This is a great time for a person to allow the mind to begin dreaming about how they want their career to travel. I know my daughter well. She has been dreaming about her career all along. However, this is the best time to begin scraping off the fat of a dream and begin working on the meat of the dream. Now is the time to start developing the creative self as well as the due diligent self with regards to career duties and career plans. Solid foundations are now taking on a shape that is recognizable.
She is excited about beginning work on her new job. She has been receiving some very good council from her new boss, even thought she has not started her first day yet. Her duties will include some work on creating a new process for internal record keeping for the few hundred employees on the company staff. She will be given some guidelines to make this transition of record keeping work smoothly but they expect her to develop several new architectural software components that will help the HR department reduce the paper trail currently used to manage all employee records. She will need to build a portion of this process.
She is our last graduate. All of our children have finished college with their desired degrees, one with her Masters Degree. All are employed in the professional world. Each of our children have performed this transition from college activities to become professionals in the working world. Each of the two children prior to our last graduate, who is just beginning her employment trek, have used each job placement as a stepping stone to move up the career ladder. The two previous graduates have moved up the employment scale with each promotion or job change they initiated during their career building efforts. I am certain the last graduate will do much the same.
The internal drive that motivates the soul to move up the skill ladder is a nurtured system that comes from a developed want that is built into a person and is designed to be able to manage some dreams about performing at higher stations in life. This type of thinking is not always natural. It needs to be trained. It needs to be nurtured and it needs to be rewarded in order to grow. These three graduates have that desire. They practice their set of dreams and establish them very well in their heart of life management. They know they are responsible for the outcomes they will produce. They know where they want to be and they know what they need to do to get where they want to be. Even though only one of them owns a small business, while managing her employment career, each of them practice the skill sets that a small business owner must possess. They know how to dream and they know how to manage those dreams into a reality. All of them are efficient in that effort.
A business owner must perform their success in the same fashion. Learning how to dream properly is a key component to helping someone to develop a successful business plan. The effort to perform well is centered around the idea of improving performance. In order to improve performance, new knowledge must grow well along side the creative use of good ideas. Good ideas must circle the truth around the field of useful and probable potentials. This is exactly how a business owner succeeds in building a healthy and growing business model. The use of knowledge, the use of probable dreaming and the successful management of doing what needs to be done is how a business owner performs growth in an efficient manner. It is a period of time an owner discovers how to be perpetual with their efforts.
Most business owners find this period of time almost an illusion. Business owners rarely get to see concrete evidence of major hurdles being cleared in the path of what they are trying to do with their business model. Everything they do seems interwoven together with so many separate processes that a clear shift from one level of accomplishment that lifts them to another plateau of accomplishments does not actually reveal itself with this kind of clarity my daughter is experiencing. A business owner must find separate ways to recognize benchmark accomplishments. They must learn how to identify when they have developed a healthy employee training program. They must learn how to identify when their profit margins have grown a point or two and have actually held that mark for more than a year. Business owners rarely get to experience major shifts of accomplishments similar to the ones my daughters have experienced. Business owners do not always get to witness that kind of clarity in their business building successes.
It is for this very reason some business owners slip away from reality and begin to formulate concepts of false impressions. Business owners are usually driven by a set of dreams that help them to overcome the customary obstacles that interfere with the business success they are trying to achieve. They use those dreams to help them push through those obstacles. This is a very good thing. I recommend it to any new business owner. Dreams are usually the root of every business building effort. Dreams help drive the machinery, especially when the terrain does not look very manageable. Dreams are centered around some great desire and help the owner of that dream to begin developing a great vision for how to get there. These are necessary steps for success.
As each person begins to learn how to dream properly, they must also learn how to deal with fantasy and illusions. It is such a difficult process to discern which is what. When does a dream go too far? When do the illusions pass up the possibility of a dream coming true? How does a person know the difference? Why should that be of concern?
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| Dream Big, But Dream Real! |
The business owner with a healthy set of good dreams is the one that will be able to overcome some real setbacks along the trail. Setbacks are real and will occur. Some setbacks are very nasty ones. They can destroy the business owners efforts and kill their desire to build what they first thought was able to be built. Dreams help that owner to rise above those setbacks and the emotional destruction some of those setbacks deliver. That is why you often hear the phrase to have a big dream. Big dreams do not necessarily guarantee big results. They will, however, help the dreamer to learn how to overcome "business killing" obstacles. Every business owner will face "business killing" obstacles. They will not be illusions. They will be real and they will be serious enough to kill the owners efforts.
The best thing a business owner can do when they begin their trek to build a great business model is to refrain from false impressions and learn how to dream big, properly and without illusions driving their heart and soul. Learn how to slam dunk the illusions. Illusions are not healthy. Illusions will destroy your efforts. Illusions will lie and deceive your ideas and hijack your plans to do what you need to be doing. Slam dunk your illusions. Get your accuracy in line with the level of dreaming you are doing. Make sure you know what kind of work your dreams will require. Make sure you accept what kind of work you will need to be doing. Do not create a cushion of illusions to help you perform what needs to be performed. Those illusions will eventually lie to you enough to lead you down the path of failure.
Dream big, but dream real. Make sure your dream is possible, even if it seems like a real long stretch. Some people grow from healthy dreaming into unhealthy illusions. Learn how to define which is which. When you discover your illusions, slam dunk them. Get rid of them. Get back to reality and dream properly. It is fine to reach for the stars, but you need to know where the stars are and how far you will need to stretch yourself to reach them. There is no fantasy to real success. It is not an illusion. It comes from real hard work, real tough lessons, very big dreams and a desire to honestly do what needs to be done. It requires changing who you are and how you think. Are you truly up to this task?
All three of my graduates fully understand this process. I know, I have watched them change and adjust as they stretch from one plateau to the other. I have watched them work hard on staying grounded well without destroying how they manage their dreams. I watch them work on developing the mental toughness required to reach higher levels of knowledge. I watch them crash and burn. I watch them re-discover a new way to get up and start over again. I watch them introduce better methods, better respect and cleaner approaches to career developments. I watch them balance this effort with their personal life management. These are crucial lessons a small business owner must learn how to practice and endure.
Slam dunk your illusions. They may be misleading you down a path that will not produce what you first thought would occur. Slam dunk your illusions. We all have them. Get to know what they are and learn how to get rid of them. Your dreams will have a much better chance of survival when the illusions disappear.
Until next time...
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