Inspirational Leaders Know Where They’re Going

*Be sure to check out the end of this post to see how you can win a free copy of guest writer Mark Hopkins’ new book!*

I had very few bosses that inspired me during my 15 years in corporate America.  Most of them internalized their role as a cog in the corporate machine and expected me to do the same.  They received their marching orders from on high and passed a subset of them on to me.  Working for them was like eating the same bowl of corn flakes every day knowing that there must be a way to score a blue corn tortilla breakfast burrito somewhere else.  Eventually I was exposed to some true leaders that I found myself attracted to—people who looked and sounded different.  It took me a while to figure out why I wanted to work for them but it turned out to be quite simple.  They knew where they were going.

People who have a personal vision have a twinkle in their eye and a spring in their step.  They are living with a purpose and their daily progress toward their vision builds confidence and leads to a belief that anything is possible. And those people are just fun to be around.  If you want to be an inspirational leader, start by developing your own personal vision and by making sure you are doing work and living life in a way that allows you to make progress toward it.

The best advice on how to develop a personal vision that I have come across is through a process called Creative Tension, a term coined by an MIT professor, Peter Senge, in his work on learning organizations.  Creative Tension is a force that is at work in anyone who has taken the time to think deeply about the ideal life that they would like to live and comparing it to a brutally honest assessment of their current reality—the life that they are actually living.  The juxtaposition of where you want to be when compared with where you are sets up a tension that pulls you forward.

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