1. Does your company have a vision of its future?
2. Does your company attract committed, inspired people who are working towards a common goal?
3. Is your company built to last?

If you said “yes” to the above, then I’ll bet you have a fabulous vision for the future of your company, which is based on a core ideology that all your people buy into.

If you said “no” then I’ll bet you have a team of people who are probably good at what they do, but are not as enthusiastic as they could be about the company they work for.

Focus

Without a strong focused vision that gives your company direction and serves as enduring promise for the future it is unlikely your people will be motivated to work towards a common objective. Not only that, but if your vision is not based on a core ideology, a set of values that your people can buy into, you’ll find it difficult to sustain an inspired workforce.

A Powerful Vision…

• Will create a shared purpose within the organisation
• Will generate commitment and meaning in people’s work
• Will stimulate improvement by always working towards it
• Is a guide to decision making

Both corporate organisations and small to medium sized business are realising that productivity does not necessarily depend on remuneration or environment.

It is now clearer than ever that sustaining a happy and effective work force depends on how they are acknowledged, fulfilled and valued by their employees. However, even more than this there is something else that cannot be overlooked.

Values

It doesn’t matter how much the company provides, unless each individual understands their own personal values – their own rules for their lives and is able to align those personal values with those of the companies they work for, they will never be able to meet the needs of their organisation.

If they can’t meet the needs of their organisation they will lose motivation and lose their company valuable business. The bottom line is that productivity pays the salaries but without a cohesive team of people who are able to uniquely express their talents at work and buy into the vision of the company, stress and absenteeism becomes “par for the course” and results in an uncertain and unstable workforce.

Research over the past five years has proven that a well-conceived vision based on core values and a core purpose can transform an organisation and its people. Based on this premise our fabulous programme, Vision to Action has been created.

From Vision to Action

Vision to Action is totally practical programme tailored specifically to each individual company. We work with large corporate, medium sized businesses and small teams to help define a solid foundation of values from which a desired vision for the future of your company is created. The results are an inspired motivated and focused organisation that produces outstanding results from every individual who can align themselves with the company’s vision.

The programme shows you how to

• Identify Your Core Ideology
• Develop Your Vision
• Decide on a Communication Strategy
• Implement the Vision
• Maintain the Vision

We can achieve the same results for you. If you want a fast track route to mastering and managing your vision and reap the benefits of a core ideology that inspires and motivates your team, contact fiona@fionaharrold.com and let us take your company from Vision to Action.

His situation is now one faced by many people, as recession bites hard and jobs that once looked safe are disappearing daily.

Sue has some tips on how you can avoid being paralysed by fear when crisis hits and shows how David applied them in a very practical way in his situation.

Sue’s Tips

Confront the precipice

When we hit a crisis in our lives, or feel that we are at a major crossroads, we can become paralysed by fear, and feel like we’re looking over a precipice and seeing a dark gaping hole. If we step off that precipice, our fear tells us we could freefall and smash to smithereens on the cliffs on the way down or on the jagged rocks at the bottom. So if this happens to you, let’s get one thing straight right now it’s perfectly normal!

Recognise that you always have a parachute on your back

You don’t have to stay paralysed by fear.

Break the trance – bring your eyes up out of the gaping hole and focus on your parachute. The longer you look down into the hole, the scarier it gets. Being on the precipice looking down is one of the scariest places in the world to be.

Check your parachute

The most important task for you to focus on is checking that your parachute has been packed properly. This means start taking practical action to move you forward. Get a coach if you need one because they will help you do this.

Jump

Once you’ve checked your parachute, as every skydiver knows, you have only one option you jump.

Trust your parachute to open

Your parachute may open right away, it may open half way down, or it may open just in time for you to skid into the drop zone. You won’t know when it will open for you until you jump. But it will open!

David’s Story

(If you have not already read David’s story, you can do so here)

What was so great about David was this:

He confronted his precipice

He got in touch with his true values and recognised that the organisation he’d dedicated so much of his time and energy to did not represent those values anymore.

He looked down into the dark and yawning hole this had created for him. He faced the fear of being without a job, without income, on his own. He faced his true needs: that to go back to work for his old company would be selling his soul and be like freefalling with heavy rocks in his pockets into the chasm.

He checked his parachute

For David this meant getting very practical about his income needs, getting very practical about what alternatives there were for him to generate that income, and taking steps each day sometimes big, sometimes tiny to make those alternatives real.

He jumped

He handed in his resignation to his old company and set out his new stall. He made the commitment and followed through. Still scared, still totally aware there were no guarantees, but also with the knowledge that he’d packed his parachute very, very carefully.

He started his freefall

Did his parachute open right away? No it didn’t. Did he feel scared? Yes he did. Did he hit a few hard edges on the cliff and get bruised as he went down? Again yes. But then his parachute opened, and the freefall turned into flight. And it felt good!

He began skydiving

Making adjustments to his course as he needs to, handling the air currents, aiming at the drop zone, and appreciating the view as he goes relishing the freedom of piloting his future.

I had an excellent work record during the nine years I had spent there, was proud of having gained promotion and I had never had one day off sick.

Disaster strikes …

Then, one day an incident happened which equally involved other members of the management team and disciplinary procedures followed on everyone. The results soon appeared and I was in disbelief at what I was hearing. I was demoted whilst my colleagues merely had warnings. I wasn’t even ultimately responsible for what had happened.

I was horrified. The decision was the wrong one. I was not guilty and believed it wholeheartedly, as did an abundance of colleagues, friends and relations.

For me to go back to work into a lesser position was going to damage my self esteem beyond repair. I believed in myself so much that I simply could not allow myself to do it. My morale, however had taken a serious beating. My self confidence had taken a nasty blow, but I knew I could not go back to work in that position.

I desperately wanted to move on but I didn’t know how.

Turning it Around

Fortunately, being a member of the Fiona Harrold website gave me the idea to contact Sue Clarke.

Since I made that decision, it has been the best thing I ever did. I can’t tell you enough how good it was to talk to somebody who really knew what I was going through. She is such a great listener and has been a tower of strength in guiding me through to where I am now.

After I made the decision not to return to work, what was I going to do? How could I make a living and keep paying the mortgage? I had some really scary thoughts and I was terrified. It felt like I was in a huge void and I just couldn’t see a way out of it.

Sue quickly got to work on my case and guided me through this void with a host of ideas for me to pursue. After a few weeks of trial and error, we came to the conclusion that I should use the skills and knowledge that I had gained over the years. I have horticultural qualifications but the creative side of me had long since disappeared in the job I was doing.

Guided by Sue, I set to spreading the word around that I was available to anyone who wanted a ‘garden makeover’. Friends and family loved it as they saw their gardens quickly being transformed.

Then I got my first client from a leaflet drop I did – and she was over the moon with what I did for her.

A new Life

Now, I am gaining a whole network of customers, my creative side has been reborn and my confidence levels restored. I am even starting to specialise in garden design for barn conversions. There are plenty of them up here in Yorkshire!

The worries over how will I pay the bills never needed to have been there. I am now making a living out of something for which I have a passion and, unlike my old job, that makes it a pleasure to get up in the mornings. I can also work the hours that suit me.

I HAVE A NEW LIFE!

Thank you Sue…you were brilliant.

David Shaw

Read Sue Clarke’s comments about working with David and her tips on how you too can “Feel the fear and do it anyway”. More >>>

Contact David
If you would like a garden makeover or a new garden design – talk to David! He works in the Yorkshire area and you can contact him through his garden designs website .

All of my start of year business objectives are connected to a long term business strategy. How many of you have a long term vision or strategy for your life? Do you know where you want to get to, who you want to be, what you want to have?

Without this in place a New Year’s resolution is merely wishful thinking and it’s no wonder we get bored with it by February.

At Cadbury Schweppes, once we have our long term business strategy – our goals – we then set our annual objectives; what we aim to achieve in the coming year. The difference with these is that they are exciting.

Energise

We use phrases and words like “be the best,” “exciting,” “superb products.” The reason we do this is that we have to energise over 60,000 employees to help deliver the objectives.

On a personal level, you could say that in “this year I want to get fit.” This sounds very dull. How about “I want to be superbly fit and healthy and be in the best shape I have ever been in my life.” A bit more exciting!

Think about how you would communicate your New Years resolution to 60,000 people and get them excited.

Implications

Finally, you need to think about the implications of not achieving your resolution. In the corporate world the pain is clear – our share price goes down, we get less bonus, I look bad to my boss which impacts my promotion chances… and so on.

For each of your new year resolutions you need to understand the implications of not achieving them and you need to feel bad – if the visualisation of not achieving your resolution doesn’t make you cringe, worry, get you angry or instil any other reaction, it isn’t a resolution you are going to act on. So change it.

If you do this well you will have a set of objectives that are aligned to a long term vision which will be so exciting that you will act on them and see them through right through to the end of the year.

Now isn’t that worth the effort?

Few realise how close they are to doing just that.

Mention  “year end deadlines” and accountants the world over can’t help but give a little shiver at the thought of mountains of work ahead. But there is only one real time year end, the 31st December, and those year end niggles begin earlier than the deadline.

It is a fact that there is something about arriving in December that turns up the volume on those inevitable questions that push their way forward and demand to be answered.

• “Is my life better at the end of this year than it was at the beginning?”
• “Did I do everything I said last January that I was going to do this year?”
• “Was this year more fulfilling than last year?”
• “Do I feel better this year than I did last year?”
• “Is my personal net worth higher or lower than it was at last year end?”
• “What is the most important thing to me in my life right now?”
• “Have the last 12 months taken me closer or further away from that thing?”

These questions hover during the indulgences of the holiday period. And then comes a brand New Year complete with new intentions for the next twelve months.

If your life were a business, you would be giving some stern accounting advice about the general lack of written plans, measurable targets and the all important comparison of budget to actual at year end. If Mr. Businessperson came to you, at year end, with some general idea of his income, a mental calculation of his expenditure, a vague idea of where that money got spent and a feeling that his business is worth more this year than it was last year, it would be very hard to assess to any degree of certainty if any of it were actually so.

How do You Want to Live?

But more and more it is becoming clear that with the demands of today’s lifestyles and the challenges in the worldwide economies, that keeping an eye on the bottom line of life is no longer optional. The business side of life has one purpose. And that is:

To generate the finances to allow you to lead the life you would like to lead.

What happens when spiraling lifestyle costs, increasing demands on resources, an expanding lifestyle, lowered provision of health care (with more and more people opting to pay for private healthcare), increasing Professional Indemnity and insurance costs mean the need to earn enough just to stand still takes all your time and there is no time to stop, get quiet and think about how you really would like to live?

And that’s without mentioning the burgeoning consumer debt that as a nation we have taken on, or the huge increase in property prices that have left many struggling to meet their new mortgage commitments.  Austerity has become the new fashion, an up-market pseudonym for keeping up appearances on a shoestring.

Work-Life Balance

Much has been made recently of the need for  “work-life balance” and there is no doubt that this has gone some way to improve the quality of the life among busy professionals. Many have addressed the balancing of working patterns with family life, time for exercise and social events and the other elements that go to make up a happy, healthy individual. And that’s great.

But there is a more important balance to be addressed and that is the balance of an individual within themselves.

The interesting thing that we have found working with professionals is that they are imbibed with a great sense of how to achieve professional success. There is a very clear roadmap, usually including college or university, followed by training, in turn followed by increasing management roles or branching out into business, solely or in partnership. Once on the path, there is a proven strategy to follow; one where many have successfully gone before. Significant positions and commensurate income are the reward.

What happens after that is not so clear at all and very few have gone before. Zig Ziglar, the grandfather of human behaviour studies, uses the phrase “from success to significance”. When you have gotten to where you have been working all your life to get to, where do you go from there? What do you do when you have achieved the goals you set out to achieve?

In other words what happens when you have security and comfort but no freedom.

And how are you going to pay for this new freedom? What impact will the changes you might want to make have on your financial stability, future and dependents?

Each person has all the answers themselves, but there are few people out there asking the questions.

The Coaching industry has tried to fill this role to some degree. However our experience is that sitting down with a client to find out what they want to do with their life invariably comes back to the question of finance. Even if you can remember or get to the point of knowing what you really want out of life there remains the question of how to use your current income and assets to provide for what you want, usually with some reduction in active time spent generating that income.

From Comfort to Freedom

Frank Brake of Brake Bros. who sold his British company for over £400m describes the successful business mans need for some form of wealth management to “bridge the gap between business and personal finance” a demand for  “persons of a certain calibre with whom they can sit down at a table, who is discreet and understands them and their needs”

Most often, we find that this does not point to a major life change but some subtle additions or redirection that turn a life that is working just fine into a life that truly enjoyable and fulfilling. After all most of the hard work has already been done to achieve a certain level of comfort. All that remains is to take what has been achieved and use it as a foundation for building a new kind of structure, one that is built around the things that are most important to you.  That’s the reward that so many get so close to but few step into, that’s the move from comfort to freedom.

End of Year Reflections

This year add these items to your end of year reflections.

• What is my Personal Net Worth?
  If you have this information from last year, check if there has been an increase or decrease in the last 12 months. If you do not maintain a personal Net Worth statement, start this year. After all if you don’t keep records how will you really know when you are winning.
• How much were my personal expenses last year and on what were they spent?
  You will want to know exactly what does your current lifestyle cost. But also ask yourself whether you actually really enjoyed the things you spent your money on. Were they worth the time you had to spend working to earn the money for them?
• Do I consistently earn more than I spend?
  Also calculate how much of what you earn comes from passive sources and how much from active work.  If you are not consistently earning 10% more than you are spending and increasing your ratio of passive to active income, consider making these specific targets for the next 12 months.
• List the 6 most important areas of your life.
  Then ask yourself how satisfied are you with where you are in each of those areas. Give yourself a score between 1%  -100%.  What makes up the existing %? What makes up the missing %? The areas can include career, health, family, finances, etc.
• Choose the most important item from the most important area you have identified.
  If there was one thing you were going to do differently next year regarding that item what would that be? Write it down and write why it is so important to you. Then choose three action items specifically to achieve that target and schedule them in your diary.
• Finally if you have dependents sit down with your family or partner and find out if all the things you are working to provide for them are the things that they want in the year ahead.It is amazing how often the earner of the household will be striving to provide things they think are important to the ones they love when the ones they love have completely different ideas about what they would like provided.

Taking a little focused time to align who you are, what you do and what you earn can result in less stress, better relationships, better career management, (by taking the financial stress out of decision making so you can decide based on what you would really like to do), earlier retirement, financial stability and growth even into later years, a longer life….a really enjoyable longer life.

This article was written by Kevin O’Malley and adapted from an article which originally appeared in Accountancy Ireland, the journal of The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland