It Clarifies Focus When you land on the real purpose for any-thing you're doing, it makes things clearer. Just taking two minutes and writing out your primary reason for doing something invariably creates an increased sharpness of vision, much like bringing a telescope into focus. Frequently, projects and situations that have begun to feel scattered and blurred grow clearer when someone brings it back home by asking, "What are we really trying to accomplish here?"
It Expands Options Paradoxically, even as purpose brings things-into pinpoint focus, it opens up creative thinking about wider-possibilities. When you really know the underlying-"why" — for the conference, for the staff party, for the elimination of the management position, or for the merger — it expands your thinking about how to make the desired result happen. When people write out their purpose for a project in my seminars, they often claim it's like a fresh breeze blowing through their mind, clarifying their vision of what they're doing.
If you're not sure why you're doing something, you can never do enough of it.
Is your purpose clear and specific enough? If you're truly experiencing the benefits of a purpose focus — motivation, clarity, decision-making criteria, alignment, and creativity — then your purpose probably is specific enough. But many "purpose statements" are too vague to produce such results. "To have a good department," for example, might be too broad a goal. After all, what constitutes a "good department"? Is it a group of people who are highly motivated, collaborating in healthy ways, and taking initiative? Or is it a department that comes in under budget? In other words, if you don't really know when you've met your purpose or when you're off track, you don't have a viable directive. The question "How will I know when this is off-purpose?" must have a clear answer.
Principles
Of equal value as prime criteria for driving and directing a project are the standards and values you hold. Although people seldom think about these consciously, they are always there. And if they are violated, the result will inevitably be unproductive distraction and stress.
A great way to think about what your principles are is to complete this sentence: "I would give others totally free rein to do this as long as they. ." — what? What policies, stated or unstated, will apply to your group's activities? "As long as they stayed within budget"? "satisfied the client"? "ensured a healthy team"? "promoted a positive image"?
Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
— Dee
It can be a major source of stress when others-engage in or allow behavior that's outside your standards. If you never have to deal with this issue, you're-truly graced. If you do. some constructive conversation about and clarification of principles could align the energy and prevent unnecessary conflict. You may want to begin by asking yourself, "What behavior might undermine what I'm doing, and how can I prevent it?" That will give you a good starting point for defining your standards.
Another great reason for focusing on principles is the clarity and reference point they provide for positive conduct. How do you want or need to work with others on this project to ensure its success? You yourself are at your best when you're acting how?
Whereas purpose provides the juice and the direction, principles define the parameters of action and the criteria for excellence of behavior.
Vision/Outcome
In order most productively to access the conscious and unconscious resources available to you, you must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like. Purpose and principles furnish the impetus and the monitoring, but vision provides the actual blueprint of the final result. This is the "what?" instead of the "why?" What will this project or situation really be like when it successfully appears in the world?
For example, graduates of your seminar are demonstrating consistently applied knowledge of the subject matter. Market share has increased 2 percent within the northeastern region over the last fiscal year. Your daughter is clear about your guidelines and support for her first semester in college.
The Power of Focus
Since the 1960s thousands of books have expounded on the value of appropriate positive imagery and focus. Forward-looking focus has even been a key element in Olympic-level sports training,with athletes imagining the physical effort, the positive energy,and the successful result to ensure the highest level of unconscious support for their performance.
We know that the focus we hold in our minds affects what we perceive and how we perfonn. This is as true on the golf course as it is in a staff meeting or during a serious conversation with a spouse. My interest lies in providing a model for focus that is dynamic in a practical way, especially in project thinking.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
— Albert Einstein
When you focus on something — the vacation you're going to take, the meeting you're about to go into, the product you want to launch — that focus instantly creates ideas and thought patterns you wouldn't have had otherwise. Even your physiology will respond to an image in your head as if it were reality.
The Reticular Activating System The May 1957 issue of Scientific American contained an article describing the discovery of the reticular formation at the base of the brain. The reticular formation is basically the gateway to your conscious awareness; it's the switch that turns on your perception of ideas and data, the thing that keeps you asleep even when music's playing but wakes you if a special little baby cries in another room.
Just like a computer, your brain has a search function — but it's even more phenomenal than a computer's. It seems to be programmed by what we focus on and, more primarily, what we identify with. It's the seat of what many people have referred to as the paradigms we maintain. We notice only what matches our internal belief systems and identified contexts. If you're an optometrist, for example, you'll tend to notice people wearing eyeglasses across a crowded room; if you're a building contractor, you may notice the room's physical details. If you focus on the color red right now and then just glance around your environment, if there is any red at all, you'll see even the tiniest bits of it.
The implications of how this filtering works— how we are unconsciously made conscious of information — could fill a weeklong seminar. Suffice it to say that something automatic and extraordinary happens in your mind when you create and focus on a clear picture of what you want
Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you " ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.
— Maxwell Maltz
Clarifying Outcomes
There is a simple but profound principle that-emerges from understanding the way your perceptive filters work: you won't see how to do it until you see yourself doing it.
It's easy to envision something happening if it has happened before or you have had experience with similar successes. It can be quite a challenge, however, to identify with images of success if they represent new and foreign territory — that is, if you have few reference points about what an event might actually look like and little experience of your own ability to make it happen.