TimeOut for Leadership Building Your Road Map to Significance Your Critical Elements

Welcome back to Timeout for leadership. This week we continue to look at the roadmap to significance and critical elements that every good roadmap must have. In the last video, I quoted Yogi Berra when he said, if you don't know where you're going, you're going to end up somewhere else. Somewhere else is definitely not where I want to be. The first step to building any roadmap is having a clear vision or destination. Whether it's your life vision or now vision. Vision, clarity is the key. You know, I also challenged you to start with your life vision and begin to dream about the impact and influence you hoped your life would have on the lives of the people and the world around you. That's a life of significance. Now, I know it's not an easy task. It's often easier to define the things we want to accomplish and achieve over the impact that we want to have. Before we turn the corner to talk about the importance of motivation in reaching significance, we need to understand what makes up a successful roadmap. You know, I've can remember the days of those folded paper mats. Once you opened that map, there was little hope of ever folding it up again. You know, before we ever started driving, we would spread out the map and we'd begin to plan our route. The yellow highlighter that would show us the way. I was a designated navigator. It was my job to keep us on track. There was no Siri object on the road, police ahead or recalculating. We were on our own. Sometimes the route we would take was perfect with no detours or roadblocks. Other times we found road closure and detours all along the way. The problem with the paper map was that we would never discover the detour or roadblock until we ran into it. And it would cost us time, energy and resources. Fortunately for us, today we have all kinds of map apps to help us plan our routes. When correctly set, they warn us of upcoming roadblocks, obstacles in the road and other hazards that can slow us down or cause us to get off track. And with a push of a button, they can quickly reroute us to help us get back on track when an obstacle in our way. Regardless of the mapping tool you use, there are several critical questions that have to be answered before the mapping route will work. The first question we must answer is where are we going? What is that life, vision or destination that you're after? It must be clear from there. We have to know our starting point if we want to build the correct route. You have to know where you're starting from. Without it, the roadmap's useless. See, this starting point in the roadmap to significance is referred to as our current reality. It's impossible to achieve our vision or reach our destination if we don't have an honest picture of where we're starting from or our current reality. You know, until we've clearly identified both our destination and our current reality, when we start driving, we really have no idea where we're going or how we're going to get there. Let's imagine that I tried to drive to a new restaurant somewhere in Houston, Texas. I get in my car, I start driving, and I know that it's somewhere on the east side of Houston. I drive and drive, hoping that I will, by happenstance, run into the restaurant that I'm looking for. I know the name. I've seen pictures. I've even tasted the food, man. My destination is clear, right? Wrong. My desire is clear, but my destination is not. If I told you I did that, most of you would think I was stupid, crazy, or both. Just because we have a clear destination doesn't mean we know how to get there. If I do, it'll be entirely by chance and accident, and who knows how long it will ultimately take and what the additional cost will be. The harsh reality is that a lot of us live our lives this way. We think that because we have a clear picture of where we want to go, our destination, and we know where we are, our current reality, that we can just start driving. But like that ridiculous restaurant journey, we never arrive and spend much of our life time and resources rerouting and recalculating, often settling for something less than we had hoped. If we're honest, many of us live our lives and similarly, we run our businesses like we're searching for that restaurant. We might have an idea and picture of where we're headed, but without clarity of destination and an honest assessment of our current reality, we will never arrive and the significant life that we desire will never be realized. Life's a journey. It's one long road trip. Instead of living our lives accidentally, accidentally, hoping we will someday arrive at our destination that will reach our goals and realize our dreams, we need to focus on living our lives intentionally, with clarity of purpose and destination. Clarifying our vision and taking an honest assessment of our current reality is the first step towards a life of significance. Let me ask you a question. Are you willing to take an honest assessment of where you are? This can be a painful process, but it's a necessary One, if we want to live that life of significance that we've talked about. So I want to encourage you to take some time and perform a reality check. Ask yourself some questions. What are your strengths and challenges? Are you where you want to be? What are the opportunities and what are the obstacles that are in front of you? As you identify these things, it will help you design your roadmap and your strategy towards your life of significance. So the truth is, once you have a clear picture of your destination and your current reality, that map, it begins to come into focus. There's one more critical piece to consider before we can start building our roadmap. Significance. I've worked with plenty of leaders, entrepreneurs, individuals and organizations who had a clear destination, knew from where they were starting, planned their route, and still failed to arrive. If they did arrive, they usually had a lot of fresh scars from the trip, and the people they started with were no longer part of their team. What I found was they lacked proper motivation and found themselves distracted along the way. They were chasing the next shiny object, leaving a wake of people behind them. So in the next video, we're going to take a look at the power of motivation in reaching your destination, a critical component in building your roadmap to significance. So let me do a quick summary of where we've been. You know, we started with this understanding of the difference between success and significance. Success is all about me. Significance is all about the we, the impact and influence that we want to leave on the people in the world around us. Then we talked about the need of building a roadmap and the priority of a clear vision. From the clear vision, we've got to have an understanding of our current reality. Where are we? When we understand where we're going and where we're starting from, we can then begin to build our strategy and our roadmap to achieve or accomplish that vision or reach that destination. From here, we're going to begin to talk about motivation and the importance of motivation in keeping us moving when things get hard. I look forward to seeing you in in the next video. As always, my name is Rick Torson and I'm believing your best is yet to come. Thanks for joining me today. The roadmap to significance is coming together. Be sure to join me next week as we explore the power of motivation in reaching our destination.