Do you know your next steps? Who would you be, in 5 years? In 10? Next month? What would you have achieved until the next week? Â Until tomorrow? These are the questions I have set, as tasks, to a meeting of associates, aiming to solve some managerial and coordination problems for a project!
Difficult questions, you would say! But, my intention was, to unblock my peers from the day-to-day problems of the project (the situations that originally created that specific problem) and make them see the bigger picture (and themselves in that!), by creating a different inertia and different loci of focus! It was essential in that stage, to make them shift their focus from the short-run operations of a project to a long-run perspective of a business, in order they should find their place in the “map”!
What’s Wrong With the Questions?
Clever questions have a long history in management, for shifting the established “status quo” and make the involved agents see different aspects of the same situation! But the answers are the key, you should focus on! More specifically, YOUR answers are the key to your further evolution, given under a specific and coherent framework of thought. Usually, there are your free-given answers which bring you the clear realization, of what you want to achieve or who you want to be in the future!
There are, also, moments, usually after a tragic or “problematic” event in your life (the loss of a close person, to loss of your job, an unforeseen breakup in your relation with someone, a health or medical problem, etc.) that brings the foreground questions and issues of great importance for your life! During your everyday life, these questions, usually stay hidden (under our conscious radar) to emerge when you need some more clarity on your direction or your chosen path of life!
The Impact of the Uncontrollably & Demanding Questions
These kinds of questions are not limited to a single level of your life (i.e. health, career, relations, financial status, etc.) but tend to spill over and “saturate” a large portion of who and what we choose to be! The impact is huge and, many times, it results in a massive changing of your previous operation “paradigm” and the adoption of a new way of living! Not necessarily good or bad! But many times, quite different!
If these questions, “pop-up” uncontrollably in your mind, without a previous premeditation, preparation and established decisions (choices) about your basic “facts” of life, tend to create to you “chaotic” behavioral patterns, discontinuity with your previous established behaviors, exit from your “comfort zone“, problems in your everyday activities, commitments, relationships, loose of the sense of personal control and of self-respect and a negative impact to your overall “psychology”!
In order for you to have control in your life and to be the designer of your present and future results, you need to have a life plan, to have given clear answers to such questions and to be prepared to respond accordingly in any given situation!
Your Next Steps
Some people they say that “there is no second chance for a first good impression“, but the same thing happens with some of your major issues in your life. To answer such questions, is paramount for you, in order for you to maintain the “ownership” and the accountability of your life!
But the things, are not taken place in the void (besides, nature dislikes the void!) They depend on specific conditions, they based on a set of (hidden or not) specific parameters and include your free will and the actions you are prepared to employ in order to cope with this or similar situations! Sometimes the changes are rapid and without warning! For this reason, you should be prepared to meet effectively the whatever challenge you may face and re-assure the flawless continuation of your chosen life plan!
For answering effectively in such questions and respond effectively to a situation that may alter your previous course of life, you first, need to prepare yourself for situations like that! It takes a commitment by you, to establish a way of thought that would lead you to provide adequate, unique and tailor-made for you suitable answers and take the necessary decisions! It needs discipline and focuses to document how you would behave in a given situation and what you would do!
It also requires of you, an intention of doing something in order to change or maintain your present life. The process called either dynamic balance or equilibrium (when you choose to maintain your present life) or transformation (when you have decided to change or “upgrade” your life)! Either way, the decision it should be intentional!
This intention ( the intention of maintenance or change), leads to a commitment to your chosen values and principles, which leads to assuming specific actions, in order for you to bring the required results. This mode of thought becomes a habit, and propagates, via your life, the required results at all levels of your life! This course of action, along with your commitment to your principles, values, and the life path you want to employ, develops for you an effective mindset towards the implementation of your goals, which, after a while, becomes a different life!
Simple isn’t it!
