If Your Business Doesn't Have THIS, You Are Playing on Hard Mode! Ft. Will Polston

For centuries, explorers navigated the seas and land not with maps, but with stars. Of all the stars in the sky, one stood out: the North Star.

Why?

Because it never wavered. It gave them a sense of direction and purpose. Today, you need your own North Star. In a world of constant change, distractions, and conflicting voices, you need something steady, something, something to guide you when life gets dark or chaotic. That's your purpose. That's your North Star. That's exactly what Will Polston is going to speak about in this 10-minute talk. Will is a best-selling author of North Star Thinking, an entrepreneur and business strategy and performance coach. He works with entrepreneurs to transform their lives by helping them solve their biggest challenges and holding them accountable as they pursue their dream life. Today, you'll learn 5 ways to create your own north star and how to use it to build an inspiring roadmap to get everything you want in life. His title is Your North Star. Please help me welcome Will Paulson. Thank you, sir.

By show of hands, how many of you have a mission and vision for your business? Okay, so it's about 68%, and if you're on Zoom, you can put Y or N into the chat box. Now, if you didn't, what would happen? Here's some of the most common answers. That I get. I'd lack direction and feel lost. I would not achieve my desired outcomes and feel frustrated. I'd be inefficient and waste time, money, energy, and effort. I'd have an inability to navigate in a crisis. I'd make poor decisions, and I'd stagnate. Because if you're not growing, you're dying. So most of you in the room understand the importance of having a business vision, and mission. But do you know your life vision and mission? What I call your North Star. In this talk, I'm going to share with you two lessons. Number one is how to find the North Star, and number two is how to find your North Star. If you were to look up at the night sky on a clear night, you'll see there's millions of stars. You could think it's impossible to find just one. But there is a clue. It's in the north. But more specifically, in the north, if you were to look to the north, you'll see there's a constellation of 6 stars that are brighter than the others that make up the Ursa Major, a.k.a. the Big Dipper. I think it looks a bit like a saucepan. And at the end of the cup of the saucepan, there's 2 stars called pointer stars. And if you 5x the distance from those pointer stars, you'll find the Polaris, the North Star. Which isn't the brightest star in the sky, and it doesn't look like that, but hopefully you'll get an idea. And it's at the end of what I call another saucepan called the Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper. It's the end of that handle there. So that's how you find the North Star. How do you find your North Star? Well, you don't. You create it. Now let me take you back in time to a story you've probably heard of. It involves a baby born in a stable a couple of thousand years ago. There were 3 men supposedly wise, all carrying presents. Now, spoiler alert, these 3 men found the baby, and they were following this star, but in every version of the story that I've ever heard, they never actually went to the star. They simply used it as a guiding light, and that's what your North Star is. It's a mission that guides you. Yes, you'll have goals that you want to reach along the way, but it's not the destination. It's a mission in life that's never achieved. It never ends. You just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. It's forever expanding. So yes, once you've got clear on your North Star, you can plot a trajectory. You can have your 10-year goals, your 5-year goals, your 3-year goals, your 1-year goals, your 90-day goals, your 30-day goals. You can have the lot, but the North Star itself is not the goal, it's the guide. My North Star is to empower people to transform excuses into results and live a life that they love. With a clear North Star, you'll have certainty of direction. It will guide you to make decisions in any other area of your life. Now, you may know people who spent their whole life learning and then earning and then yearning for their younger years. You may know people who have achieved their dream goal of selling a business, or buying the dream house, or the dream boat, or the dream car, or winning that gold medal, but then end up depressed shortly after achieving it. You may know people who have spent their whole life committed to a particular partner, and they lose them through death or divorce, and then they die, literally or metaphorically speaking, shortly after. These people didn't have a North Star. They had when-then syndrome. When I achieve this, then I'll be okay. When I get that, then I'll be all right. When this happens, then I'll be okay. By living your North Star, you can detach from having just one outcome. And you'll find that you're more inspired, fulfilled, more energized. You'll overcome challenges with ease and grace. By living your North Star, it will help you identify projects and people and businesses and collaborations that can lead to greater success, and it can even help you live longer. So there's 5 ways to create your North Star, which I'm about to share with you, and you'll be able to identify if you have one and if you're living congruently to it. So number 1 is that you actually already know it. You know your North Star, but the question for you is, are you living it?

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to JoePolish.com and you can get a copy there.

Number 2 is a process that I love called the Ikigai process. Now, this is a concept born off a tiny little island just off Japan called Okinawa. Now, the translation into English means a reason for being, and what's fascinating about this concept is is where it originates from. They have more centurions than anywhere else in the world. More people that live to over 100 years old than anywhere else on the planet. And what it is, is a blend of answering 4 questions. What do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need? And what can you be paid for? That's the ikigai process. The third way is aligning to your means values. Now every single one of you have a set of values that are as unique as the fingerprint on the end of your finger. There are many ways to identify your values. I refer to means values being the things that you do that give your life meaning. And one of the ways of identifying those is using STEM. What's your STEM? So you could look at your space. So if you walk into Genius Network, you can get a feel straight away for what this place is about and what Joe Polish Polish just on the stuff that's in the environment. The second is time. What do you spend your time doing? That fires you up, fills you with enthusiasm? And energy, what is it that when you're doing it, it fills you with that energy, you spend time thinking about it and it energizes you? And fourth is, what do you spend your disposable income on? What do you spend your money on? Now speaking of money, another way of identifying it and creating it is asking yourself the question, if I didn't need money, if I had all the money I could possibly want, what would I wanna do? With my time. And then finally is doing a life review. So we have an x and y-axis from +10 to -10 in terms of emotion, and then from your earliest memory until your age now. And we plot a trajectory of your highest— so we plot your highest highs and your lowest lows, and then we connect them, because almost always there's a direct correlation between your lowest lows and your highest highs that can reveal your North Star. Now this is Harry Malding. Harry is a client of mine back in the UK, and we identified his North Star. His North Star is to light people up using his personality and magic. And just 3 weeks ago, Harry won Britain's Got Talent, living his North Star. The equivalent of America's Got Talent, obviously, in the UK. Harry is living his North Star. Then there's Joe Polish, our faithful leader of Genius Network. Joe's North Star is transforming the lives of entrepreneurs and helping them to be more effective and connected in both their personal and professional lives. And I think it's fair to say Joe lives his North Star. And then there's another Genius Network member, Barry Goldstein. Now Barry's North Star is to use music to create transformation. Barry loves music. He makes music. He plays music. If you're ever on Zoom with Barry, he's got musical instruments in the background. He's a Grammy Award-winning producer of music. He's partnered with people like Dave Asprey, Dr. Joe Dispenza, and Daniel Amen to make music and use it for transformation. His music is played in wellness centers and hospitals all over. And as Joe said yesterday, millions of people are listening to his music. And in addition to that, we talk about spending money. Barry just spent $15,000 just on a microphone. Barry is living his North Star. So when you live your North Star, you'll benefit by having more inspiration, you'll have more energy, you'll make more congruent decisions, you can even live longer, and you'll have greater clarity on your future. A great friend of Joel's is the late, great Earl Nightingale, and Earl said, "Work is what you do when you'd rather be doing nothing." something else. Now, for the astrologists within the room, you'll know that the North Star never moves. So maybe you already know your North Star and you've been living it. Maybe you know your North Star and you've not been living it. Maybe you've been guided by the wrong star, or maybe you just haven't created your North Star yet. Regardless, my intention is for you to be guided by your North Star. So that's a quick recap of the 5 ways you can create yours. One is you already know it. A question for you is, are you living it? Number 2 is using the Ikigai process. Number 3 is aligning to your means values. Number 4 is asking yourself the question, if you didn't need money, what would you do? And number 5 is doing a life review. Now my invitation to you is this: when you're outside at some point in the future, and it's a clear night. Maybe you're out for a walk, you're camping, you're out on a boat, wherever you are, just find the North Star and stare at it for a minute using the process that I shared with you earlier, and use that moment to reflect and identify if you've been living your North Star and adjust accordingly. Now by Sunday night, I know we've got a busy few days, Genius Youth tomorrow, regardless of whether it's a clear night or not, just spend 5 minutes to reflect and think about whether you're living your North Star simply by reviewing what percentage of your typical month is doing things that fulfill you. If the answer is as you like, great. If not, change something and live your North Star.

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