Sherpa Leadership Podcast
Welcome to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, where we help you climb higher in life and leadership. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or leading a team, this podcast is designed to give you practical leadership tools, frameworks, and real-world insights to help you grow.
Sherpa Leadership Podcast
Episode 4 - Eyes Up: Stop Walking in Circles as a Leader
What separates truly exceptional leaders from the merely competent? The ability to see and shape the future—to craft and communicate a compelling vision that inspires others to action.
In this thought-provoking episode of the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, hosts Reed Moore and Chase Williams dive deep into the transformative power of vision in leadership. They explore how vision acts as the bridge connecting today's difficulties with tomorrow's potential, giving meaning to the daily grind that might otherwise feel purposeless.
"One of the challenges that even great visionary leaders have is not that they don't have clear vision, it's how do they communicate clear vision to others," Reed notes, highlighting a critical distinction that many leaders miss. Without effective communication, even the most brilliant vision remains trapped in the leader's mind, inaccessible to those who need to embrace it.
The conversation shatters the myth that visionaries are born, not made. Chase and Reed share practical strategies for developing your visionary capacity through dedicated thinking time, practice, and feedback from trusted colleagues. They reveal how Microsoft faced a decade-long identity crisis after achieving Bill Gates' audacious vision of "a computer in every home"—a cautionary tale of what happens when organizations accomplish their vision without establishing a new one.
Perhaps most valuable is their insight on vision repetition. Following Patrick Lencioni's observation that people don't truly hear something until it's been said at least thirteen times, they encourage leaders to become comfortable with feeling repetitive. The moment you grow tired of sharing your vision is precisely when some team members might be hearing it for the first time.
Whether you're struggling to articulate your vision clearly or looking to strengthen your organization's sense of purpose, this episode provides the practical wisdom and inspiration you need to see and shape a compelling future. Your journey toward more impactful leadership begins with a clear vision of what could be.
One of the challenges that even great visionary leaders have is not that they don't have clear vision, it's how do they communicate clear vision to others?
Speaker 2:grow right and it's to lead well. We have to stop and say, okay, I might not be somebody who has substantial vision right now and I can do something about that. You're listening to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, your guide to climbing higher in life and leadership. I'm Reed Moore and, alongside Chase Williams, we're here to help you break through obstacles, scale your potential and lead with greater clarity and purpose. Leaders, welcome back to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast. I'm Reed Moore, here with my good friend, chase Williams. We're here to help you climb higher in life and leadership, and I'm so excited about today's topic because it's an absolutely critical component for you mastering as a leader. As always, go to SherpaConsultingGroupcom for our action guides as well as all kinds of other resources and to be able to get in touch with us. All right, chase, how are you today? Great man, how are you Doing well, man, doing well.
Speaker 1:I'm excited for this episode. Yeah, this is an important piece of leadership we're going to unpack today. Yes, all right.
Speaker 2:So what are we talking about today?
Speaker 1:Well, we're talking about vision really, but it's kind of modeled under this I serve leadership model that we follow and the S in I serve is see and shape the future. Yes, kind of another way of saying vision, Right. Right, so when you think of seeing and shaping the future, having vision as a leader, what do you think of?
Speaker 2:I always kind of go back to this core idea of what is leadership, and there's all these definitions that we've talked about. Of course, will continue to, but ultimately, somebody who is leading is not going on a journey by themselves. They're taking other people and the question is always where am I taking them, where are we going? And that creates an immense amount of pressure as a leader. There's a huge obligation there, and one of those obligations is to stretch our vision, muscle our ability to see into the future, which for us, as well as everybody else, is really, really unknown. But because we're leading other people, we are moving people forward into a direction and, as a leader, that's a core piece of what we have to grow in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, and you said a couple of things there that I think are really important. You think about the power of vision, right, like. This country was founded on someone's vision of what could be or should be before it even really existed, right? Businesses same way, right, like if you think of a startup as an example, existed, right. Businesses, same way, right, like if you think of a startup as an example, sometimes they're gathering millions, hundreds of millions of dollars for an idea, a vision, before there's really even a company behind it, right? So we know it's super powerful, which is why there's a big responsibility around it for leaders.
Speaker 1:I think one of the challenges that even great visionary leaders have is not that they don't have clear vision, it's how do they communicate clear vision to others? Because if you're a really strong visionary and you have an idea that's so powerful, but I don't know what it is, I can't see inside your head, then it means nothing to me, right? Or anyone else who might be interested in going on the journey toward that vision with you, right? And that's one of those pieces of the skill that you can actually improve and practice and get better at.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, one of the things that we talk about, like in marriage and different things, is you know, there's there's this, this idea of you know, I deeply love my wife, but if she never hears, the words I love you come out of my mouth, or specifically, I love you, and then and then an actual list of like these are the things that cause me to love you, and it's all inside of my head, there's this dissonance in my leadership at home, and that is that I am experiencing all of my emotions and all of my gratitude, but nobody else gets to experience that it's the same way, right? And if you look at the best leaders out of the course of history, they have all been great communicators, specifically communicators of vision.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what do you say? Read to somebody who's listening, who thinks that, well, I'm just not a very strong visionary or I don't feel like I have strong vision. That's really something I'm not good at. What do you say to that person? The first place?
Speaker 2:I would start is. I would say I would take a step back and say, okay, so are you operating from a fixed or a growth mindset? And fundamentally, a fixed mindset is this idea there are lucky people and there's unlucky people. There are visionaries and there's those who can't see the future. And it's a really hard way to live life, and I think it's a very wrong way in general to think about things like vision. So it's kind of like saying you know the person that doesn't go to the gym and they say, well, I'm not strong, yeah, like that. That's. That's a totally reasonable statement. But the the, the underlying challenge is can you become strong? Or is this, you know, apart from a significant physical disability, can you do something about it? And so the challenge here is we're saying, like, as a leader, your job is to grow Right and it's to lead. Well, we have to stop and say, ok, I might not be somebody who has substantial vision right now and I can do something about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would also say too, that you can get better at having a vision Right, and here's what I want to say about that. Sometimes people think of vision as like. I woke up one morning and it was like perfectly clear in my head. It was like an idea that had all this clarity to it. That can happen. That's very rare, very rare.
Speaker 1:Setting a vision or getting good at being a visionary can sometimes look like sitting down with a blank piece of paper and a pen and thinking way out into the future. What do you want your business to look like? What pen? And thinking way out into the future. What do you want your business to look like? What do you want the country to look like? Right, what do you? What things would you envision happening if other things happened right? It's actually a practice that even very highly successful people don't take the time to do often enough Right, right. So if you're having trouble, like thinking that you have the strong vision for the future, you might just need to set aside some time to work on what that could or might look like and over time your vision can become stronger and have more clarity, not just like the second you woke up one morning. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it's one of the reasons we, instead of just saying vision, we say see and shape the future. Because there's two disciplines here. One is for me to be able to extend my vision out, but that can be kind of like this this prognostication, right, so you start getting into. I forget the guy's name. They wrote the, the, the, the book, the big short about right and, and the joke is that he has, you know, he has successfully, you know, prophesied, you know, 17 of the last two recessions, right, yeah, 17 of the last two.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And so there's this idea of, like he clearly sees this thing. No, he clearly saw a thing, and now he's kind of stuck in this trap. But the other one so we do want to see things more further, you know, further in the future, which requires stopping and thinking what is it that I'm observing and what was the application to me and the people I lead? The other one is actually shaping the future, kind of like thinking about this country or thinking about a city, or even thinking about something like building a new house for your family there is. That's actually what you're doing when you sit down with an architect or you sit down with a blank piece of paper and you start envisioning what that house could look like, what the future could look like. This is vision and this is specifically you carving out or building or shaping the future, which is also a significant skill set and something to to grow in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we talked a little bit about kind of like the power of vision. Right, like why? Why is it so powerful for others? Why is it such an important skill for great leaders to have to be able to see and shape the future? What does that do for a leader?
Speaker 2:so one of the things I think it does is it connects current activities or actions or hardships with hope. Okay, right, so if, if I'm in a sales business or I'm building out a brand new product, everything that shows up today is just nothing but hard. Yeah, it's hard, it's monotonous, it's coding's, planning, it's making phone calls, it's it's, you know, setting meter meetings with investors. It's just flat out hard, it's rejection, and the list goes on and on and on. And so if I can connect today's hard with what the future hope could be from that that is, you know, people run off of hope. Yeah, people run off of encouragement all of us, right, not just like the week, but everybody does. And so vision, really, it ties a current, uh, hard thing to a future preferred reality yeah, otherwise what you're doing might start to lose meaning, purpose.
Speaker 1:It becomes just like a grind. For what grind sake? And that's really what I hear you saying, right? And so, from a leader's perspective, if we are setting and communicating a strong vision, we can see and shape the future and help others see and shape the future. Then all the hard stuff they're doing every day takes on meaning, takes on purpose. They can keep going towards something with this hope, as you mentioned, for the future. Right, like the Bible says that in the absence of vision, the people perish. Yes, well, that sounds a little bit like they get tired of doing the hard things, right, they just get they, they, they. They get disenchanted or disenfranchised. What am I doing this for? There's no rationale behind it. So that's what creates that power to move people, move an organization, move a country towards something that can be better. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that that, like you know, that's exactly right. And I think sometimes the more seasoned a leader gets, the more distance there is between them and the reality that the people that are following them experience. And that is that you might, behaviorally as a leader, be wired to have seen a vision, seen something, been hopeful, and then just go to work and grind and put your nose down and go and go and go and you look up and you don't see people going and going and grinding. You just get super mad, right, what's everybody's problem? And you go down this whole negative, you know, like negative mindset space. But you actually, as an individual, might have way, way longer of a period of time before you get disillusioned, right, Before you lose hope.
Speaker 2:Although you know when it happens with a leader, it shows up sometimes pretty catastrophically right, they will wake up one day and they haven't been casting vision even to themselves and it's really dark and really hopeless. So it applies and it's important for the leader as well. But the other piece of this is that as a leader, you have processed it and thought it through so much sometimes that you just forget again that you haven't talked about this externally and there's kind of this desire of like you know, why doesn't everybody just figure this out for their own life? Well, you're the leader right. Fundamentally, they're looking at you and saying, hey, you know, you pointed us in a direction and now you got to help us stay clear, because we decided to move a part of our life at least forward with you at the helm.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so okay, I, I I've got this strong, clear vision. I stood up in front of the company and I communicated it really powerfully. Am I done?
Speaker 2:You are done as a company. If that's it, okay. Yeah, that's the deal, okay. So we as people are very we have a significant challenge hearing something for the first, second, third, fourth, tenth time, right, so kind of you know, there's all kinds of different metrics that get thrown out from stages. Patrick Lencioni says people don't literally don't hear anything that you say until you've said it at least 13 times.
Speaker 2:I don't know if that's scientific or not, but I think leaders that ultimately do a good job casting vision make peace with a pattern, and that is you say something long enough that you get sick and maybe even embarrassed that you're saying it again and you either stop and that's right at the point where somebody might have heard you for the first time or you make peace with what you're experiencing and you say it at least you know a 2x of that before it really even catches. You know, and that's one of those disciplines as leaders is if you get caught up in they should have. The question always goes through my mind as a coach is there are ways that you think things should be, and then there's being committed to being effective. Yeah, right, do you want to be right? Do you want to be effective. If your goal as a leader is to be effective, you just have to make peace with some of these things around vision.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and repetition of communicating. It is important, right, because regardless of how many times it took for someone to hear people forget, still they might have actually heard you. They inspired them, and then months go by and hard things in their life happen and no one said it again and they forget. Why am I doing this? Why does this matter? So it's almost like being a good leader in part is being like a parrot yes, saying the same important things vision, seeing and shaping the future over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:Here's another practical reason right, reed, organizations, by nature, are changing all the time. Yeah, new people are entering the organization. Some people move on. We like to think that's not the case, but it is. Yeah, and so you might be having a meeting and saying this thing for the hundredth time and that employees it's their first meeting, yeah, it's the first time they've ever heard this. Vision, right, right, or in the hiring process, you're attracting talent into your organization. You had better be talking about the vision if you want to attract great talent over and over and over again, because the, the concept that we talked about is like vision leaks, yes, right, what does that mean to you?
Speaker 2:right, it leaks so, yeah, vision, uh, hope, encouragement, all of these things are kind of like eating right or sleeping or going to the gym, like you do it and and you've gotten enough for this period of time. Yeah, but if you don't continue to go back, then it goes away eventually to nothing. Another way of thinking that maybe is uh, running a business or leading a family or leading in any capacity is it's like steering a ship. It's not like being on train tracks, right where it's completely perfectly defined and very rarely is there a derailment. It's you're going to hit a storm and you're going to have to change course and then you're going to have to readjust and point to true north again, and you're going to have to do that over and over and over again for maybe even months, right, like old school journey across the Atlantic. So it's this constant reorienting, constantly letting people know where we're going and that we're on course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. Okay, so beyond communicating a strong vision well, and what you see for the future, and then you know how you're going to shape the future, what else do we have to do as leaders in regards to vision, after we've communicated it? So after we've communicated vision.
Speaker 2:We have to embody the vision right. We actually have to. We have to be able to show people by our words and our actions that we are on mission with them, that we are casting a vision and then and then we're moving forward with that right. If we don't, don't do that, it's. It's one of the things I've just kind of observed about, uh like, human experience is that people aren't deeply moved until they see things embodied right.
Speaker 2:So we call it in our company, we call it, uh, you know like, until they see something incarnate right, which is like a biblical idea, and that is that, you know, as a leader of a company, if somebody can hear my words and then they can watch me, they're like that's what that looks like, right? That's really inspirational. And as an organization grows, the ideal is that more and more and more people embody the vision, right. So you've said it so many times that all these light bulbs start going off, and then you've lived it for long enough that they start modeling the way that you work around the vision. And now you look inside of a company of 50 people and you have 10 or 20 or 30 people that you can almost say are the vision that is a magical place to be inside of company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the reality is is that most companies will take on the characteristics of their leader. So if you look around and you don't like what you see, you better look in the mirror as well. Right, because that's that embodying piece around the vision. The other powerful part about a strong vision is that it will help you make really difficult decisions as you go along. That's the shaping part, right, like, does this align with the vision we have for where we're going? Because otherwise every idea can look like a good idea or every idea can look like a bad idea either way, right? So if we don't have something that's kind of North star pointing us in the right direction, then decision-making gets exponentially harder. Yeah, right, and no one will really even understand why you're doing what you're doing or why you're not doing what you're not doing because there's no shape to it. Yes, right, because there's no vision there. They forgot, right, where we're heading and why that matters.
Speaker 1:And that's something else that I love to communicate to leaders is people will be excited about something that is extraordinary or bigger than themselves, or something they can, they can be part of creating. Right, and everyone has a little bit of what's in it for me and them, sure, right the with them. What's in it for me? So, when you're communicating vision, it should demonstrate and show people how everyone involved will benefit not just the owners of the company, the employees, as well the people we serve, the communities we operate in and beyond. Right, like, how does this vision actually create something of value that serves everybody connected to?
Speaker 2:it. I love it. You know one of the things I used to love? This show that was on TV for quite a while and it was Mythbusters yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, great show.
Speaker 2:Great show, and one of the myths was that.
Speaker 2:So Adam and Jamie decided to go try to prove out.
Speaker 2:Is the myth was that if you were lost in the forest, you could find your way out or find a navigable path If you had blinders and all you could see was, you know, basically your feet, or within like a couple feet in front of your footprint, and both of them, as I remember it, uh, said, yeah, we actually think we could do it.
Speaker 2:Here's the plan. Turns out that if you actually can't see, uh, even in a situation like that, if you, if you can't see beyond, you know, as my dad you say, the tip of your nose what they did is they spent hours and hours, and hours, and, and they actually covered almost no ground at all, maybe, maybe, like 100 yards of a circle in all kind of a random pattern. And so, if you think about, if we don't have vision as leaders and we don't have vision as people, where is our life going? Well, the answer is probably what you could easily observe with somebody who's not leading well or somebody who's not being led well, and that is year after year, sometimes decade after decade. There's actually not progress made.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love that. And we've heard it said before maybe, like the vision, strong enough, we'll find a way, something like that, right, I believe that's true, right. But the opposite is also true, which is what you're describing. If I'm just looking straight down and walking, I can get somewhere, but I just don't know where. Right, and I've seen this happen with business owners and entrepreneurs over the years. You have to. It's like they actually keep their head down so much, never look up that they. They have some level of success in certain areas and they can go years, decades, and when they finally look up, they're not always happy with where they've arrived. Right, and it doesn't mean they didn't have some successes by a lot of people's measure along the way, whether that's income or profit or whatever but they got to a destination that they didn't, they don't really like, all of a sudden. Yeah, right. And so that's kind of the danger of that.
Speaker 1:I want to tell you like a quick story of where I experienced the power of vision and then the power of not having vision. So I took over a company a number of years ago, a decade ago, as the primary leader of the company, and there was already kind of a strong vision there that I had gotten from the person who hired me into the role and he articulated the vision well, here's where we're going as a company. Here's the size that we want to get to. This is actually a real estate brokerage, right, and the idea was we're going to go to 300 plus real estate agents and we were a third of that size at the time, which is already pretty big. And I'll be honest, reed, like at first I had I it took me a minute to wrap my head around a business of that size because from my experience, I had never led or run a business anywhere near that size or that number of people. But I was able to do it and it kind of crystallized in my mind. I said, ok, let's go, take the hill right, let's go and do it. And so I got to work on casting that vision to the rest of the organization and talking about you know why that number actually mattered and the market share that it would give us and the what's in it for me type of things for all the agents that would be connected to that. Lo and behold, with a great bunch of a great bunch of people, a solid team and lots of hard work and years later we eclipsed that number. We eclipsed that size as a company, yeah, right. So I saw the power of vision work.
Speaker 1:And then here's where the story turns the other way. That vision alone wasn't big enough because we had accomplished it, and my mistake as a leader was I didn't reset a different vision or a bigger vision or however you might think about that. Right, kind of like we had kind of gotten there and then, without resetting the vision, the, the, the company got a little funky. The results started to change a little bit.
Speaker 1:People started to wonder, like, what are we doing this for? Why does this matter? Right, like a lot of the things that we don't want to show up in our organization showed up in mine. Yeah, and looking back on it, I know now one of the reasons, one of the primary reasons, was I wasn't looking farther, I wasn't seeing and shaping the future beyond this, this, you know, place that we had arrived to so that we could continue to go collectively. And it took really years actually for for me to realize that, others to help me realize that, and then ultimately to go back to okay, where are we going again and why does it matter again. And then how do we get people back on board again? That was a really tough lesson.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really interesting because there's this idea of vision, or even like mission, which is something that we teach, we do workshops on, and that is that if you can actually hit it, it's too small, right, and it creates problems. The classic example of that actually is Microsoft, right. So Bill Gates came out with this audacious vision, right, which was to put a computer in every household in the world. Right, no way that's ever gonna get accomplished. Functionally, it did, yeah, functionally it did Right Faster than he would have ever imagined, way faster than he imagined Like. It was so audacious at the time and, of course, that accelerated Microsoft just through the roof. But then, all of a sudden, microsoft had this massive identity crisis and it lasted about 10 years, maybe a little bit longer, where they just struggled and I knew I have some friends really high up in Microsoft and the company had an identity crisis because they had accomplished the mission, they had fulfilled the vision. It was a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's something to watch out for, right. If you feel like you set a vision that you thought would never get accomplished because it was so big, and now you're getting close to accomplishing it as a leader, you need to take some time and re-see the future right See a bigger future than what you thought was possible before, because otherwise you can end up in that same place that I did, same place that Microsoft did Lots of companies right.
Speaker 1:This is a common problem that companies run into if you're not paying attention and you forget or don't understand the true power of vision.
Speaker 2:So there's a flip side of this coin and that is that, for the outliers that are listening to us, there are some people that are so incredible at casting vision and so incredible at, like, wonder and ideating the future that they can use the unbelievable. If I could quantify vision as, like you know, one of the, I would say vision is one of the top five most powerful things in the world, I mean maybe top three it is unbelievably powerful and I had an experience of being in business with somebody we, we were in a partnership with a few partners and we set out to build a really large national level company.
Speaker 2:His ability to cast vision was light years beyond mine and the talent that we attracted and the people that we brought into that company from around the country was it was amazing and it was electric because, uh, we, we, we worked so hard on the mission statement and when we nailed it like it just resonated right and his ability to cast it and to just constantly be a visionary, it created an environment that we were able to hold together even though, looking back, the rest of the I serve model was really problematic. Yeah, we actually didn't do a lot of the other things that caused for longevity. There is this, maybe, responsibility as a leader, and that is, if you have this ability to cast massive vision, you'll have the ability to attract people really fast to yourself and to be able to kind of build from this place of hope in the future areas, because the vision itself over the course of time, you could almost say it becomes toxic because people are hoping in a future that actually will never happen and there's a tension there, because everybody who's built anything has purely ran on hope for a very long period of time. That's right. When we started, when we started our primary company you know the people that I don't even know why. They joined me at first, like I had a vision, like we're going over here, and it was just.
Speaker 2:Else was a mess. Yeah, it was a disaster, right, but it was a really fun one. And then, over the course of time, they stuck with the vision long enough for the infrastructure and for all the other pieces of my leadership, as well as the company, to come together. So we just have to be responsible. I would say, if you are somebody who has a visionary, use it full throttle, cast the vision, but your growth is going to be massive to making sure that this is not people buying into something that that ultimately can't succeed.
Speaker 1:So sometimes it just flat out won't and that's hard, but it can't if you don't grow yeah, I think one of the the key lessons that you're sharing is, although the ability to see and shape the future, having vision is maybe the most powerful thing you need and have to do as a leader, it's just not the only thing. Right, I was taught this years ago. It's called the seven principles of leadership and it kind of demonstrates this idea. Beyond having and setting a vision, there's other things that have to happen beyond that, so I'm going to read through them really quickly. The first one is set a vision and, by the way, like you can get better at that. That's a skill you can improve on if you don't feel like you're amazing at it, naturally, right. The second one clearly communicate the vision. We talked about that Right, so I have it in my head. Now I got to communicate it well to others so that they can, it can resonate with them, they can connect to it, be attracted to it.
Speaker 1:Number three is recruit a team to the vision. Right, there might be a lot of people that actually get excited about your vision and are attracted to your vision, but you've got to recruit the right team. Not everyone's going to be, you know, the perfect fit, or even the right fit as you go along accomplishing the vision right After you've recruited a team, you have to define each person's portion of the vision right, like their role in achieving the vision. So they all got attracted about this thing we're going to go and do or this place we're going to end up. Now we got to just start defining each person's role so that they can get into action shaping it right. That means you have to also empower people to achieve the vision as a leader.
Speaker 1:It's not about just the things that you do. It's not about just the shaping that you do. It's not about just the shaping that you do. It's ultimately about the shaping that others do too, right. So that's that empowerment. Piece number six is measure track and hold people accountable to the vision, right? Yeah, that's a whole episode right, this is this idea.
Speaker 2:It doesn't. It doesn't feel very visiony yeah, it's hard and accountability that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:I'm sure we'll get the chance to unpack that. And, of course, the seventh one is respond quickly when issues arise that threaten the vision. Such a big deal. Right, it tells us like, ooh, that's not going to work because that's not where, that's not part of where we're going, or that doesn't help us get where we're going. If you make the mistake of inviting someone into your company or your world that actually doesn't want to go there, as an example, sometimes that can turn toxic not always, but it can just be an anchor without being toxic. As a leader, it's your job to go and solve those issues. Yeah, either get those people on board by re-articulating the vision right, like re-engaging them and why they were passionate about in the first place, or frankly identifying that they just flat out don't want to go there and they're they're not going to be an asset or a resource to the company. That can actually be a hindrance and anchor or toxic to the place that the rest of us want to go. Yeah, yeah, absolutely Okay.
Speaker 2:So let's land the plane with some practical. Okay, so let's land the plane with some practical. How do I grow in my ability to cast vision, like? How do I grow in my ability to bring people along with the vision?
Speaker 1:Well, I think I mentioned one thing before, and that's set aside time to think about the future your future, right, and maybe it's vision for your family, maybe it's vision for your financial situation or the wealth you want to build. It could be for your organization. That's a lot of what we talk about, but actually take time, block time, right, like this is called thinking time. If you've read the book the Road Less Stupid, yeah, thinking time, that's what Keith Cunningham calls it. This can be used for getting better at actually thinking about what it can look like 10 years from now, 50 years from now, 500 years from now. Stretch yourself, right.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like a muscle Practice doing that and articulating what that looks like. So, if you start to see it, but it's kind of fuzzy like, articulate what it might look like, because you can change it, you can tweak it as you go, can change it, you can tweak it as you go. But the more detail that you can you can get down or think through, yeah, the better you can then communicate and articulate that. It just creates color and it creates contrast for the other people and eventually you're going to start communicating this too, and that's the other thing I would say is get to work, practicing, communicating it.
Speaker 1:Share it with a friend, ask them what they think about it, see if it stirs something in them that you're hoping that it would, because if it's not, you can tweak it, you can change it, you can say it differently. It doesn't have to be a different vision, you might just need to communicate it differently. It's really like anything else. Read like practice makes perfect. We've heard that. Well, I don't know if perfect's the right word, but practice definitely makes better. Yes, and so get get to work in sharing that, casting that vision with people that you trust, those that are close to you, and let them help you, kind of give some feedback and help you tweak it, improve it, make it better.
Speaker 2:I love it. A couple things I'd probably add to that is uh, as number one is, as a leader, just set it in your mind that every time I open my mouth it's to cast vision. There's always a reason that I'm going to talk, but it's always secondary, and that is that every time I open my mouth to talk to somebody in a meeting, talk to somebody in front of my people, it's an opportunity to recast the vision, opportunity to reset the vision, and it's not always the same talking point every time, but it's taking this conversation and tying it to vision. Taking this conversation and tying it to vision, taking this action that you just saw in that person and tying it to their future. Every time I get the opportunity, it's a chance to tie it to vision. So then it kind of erases this question of have I talked about this enough? It's no.
Speaker 2:Every single time you open your mouth is to cast vision, is to cast vision, is to cast vision. Single time you open your mouth is to cast vision is to cast vision is to cast vision. Secondly, something I've uh, you know, I've just experienced over the years is if I have a new vision to cast or a new thing to work on. I think I'm just going to double down on your last thing, and that is I'm going to go and talk about it with people, I trust, when it's still clunky I'm gonna say, hey, chase, what do you think about this idea?
Speaker 2:and I'm gonna pitch it with it with like here's all my energy, and you're going to look at me like let's beat that up a little bit, try again, right, and so then I'm just going to say it again and again and somewhere around you know the 20th time. It's refined enough that all of a sudden it's not just clear in my mind but the other person's like oh, that makes sense. Now I have my, the beginning of my talking points.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love that. Awesome. What else? Anything to close us out on vision?
Speaker 2:I think that's it, like. Oh well, there's, there's. You know, there's 80 more hours of vision that we'll we'll get to over time, but functionally I think this is the lay of the land and that is a seeing and shaping. Seeing and shaping the future. It really, really matters to you and your business and your people. And secondly, it's a skill that can be developed. It's not an inherent trait that only some people have.
Speaker 1:You are a visionary. Right, you are a visionary. That's a growth mindset. You can get better at it, but saying you're not one is almost like saying you're not a leader. It is Thanks for listening to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast. If this episode inspired you, we hope that you'll subscribe, leave a review or share it with a fellow leader. For more resources and tools, you can go to SherpaConsultingGroupcom and remember that leadership is a journey. Every step you take matters. Keep climbing. We'll see you next time.