How do you remodel, refresh, or replace a dream you held if it’s no longer current for you?

A colleague and I noticed this was the case with several small business owners we worked with in a mentoring program we created.

You also see this with college students choosing majors, and then people who suddenly face a career change, whether it is forced or chosen.

You see this with companies and teams, too, when circumstances have changed and they may not have kept the dream alive as new people joined the company. Or maybe customers have moved on, making a once-successful company and products now an industry also-ran.

First, relax.

It may take a while, but you’ll discover what you really want to do and achieve if you’re open to whatever you discover, in the process.

Second, start paying more attention to the things you really like, and like to do.

For example:

– What do you love to do?

This can give you a general direction to look toward for your dream. It may or may not lead to an improved team goal or career path, but it can give you clues about where to look for more information.

At a minimum, paying attention to what you love to do, and then adding more of that to your life can make your present circumstances more satisfying.

If you’re part of a team that is trying to refresh its dream, notice the times when, as a group, you are most satisfied and most successful working together.

– What achievements are you proudest of?

This can give you clues about what makes you happiest. It can also help you understand what it is about those achievements that makes them so satisfying to you.

If you’re part of a team, pay attention to what collective achievements members of the team are proudest of. That gives you an idea of what motivates different members of the team, and what they might be driven to try to achieve again, together.

– Who do you admire?

If you admire people of great courage, perhaps you secretly wish you had more reasons and opportunities to exercise your own courage.

If you admire great artists, authors or musicians, perhaps you’re wish you had outlets for performing, expressing, or developing your artistic talents in other ways.

Perhaps athletes, inventors, great world leaders or Nobel Prize-winning scientists are those you admire most.

Whoever these people are, and whatever they have done, looking at who you admire can give you clues about what you long to do more of, yourself.

If you’re looking at this as a team, it can tell you more about what you’re driven to achieve, collectively, and what motivates you to do so.

There are other tools and exercises you can use to discover the dream that is real for you now. This just gives you a few ideas for how to start down that path.

If you find that you’re driving toward a dream or goal that just doesn’t move you,  have the courage to take a step back.

You will find that it can ultimately help you leap far ahead…and on a truer path.

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A colleague and I finished another successful round of mentoring small business owners recently.

During the sequence of classes and exercises in the mentoring program, several mentees discovered, to their surprise, that they were highly resistant to goals and dreams they’d long held.

As I listened to and worked with a few of the class participants in our 1:1 mentoring sessions, it sounded as if they were focusing on dreams that weren’t really their own, or were no longer alive for them.

Their resistance to these goals and dreams was almost like the case when magnet ends are positioned to create a force field that repels, rather than attracts.

You sometimes also see this when college students pursue a college major that’s not one they really like.

Thrown into the mix with students who love classes they hate, they may eventually find they’ve earned a degree and started down a career path that isn’t their idea of satisfying work, at all.

The irony is that if they have the courage and do the work it takes to discover a truer educational and career path for them, it may lead to opportunities of their dreams…or something far closer to that…than their original plan might have.

The same thing can happen to companies, and teams. They drive toward a dream that, for a variety of reasons, is not now real for them.

Perhaps competitive pressures have changed the playing field. Maybe the company was once a market leader but is now an also-ran. Or perhaps the demand for products which were once in great demand has moved to entirely different products and services, and the companies that produce them.

If that repellent, resistant-to-the-dream feeling sounds familiar to you, consider these reasons why that might have occurred:

1. It’s someone else’s dream for you.

Maybe this is a dream you essentially inherited or were assigned, in some way. Perhaps you’re working toward a goal your mother or father, or a coach or other advisor held for themselves, but which they didn’t achieve, for any of a number of reasons.

If you’re part of a company or team guided by a dream that no longer fits, maybe you joined a company that was riding a dream the founder created, yet he or she is now long gone. Or maybe your company is still focused on customers who have shifted to entirely different types of products than what made your company successful for so long.

2. You need more information to find out if the dream fits.

You may not know enough to know if this is really your dream. The general direction may sound interesting, but the dream may not be compelling enough yet that it will drive and guide you through the expected and unexpected challenges that occur as part of almost any significant achievement.

3. The dream is bigger than what you now believe you can achieve.

Here the problem may be that you want the dream, but you don’t believe yet that it is something you could really have, or achieve.

If you’re part of a team, perhaps one of the problems you face is that part of your team believes you can be successful, and another part of the team fears that is far from the case.

4. It’s a dream you used to have, but don’t care about anymore.

Maybe you used to dream of living in Paris for a year, traveling around Europe using the city as your new home base. Maybe you no longer dream of Paris, because now seek to take shorter, more frequent trips instead.

If you’re part of a team, maybe new people have joined the company or group and gradually (or suddenly) the dream is changing. Perhaps part of the company is pushing for the same freewheeling approach you’ve used to grow this fast, this far, yet another group wants more predictability, visibility, and a sense that things are under control.

What do you do if you find out that what you thought you wanted is not what you want now, at all?

I’ll give you a few ideas for starting to discover your truer path in the next blog post.

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Your vision of the future may be fuzzy, indistinct.

Or it may be crisp, clear and compelling, guiding you to take action consistently to turn that vision into action and results.

Either way, you’re moving toward a vision you’re trying to create.

It’s better to know what your vision is, and to the degree that you can, to affect, improve and direct it in the most positive ways.

If you need to articulate, create or update your vision, where do you start?

Here are six important steps to take:

1. Decide who needs to be involved in creating the vision.

Start by considering who will implement the vision.

Err on the side of including these people in the process of creating the vision, if you want it to be the inspiring, fully-owned guide for future action that it can be.

Consider how people would feel if you said to them, “You’re not important enough to help create our vision. But we do want your full attention and energy when it’s time to take action to make it real.”

For a vision to be powerful, the people who will be implementing it need to be fully engaged, and to “own” it.

2. Consider how you’d like to create it, if your preferred process will work with the group involved.

If a very large group of people will be involved, you may need to use small groups to gather their ideas, and then combine that input in some creative and cohesive way. The process you use also depends on whether the people involved are geographically dispersed, or can all be working together in the same place.

If a small group is creating the vision, they may be able to work together at the same time and place easily.

Also, consider if you want individuals to do some pre-work before the visioning work is done, or if you want to catch everyone’s fresh, natural input without much advance thought.

Decide, also, whether you want to have someone guide or facilitate the visioning process for you, or if you want to do that work on your own.

3. Make the time and space for the vision to emerge.

Creating a vision takes some time.

It also requires some out of the box thinking. And that means that you need to create an environment that encourages people to think and imagine freely.

How and when can you create that experience and environment for the visioning work to occur?

4. Accept that not everyone who needs to be involved is going to be onboard with the work, initially.

mong the very important things you must consider is that some people are going to be resistant to creating the vision, in all likelihood.

It might seem too “touchy-feely” to them.

I worked for one senior finance manager at a high tech firm who was this way. Yet when I listened to his resistance but told him I thought we needed to use the tools with his team of senior finance managers, anyway, he loved the processes and tools we used, and the outcomes we achieved, as a result.

People who are uncomfortable with the visioning and other creative group processes at first might not trust their own creativity. And so, rather than controlling the process too much and excluding others, these people may want to delegate their full involvement and responsibility for creating the vision.

But there’s passion involved in turning a dream or vision into reality. That passion can’t be delegated. And the drive that it takes to make a really grand dream come alive is one that has to come from deep within. And if a group is involved, that shared drive has to exist in many different people.

5. Gather creative tools.

Creating a vision takes skill in bringing out the real thoughts, feelings and aspirations in the individuals and in the full group, as well.

The creative tools you use may be sources of inspiration, such as photos, stories, music, and other resources that loosen up people’s thinking and enable them to bring their best ideas out.

They may be creative group process tools, such as mindmaps and other approaches.

You may also find wall-size graphics, such as visual templates, to be a powerful way to elicit and easily organize individual and collective thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations.

6. Work together to create a felt sense, and a shared picture of the future that speaks to you as a group.

Know that you will use that vision, again and again. You need it to speak to you. And you need to have it work for you.

It takes a spark, again and again, to keep a vision alive. Many individual and collective actions must flow from that vision in order for dreamed-of results to become real.

Do the planning, create the environment, convene the team that gives your dream a chance to become a vision that becomes drives action leading to real results.

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Let’s say the subject of your vision comes up.

Is your natural response to say, “I don’t have one”?

Oh, but you do.

And if you’re a leader, your team does, too.

Whether you know it or not, for better or worse, you hold some expectation or belief about your future.

Effectively, that is your vision, unless you change it.

And that vision – positive or negative – is far more powerful than you might expect.

If your vision needs to be updated, here are a few initial steps you can take.

I’ll provide more guidelines for creating your vision in the next post.

1. First consider your goals.

These may be responsibilities that you worked out with your manager at some point. Or these may be goals or quotas that were simply assigned to you.

What, specifically, must you achieve?

By when?

2. Now stretch far beyond that.

What you really want to do?

We’re not talking about an intellectual exercise here.

This is what, in your heart of hearts, you REALLY want to do or achieve.

Or if you’re part of a team, this is the thing that you’re really driven to accomplish or create together.

3. For now, make a few notes about what you really want to do, or create.

You could also draw a simple picture, or capture an inspiring phrase that represents what you aspire to do or create in the future.

We’ll work on the next steps of creating or updating your vision in the next post.

Give this a few days to “percolate,” and we’ll move on to the next steps from there.

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If you answered the questions in the last post, What customers do you do your best work with, and for?, that information will be valuable to you here, too.

Use the following exercise to see what you already know about your current customers, or that you assume about prospective customers.

This exercise is based on a framework in Letting Go of the Words, by Ginny Redish. Created primarily for website developers to help them understand the customers that websites they’re developing are trying to reach, this framework can help you understand your target customers better – and help you see where you don’t know them very well.

Start here:

1. Using Excel, or a pencil and paper, create a grid.

Include 4-6 columns and 15-20 rows.

2. Choose a sample of 3-5 customers.

If you have an established business, use customers you know well who represent other, similar customers.

If you have a new business, or are moving into new markets, you may want to test your knowledge about prospective customers.

3. In the far left-hand column, list the following characteristics, one per row.

Refine this list of characteristics, as needed. Add characteristics that are important for you to consider, and remove any that aren’t especially relevant to your products or services.

If you’re uncertain about whether to include or drop a characteristic from the list, err on the side of including it. You may find that it opens up new understanding, and provides fresh ideas about ways you can serve customers better.

- City in which they live

- Age

- Values

- Company and job

- Experience and expertise

- Economic circumstances

- Marital and family circumstances

- Whether they have children or not

- Social and cultural environment

- Technology they use

- Typical tasks and responsibilities

- Strongest emotions that lead to their need for your product or service (such as frustration about a circumstance they want to change, or very high aspirations they have to achieve a particular dream)

- Key phrases and quotes they use

- Other characteristics, as appropriate

4. Write the name of one customer at the top of each column.

5. Complete as much of the grid as you can with information you now have.

5. Notice what information is missing.

6. Review the results.

- Do you know your customers as well as, or better than you expected?

- Or do you know them less than you thought?

- In what areas, if any, do you feel there’s a real gap in your knowledge about your customers?

- Are there any surprises in what you discovered about them?

- Does having completed this give you ideas for other products or services you could add?

- Does it give you ideas about how to reach your customers or prospects more easily and effectively?

7. Make plans to collect information you now find you need in order to understand your customers well.

There are many ways to do this, such as by surveying them, using focused interviews, and observing customers, among others.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish every Tuesday. Sign up for the newsletter here.

To serve your customers best, it helps to know them well.

That’s easy to say, but hard to do.

Do you know your customers?

Are you sure…and are you willing to give that confidence a test?

In the next post, I’ll share a framework you can use to test your knowledge of your customers, identifying areas where you want or need to know more.

Before taking that step, however, answer the following preliminary questions.

This will help you understand more about how you feel about your current markets and customers, and where you’ve done your best work in the past.

Consider:

1. Whose needs do you like to serve?

Some customers are very satisfying to work with. They may be easy for you to work with, or you have something in common. They enjoy the work you do, and enjoy working with you.

Pause for a moment and recall a few customers you’ve particularly enjoyed working with in the past.

2. Whose needs have you served well in the past?

Start by considering which customers you communicate most easily with.

That may give you a good clue about the types of customers whose needs you serve well. Clear, effective communication is a major part of success in yours, and any field.

Consider, also, those who made you better in some way.

They may not always have been the easiest customers to work with, but they held you to a high standard. They turned out to be an asset to your business because your work became better for everyone else, in the process.

Think back about a few customers whose needs you served especially well in some way.

3. Whose needs do you want to serve?

There may be types of customers you want to work with, but you haven’t worked with yet.

Think about who these people, or groups of people are. Consider what is common about a few of them.

In the next post, I’ll go into more detail to help you test your customer knowledge, and begin to fill it in, if you find you need to know more.

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Having a vision you don’t use is almost like having no vision at all.

Many organizations create a vision and then never use it, for any of a variety of reasons. One reason is that the vision was not compelling enough to grab, and guide the team. They never experience what a valuable tool a strong, shared vision can be.

Ask any team that was wildly successful.

You’re very likely to hear that their success was largely because – in addition to talent – they shared the bond of a compelling common vision, an aggressive goal that they believed they could reach.

In contrast, check with a team that failed.

Often a variety of things handicapped them. But one of the most fundamental problems was probably that they didn’t have a shared goal.

Or if they did, they didn’t really believe they could succeed together. They started to see what they believed was evidence that they couldn’t succeed. That, unwittingly, is the vision they drove toward…the belief that they would fail, or at least, not prevail.

Or perhaps they held strong, but wildly competing visions of success. Perhaps a few people drove toward personal glory, and others were focused on team success.

Whatever the circumstance, they shared something less than a common vision, bond, and dream.

What does it cost an organization to miss out on the power of a shared vision?

There are many:

Opportunities are lost. That may shows up in individual careers that don’t live up to their original talent or promise.

In other cases, teams or entire companies can fail.

Customers can be lost. They take with them current and future business, referrals, revenue and profits with them.

Competitors can overtake a company. This can happen when success seemed to be a sure, and forever thing. Check out past Fortune 500 lists. Some companies long on them no longer exist.

Whatever the reason, a vision that does not grab and hold the team whose vision it is supposed to be will never implement it.

Make sure your vision doesn’t get filed away, a dusty relic of a long-ago team offsite or meeting.

Make it compelling, and use it.

In future posts, I’ll address ways to make sure your vision works, and provide ways you can reinforce it. Make your vision real, in the best possible way.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish every Tuesday. Sign up for the newsletter here.

We all know qualities of great leaders. One of those characteristics is being unafraid to take on big challenges.

If you do take on a big gamble, or take a big risk, there is a chance that things may not go well.

And as much as you don’t want to think about it, you could fail.

The recent election provides just one example of how, if you’re playing a high-stakes game, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.

No matter how dedicated candidates were, and what they said about how they’d serve, or how they’d lead if they were elected, at the end of the day, some candidates and their teams were going to lose.

Sporting events provide another case. The recent World Series is just one example.

Two different teams battle for victory. One team goes home the winner, the other returns filled with battle scars and regrets about moves they didn’t or couldn’t make, opportunities they didn’t take.

If you are the leader of a campaign, company or team, and you’re playing high-stakes games, when things don’t go your way, your job as a leader is not an easy one.

At these times, you have to pick your team up, get focused again and get on the move, in a better way.

Here nine key steps to do that well:

1. Figure out what happened.

Size up, as much as you can, as well as you can, what happened, and why it happened.

2. Learn from it.

Be honest about your mistakes. Learn from them. For example:

- Were your expectations realistic?

- Were people as well-prepared and equipped as you thought they were?

- How well did you read the situation? Were your observations, assumptions, interpretations and planned actions correct, but your execution suffered? Or did you miss important signs of the situation you were really in, focused as you were on what you hoped was happening?

- How adaptable were you and your team, once you realized the circumstances you really faced?

- Had you prepared for contingencies? Were you ready with a Plan B, a Plan C, and more, if needed?

3. Get your bearings. Get focused again.

Check and correct your goals and strategies, if need be.

They may have changed.

Or maybe not. Your original plans may still be fine, even if you’re licking a few post-competition wounds.

4. Communicate and prepare to move.

Let people know what’s changed, and how you want them to move ahead.

Let them know, also, what they can do to help prevent the circumstance from happening again, if possible.

5. Get moving.

Get back in the saddle again.

Get moving forward again.

7. Pay attention.

Monitor key measures and other possible signs of the need to adapt.

Teach the members of the team the things to be especially attentive to, as well.

8. Adapt when you have to.

To change, you have to go about things in a different and better way.

You can’t take prior success and strengths for granted, and you can’t take this setback as a prediction of what will happen in the future.

You’re adapting to the circumstances you really find yourselves in.

Be prepared to adapt again, if you have to. Resilience is a skill you need now, and will need again in the future.

9. Take time for self-reflection, as a leader, and as a team.

One question you have to ask yourselves, as a team, is if you really want the success you originally planned, if you can still have it.

And you, as a leader, have to check your commitment, too. Do you really want to lead, and lead this team, or did you just not want to lose?

If so, recommit to your shared goals, your individual roles, and to each other.

Plan, and take actions that once again, lead to shared success.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish every Tuesday. Sign up for the newsletter here.