. And we had pulled all 85 of Dean's employees off site to curling club. Strangely, in Canada, we were running the leadership team meeting at this club. And at the end of running this leadership team meeting, Dean rolled out his vivid vision for what City Max was going to look like three years later to all 85 employees. And at the end of his presentation where they were all reading through it together, Dean on a slide deck said, and tomorrow morning when you come to work, please go to this address. And they're like, what he's like, what you don't realize is that today, while we were all off site, a moving company came and packed up our entire company and moved us to this address. And then he started showing photos of the new location. And he said, 85% of you are so excited to see what your new office looks like to help us build this vivid vision. And 15% of you are terrified and know that this is the wrong company for you. That means it's the right time for you to quit. Within six weeks, 15% of his company had quit. And two years later, Dean ranked as the number two company in Western Canada to work for. You have to be comfortable in knowing that when the right people are aligned, they'll go through brick walls for you and the other people can go somewhere else. Back in 2007, when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, he was crazy enough to say there was going to be no keyboard. And if you wanted to build a phone with a keyboard, you could go work for Nokia or go work for BlackBerry, for rim. But if you were crazy enough to want to build this, come to the dark side and join the future. That's where you have to be is if your vivid vision is so watered down, no one's going to care. No one's going to be inspired. You want to find the employees that are rolling their eyes. They're not that bought in, they're not that excited. They're debating everything because they're already unhappy. You know, I think it was Zappos who said that in the first two weeks of onboarding a new employee, they would say something to the effect of, if this doesn't sound like the kind of company you want to stick with, we'll pay you $3,000 if you quit by Friday, because they just want those people off the bus early rather than sticking around for three months and six months. And the reality is, when you're so clear on what your vision looks like, you only want people that are excited to build that it might be the right time for them to go somewhere else. Don't feel upset if an employee quits and goes somewhere else. It's the right thing for them to go somewhere else. You're not giving the actual plans to make this come true. Your vivid vision does not include your hiring plan. It doesn't include your budgets, it doesn't include your cash flow. It doesn't include your kind of strategic plan. It's not the one page plan that you're giving out. So, no, you would never give out your one page plan to your competition, but you can share your vivid vision of what you want. They're never going to have the people and the team and the plans to make that come true. The vision of what you're building usually has your competition kind of laughing because from the outside, all they can see is today. And they don't have the aligned people driving towards what you're driving towards. By the time that they get excited, you've already beaten them. Don't put how you make the sentences come true. Don't explain how you hang the cabinets or how you put in the electrical, or don't explain the how. Just describe the future state. Leave it there. Let the team figure out the how. The CEO's job. And again, as Gino Wickman in his book Rocket Fuel and Vivid or Traction talked about the visionary and the integrator, the visionary's job is to describe the vision. The team's job is to figure out how to make it come true. So I would really avoid that one. Next thing is I would avoid putting a lot of numbers in place. This is not a series of goals. It's not a series of metrics. It's not a series of, you know, achievable milestones. So try to keep some of those out of your vivid vision. And then another part is don't get all of your employees or all of your leadership team to help you craft it. It's the CEO's job to architect and explain the vision. It's the leadership's team's job to figure out how to make it come true. If you try to get everybody to contribute on crafting that vivid vision, it becomes so watered down that it's not as inspiring, it's not as magnetic as if it was just owned by that one person. A lot of companies say they're having a strategic planning meeting, you're having a strategy meeting or you're having a planning meeting. But strategy and planning are very different things. Strategy is figuring out kind of the where you're going and the potential ways to approach something and kind of looking at it from lots of different perspectives. And then the plan is figuring out how to make that strategy execute or how to make the goals come true or how to get to the vivid vision. That's why I say that things like the Vision Traction Organizer and the One Place plan are critical things that every company needs after you have that vivid vision in place, not in spite of it. Well, so I've also crafted a vivid vision for my life. So I've described Cameron Herald. I wrote it two years ago. But I've described my life, me as a human, me as a friend, me as a father, me as a spouse, me as a lover, me as a person in the community. And I've described a four page description of me. And then my wife and I crafted a vivid vision for our ourselves in our marriage together, how we were interacting as partners, as lovers, as travelers, as, you know, spiritual fitness, friends, family. And when we've passed our vivid vision to our friends, they're starting to make sentences come true. So the more people that you share the vision for your life or your marriage or your company, they see one or two little sentences and they start to help you make those come true. One of the parts of my vivid vision talks about how I'm actually doing more in Europe. I'm doing more more with the COO alliance in the Middle East. I'm now based in Dubai. I'm now landing speaking events in Europe in front of. It's weird, but this spring I'm speaking twice in Dublin, Ireland, which will be country number 29 for me. I'm speaking in Ibiza in April. And all those three speaking events happened because in my vivid vision, it talked about me speaking in the future and me doing more work in Europe and the Middle East. Those are starting to line up for me. I've done three podcast interviews in Dubai in the last three months, all three of them in person. One TV and radio and two big podcasts. Because I was describing that and then people say, oh, I saw that you wanted to do that. Let me introduce you. We all want to help someone. We all want to give them the shortcuts. And if we can help them make one sentence come true, oh, I know a great electrical contractor. I know a great plumber. I know a great tiling place. I know a place you can buy the coolest roofing shingles. We kind of give that person that one little tip. We've got to help them make their home come true. In the first one to three months, you're going to have a lot of people think you're crazy. You're going to have a lot of people think you are smoking way too much weed. You're going to have a lot of people think, oh, it's just another crazy thing. You have to keep communicating it and communicating and communicating it until some of those ideas start to stick. So be careful. In the first three months, you don't get too disillusioned because people say it's impossible or you're nuts. But then all of A sudden you're going to start to get. People say that they're excited about certain parts, they're going to start mentioning certain parts of the Vivid Vision. They're going to come to you with ideas on how to make it come true. And you will see that energy start to shift in your favor. It's kind of like when you're building the home, the whole stage of like bulldozing the property and pouring the foundation is pretty freaking boring. And that day that you come to the property and you see the walls start to go up, it feels like the home is starting to get built. That's kind of what happens in the Vivid Vision process as well. What I like to do is every quarter, take the Vivid Vision as a word document and start highlighting the sentences that have come true in green. So that quarter after quarter after quarter, this four or five page word document starts becoming more and more green. And it's almost like watching the home start to, you know, come to fruition or come to completion. Every single entrepreneur that's listening to the podcast right now is working on growing their skills. If they're a part of a mastermind community in your space, they're growing their skills and their connections and their confidence. And most entrepreneurs grow themselves, right? Whether they're a part of Vistage or Tech or Genius Network or, or ypo, they're usually a part of some community for, or even a community in their industry where they're growing their skills and confidence. But that only takes your company so far. What we want to do is grow the skills of our leadership team. And so we created this one community called the COO alliance, which is a network of second in commands from lots of different industries, virtually every industry you could ever imagine. And then you need at least 5 million or greater in revenue to qualify. So it's one real businesses growing real companies. We hold two in person events every year. One is always held in Vancouver, Canada, one is always held at MIT in Boston. And then we also host two hour events every month online via Zoom. And no entrepreneurs or CEOs are allowed to come. It's only for your second command, whether it's a COO or a BPOPS, whatever the title is. The second way that you can grow your people is the invest in your leaders course. And this is where you grow the skills of anyone who is managing people.