Here’s a sneak peek into my upcoming book: How To Hire the Best: The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members (Releasing September 15, 2020)
Create the Story
To help you give your team members a story worth telling, here are a few questions to get you started:
- Why do you do what you do for your best clients?
- What are the greatest, most important problems you solve for your best clients?
- What impact does solving those problems have on your best clients?
Your vision is perhaps the most compelling story you will create for yourself and your team. It begins with one simple, yet extraordinarily powerful question: What do you want?
My Own Experience
In 2005, I was working in a job that sucked my soul dry. I clung to a ray of hope — my discovery of life coaching. Life coaching offered a way to repurpose my skills as a psychologist into a career that would be more life-affirming to me than the work I had been doing. As I completed my first course on the path to becoming a life coach, I was to write my vision for my life in 10 years. I was to write as if it were happening, in the present moment, and take the limits off my imagination. I was invited to claim what I want.
So, that Saturday morning, I put away my vacuum, grabbed my journal, and walked out of the house to sit in my yard, writing. As I wrote, that skeptical gremlin shrieked loudly in my head: That will never happen! You can’t have that! Keep dreaming sister! Ha! No one gets all that. It’s not possible. You don’t know how… I persisted. Three pages later, I got up, walked inside and had one thought reverberating in my head: I have nothing to lose if I decide it’s possible and everything to lose if I don’t.
Seven years later, I stumbled upon that journal entry. As I read, I read about my life…the one I was currently living. What had seemed impossible seven years prior had come to be. Not only had my vision come to be in a much shorter time than I had imagined, I had surpassed it in ways that were unimaginable to me at the time I wrote my 10 Year Vision. You see, there were experiences and circumstances I wanted to include in that 10 Year Vision that scared me so much, I feared putting pen to paper to claim them. Yet, they had been acknowledged and were tucked away in my heart. That was sufficient.
Courage is feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
–Oprah Winfrey
Visioning is Powerful
I first wrote about this in Success From the Inside Out: How Busy Women REAL-ize their Dreams (out of print) and have had the privilege of coaching hundreds of clients over the years to achieve their visions. One of the greatest joys in approaching my second decade of coaching is reconnecting with past clients who reach out to share the realization of their visions. I am repeatedly reminded of the power of this process!
When we have a clearly articulated vision connected to feelings and experiences, we create a gap between our present reality and the reality we want to experience. Our minds unconsciously work to close the gaps. Your vision becomes an open loop that your mind seeks to close. You will spot opportunities to bring your vision to fruition, often with more ease and speed than our logical brain anticipates. Do not underestimate the power of a clearly articulated vision!
Identifying Purpose
One of my favorite aspects of our Better Business, Better Life Program™ is the coaching we do with our clients to identify their personal mission, vision and purpose. These become the foundation for their businesses. We frequently hear how refreshing it is to get work on the business from the perspective of designing a business that supports life. Our clients are writing their visions and incorporating their team members’ roles in the realization of their visions.
“What is the truest, most beautiful story you can imagine?”
–Glennon Doyle
Claim it. Tell it. Live it!
Dr. Sabrina Starling, The Business Psychologist™ and author of the How to Hire the Best series is the founder of Tap the Potential. At Tap the Potential, we work to free business owners from the constant demands of a growing business. We believe work supports life, not the other way around. Through our proprietary Better Business, Better Life™ coaching program, we transform cash-sucking businesses into highly profitable, Great Places to Work, then send business owners on a 4 Week Vacation™ to celebrate that accomplishment. After the first year in our program, our clients have more time for what matters most and more money in their bank account than ever before.
Never one to accept the status quo or back down from a challenge, Dr. Sabrina’s How to Hire the Best series grew from her desire to solve the toughest hiring challenges interfering with her clients’ growth and profitability. What sprang from her experience working with entrepreneurs in rural areas catapulted her into becoming the world’s leading expert in attracting top talent in small businesses — no matter what hiring challenges those businesses are facing — and earned Tap the Potential’s reputation as the go-to resource for entrepreneurs committed to creating Great Places to Work with thriving coaching cultures and highly engaged team members working from strengths. Her latest book, How to Hire the Best: The Contractor’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Employees, is an International Best Seller on Amazon! In this powerful book, Dr. Sabrina shares crucial hiring strategies to transform your small business AND improve your personal life. With her background in psychology, and years of driving profit in small business, Dr. Starling knows what it takes to find, keep and get exceptional performance out of your biggest investment — your team members.
Dr. Sabrina is working on her next books: How to Hire the Best: The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members (available Sept 15) and The 4 Week Vacation: Work Supports Life, Not the Other Way Around (available Dec 1; featuring many of our Trailblazing 4 Week Vacation™ Retreat Participants!)
