Where’s Your Thinking?
One of my greatest mentors and teachers in leadership is John C Maxwell. For some years now I’ve been in the habit of revisiting books that had a profound impact on my thinking. It’s a powerful process, I find new insights and understandings I hadn’t experienced before, not because there’s been any change in the content of the book of course, but because of the changes in me since I first read the book. My awareness has shifted, resulting in my ability to see things in the book I wasn’t able to see previously.
Recently, I returned to John’s ‘Developing the Leader Within You’, and one of it’s messages hit me like a train. It was a message relating to vision, perception, thinking and potential.
Casting vision ignites potential. Too many people fail to create a compelling vision for what they aspire to in their lives, and what can’t be seen with the mind can’t be created in life. What you see is what you can be, and what you see is what you get.
I’ve worked with many business leaders who cast vision for their business and never for themselves. This is a major error. Without a personal vision of success, an individual is nothing more than a wondering generality in life.
Having a career is one thing, shaping one on your own terms is another. Lacking vision, a person is a like a ship adrift at sea without destination, it’s the tide that governs the path. Despite the biblical warning of ‘where there is no vision the people perish’ many people are still choosing to live life this way.
Then there’s perception. The way a person chooses to see things has a massive impact on their success in life. Konrad Adenauer once said ‘we all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon’.
Henry Ford was told repetitively by his most senior engineers that his idea to create an eight-cylinder automotive engine was ‘impossible’. Over a two year period he continually sent them away to ‘make it so’, only for them to return with the same message. He refused to accept their beliefs, and eventually they overcame the obstacles and ‘made it so’. Ford and his engineers lived under the same sky yet had very different horizons.
What you see is what you get. What are your horizons? Where’s your thinking? This brings us to responsibility and accountability. Personal ownership is not a pill that is easily swallowed for some.
In Bobb Biehl’s book ‘Increasing Your Leadership Confidence’ he discusses the key differentiator between the mental strategies of a ‘loser’ and ‘winner’. The latter focuses on winning big, not just on how to win. Whilst a loser doesn’t intend to lose, their thinking is focused on ‘just getting by’, and that’s the fundamental difference between the two.
This is the message that hit me between the eyes. The most potent influence on the quality of our thinking is our environment. When surrounded by the ‘doom and gloom’ merchants spinning their negative toxicity day in day out, it’s easy to fall into the ‘just getting by’ attitude. It’s a message that has me questioning where my thinking is.
When we change the way we look at things the things we look at change. Check in with yourself today. Where is your thinking?
Tags: Leadership, success, thinking, vision