Partners can be colleagues, family members, friends, or anyone who has an interest in helping you meet your goals and achieve your vision.  When considering who you might enroll as your partner, think about who might share your vision, benefit from you achieving it, or be pursuing a similar vision themselves.

The purpose of partnering is to find continuing support from someone who truly wants you to achieve your goals and is able to provide help to you when you need it.  In a coaching relationship, you can count on your coach to be supportive of whatever vision you are creating, and unbiased about what goals you choose, or how you choose to get there.  A professional certified coach is one of the best ways to achieve this level of partnership, but if coaching is not for you, you can find other types of partnership that help you grow and learn on your journey to your vision.

Some things a partner can bring to you include resources, ideas, a brainstorming partner, encouragement, accountability and feedback.  If you are both working toward similar goals, you can trade success stories, celebrate together as you reach milestones, and pull each other up when you get discouraged in any particular area.

If you can’t find an obvious partner in your immediate circle, you may want to focus on a specific goal and look for others who are acquiring a similar skill or habit.  For example, if you have an important goal that includes developing stronger public speaking skills, your local Toastmasters may be a resource both in developing that skill, but also in finding partners in your journey to reach that goal.

Depending upon your goal, you may find local networking groups, existing support groups, and alumni or educational groups where others share your goal and are actively sharing their successes, strategies and struggles, and these groups can be the source of great power in keeping you on course

Who will you choose to partner with in your journey?  Which partners might be right for each of your goals?

As we mature, we even forget who we really are and begin to believe that the shell of beliefs and habits we have built is really “us”.   We make excuses for ourselves and others, thinking “well, that’s just the way I am”, instead of committing to live in our own true image.

An analogy I found that rings true to me relates to the weather (posted on Michael Neill’s Genius Catalyst blog):

• If you are a victim of the weather, then sunshine is far preferable to rain.
• If you are the weather, which weather you are most comfortable with will be a function of the weather you are most familiar with being.
• If you are the sky, it really doesn’t matter what the weather is.  It will change according to the day and the season, and you will carry on, regardless.

When we are acting like someone we “should” be, we are pretending to be the victim of the weather, when we are actually the sky.  The first step is to understand that you are playing the victim, or at best the weather in your own life, with your mood and reactions driven by what is happening.  Step outside of that “should” perspective and know that you are the sky, and that the passing weather is an interesting experience to be observed and learned from, but no more defines you than a raincloud defines the sky.

From this bigger, more powerful perspective, what greatness inside yourself are you willing to reach out and commit to being?  When you make a commitment, great things begin to happen.  Step up and start creating your own success.

For one man, his commitment is to be TBOLITNFL (his story here).  Post your own commitment and step into your greatness.

The strategy is not the end of the process, but the beginning of your journey toward your vision.  You have defined the vision, made it concrete with some goals that define what it will take for the vision to come to life, developed some strategies that you think will help you achieve your goals, and now you are ready for the plans.

Plans are the day to day activities that are how you will implement the strategy.  In some cases, it may be as simple as attending a meeting, or joining a group and putting it on your calendar.  In others, it may involve multiple steps in meeting with others to get feedback, breaking your strategy down into specific steps and tasks, and then making time to take those actions every day, week and month until you have built new habits, new ways of being and a new feeling about your life.

So if your goal is to bring in 10 new clients, for example, your strategy might be to increase your number of prospects in your target market.  Your plans might include joining a new group with lots of your target clients in it, attending more events where your target clients will be present, or speaking at those events.  It might include making sure you actually attend the meetings of the new group by blocking that time in your calendar, having a plan for talking to at least 5 new people at each meeting, or spending 30 minutes a week identifying events where your target will be present, or calling organizers to find speaking engagements.  When you break your strategy down into specific actions, plans for overcoming habits, time pressure and your own thoughts, you are creating a plan to implement.

Plans are at the most basic level, so if you find you planned to do something important in the morning and you just can’t get up, adjust your plan to do it at a time that feels more natural to you.  Plans are the level at which you “play” on a daily basis until you find a formula that works.  It is the most flexible, but that does not mean you don’t need to have a written plan and a commitment to work your plan.  Unless it’s written down and scheduled or made concrete for you in some other way, a plan becomes just another “nice idea” that you didn’t do anything about.  So, while your plans can be flexible and changed when they are not serving you well and moving you toward your goal, you have to take positive actions on your plan regularly.

What will your plan be for this month?  For this week?  For today?  How will you make sure you follow your plan?  When will you review your ability to follow the plan and make adjustments?

There are always multiple strategies for achieving any goal, and these can be as personal as the goals themselves.  If you want to reduce the amount of soda you drink, you might think about when you drink it now, what triggers you to drink it, and what alternatives you might create for yourself.  Not having it at home could help someone who primarily drink soda at home, but if you drink it mostly at work from the vending machine while on a break with colleagues, your strategy would probably be very different.

If you are trying to replace an old habit, whether it be interrupting others in conversation or asking multiple questions at once before you get answers, you will want to find new behaviors to replace them with.  You might work on shutting off the internal dialogue that has you preparing what you want to say by listening to the other person and building a mental image of what they are saying and taking a breath in the silence before you say anything.  You might have a mantra before you speak of “one question”… and practice not speaking until you had the question you really wanted to ask.

A strategy is simply a decision about how to use resources to solve a problem.  It is a choice about what you will do and what you will not do in order to achieve a goal.  When you have given a strategy a good chance to succeed and find it ineffective, it’s time to come up with a new strategy.  Remember, experimenting is how we learn.  Failures are opportunities to examine what happened with a critical eye and design a new solution that may work better.

What strategies will you come up with to reach your goals?  How can you learn about strategies that have worked for others and might be useful to you?  How will you leverage your innate strengths and values to make your strategies right for you?

The surprising answer to motivational deficits are not individual relationships and physical environment or a lack of financial reward, but rather on your ability to control your destiny and the alignment of what you are doing to your personal values and vision.  Certainly all the variables in your surroundings help, and may make your work less onerous, but true motivation comes from internal factors:

• Control of your own work: how, when and by what method you achieve the goal
• Ability to do the job well: having the skills, knowledge and support to do a great job
• Alignment of the goal with your own personal values and goals

The first two are driven by management culture, and are key elements of engagement, but the third is only possible if you have a sense of your own personal vision.  In fact, having a personal vision, a passion for something larger than your own personal gain, is such a strong motivator, that it can overcome the first two factors and drive you to unprecedented success and achievement.

Think about Gandhi who began a career as a mediocre lawyer, and discovered his purpose to overcome the abject poverty of his people, and their feelings of inferiority, and rose to greatness and influence on the power of that vision.

How can you develop your own personal vision?

First, start with identifying your core values, then work on envisioning a future in which those values are all honored to their highest in your life and work.  This becomes your personal vision.  Now look at the work and life you have and start planning how this can change into the life and work you need to manifest your personal vision.

Your vision enables your most powerful self to emerge.