What about your start-up?

"Good leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion." Jack Welsh

New year's eve 2013 went by rather quietly, and i found myself the next day staring at a bunch of resolutions and a 2013 Jessica plan realizing how useless this all were. 

It felt the same as working long hours on creating a business plan for a start-up whilst having no vision or idea why you are doing the start-up. 

Or spending sleepless nights on a consulting deck that is eventually going to end up in the client's trash. 

And exactly like the deck, I threw my plans in trash, decided to lock myself down for a weekend and brainstorm the vision and mission for my start-up: me.

The 5-step process

"the discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen"

But first, the ingredients

Pens, colorful ones, highlighters, lots of them. A board, sticky notes, or anything you can write on. Somewhere quiet and alone. Your favorite beverage, a day with no plans and patience.

1- Brainstorm - who am I

Spend half an hour to 45 minutes, throwing down all words that define you, mean something to you, inspire you, or simply come to your mind when you think of you. Remember no judgement: one of my words was neon colors. 

Next, cluster these words into themes; mine were 5:

Innovation, inspiration, revolution, feminine power, hard work

Now that you have all of these themes out of your head, take a break, and change scenery.

2- the 3 questions - your purpose

Come back re-read your words, then ask yourself these three questions:

- What do I wish to be remembered for after I die?

- If money was not a problem, what would I find myself doing?

- What matters most to me and why?

3- Map your life - your happiness

Create a graph of how happy you are and what were the major events. 

I surprisingly found out that during the perceived happiest events, for example starting stanford business school, I was in fact miserable. 

The purpose of this step is to help you understand what brings you happiness.

4- Your learnings

27 years on this earth, i actually had never took a moment to write down what I have learned during this journey. Check out my previous blog entry on my learnings. It is an empowering feeling to have them all clarified.

5- The outcome

So what was the synthesis of all of your mind porn?

Just like a company, I came up with

A mission

A vision

Guiding Principles

I am excited to share mine with you.

Mission: Inspire and support a world of seekers

Vision: a world full of people choosing meaningful lives

Guiding Principles: forgiveness, creativity, change, self-love, passion, vulnerability, gratitude, giving, courage

What next

I pinned my mission and vision in my bedroom, to remind me every day why i wake up and want to be part of this world.

While I have not figured out my detailed life plan, I as the CEO of myself have a clear direction. I now have a why, and it helps me make decisions faster, more confidently and from a place of trust.

What's your why?

photo credit www.celestenoche.com

It starts with Love

What if I told you all your decisions are driven by emotions? 

You would probably laugh at me. But before you do, think about the last decision you made. 
Mine was ordering a banana pie at Mission Beach cafe, last night. 

There goes the process.

My instinct wanted to devour the pie, my mind followed suit and created a whole logic for why it is okay for me to have fatty food at night: " you worked out today, you had a light lunch, you deserve it".

My decision was nowhere near rational. But what is reason anyway?

Senses + reason = understanding.

With our senses, we gather information, and thanks to our rational ability,we connect the pieces to form an understanding of how the world functions. We also refer to our past experiences to further our understanding of our world.

But reason only sets the destination.

It is emotion that drives us to action. The feeling, that sometimes you do not even recognize. 

While that could explain why the world works in a crazy way (think wars, economic crisis, romantic love), the good news is that we can make the world crazier in a good way, by basing our decisions on love rather than fear.

There two major source of emotions are Love & Fear.

For fear, is when you make a decision, such as not helping a colleague who you are competitive with, or staying in a relationship that is not working, or you emotionally eat a jar of Nutella.

Fears come from our deeply rooted insecurities and most times we are unaware that they are the ones calling the shots. 

For love, is when you make a decision from a place of generosity and authenticity. When i decide to give feedback to one of my employees, I check in with myself to ensure that why i am doing is precisely to make them better at what they do. That it is not anger based.

An easy tool to make more love-based decisions.

We make a lot of decisions in our day. Set yourself a challenge. for 7 days, you will ask yourself before making any decision this simple question: 

"is my decision coming out of a place of love or fear?"

You do not need to do anything about it, but by just creating that awareness, you will start digging deeper into what is driving and most importantly the why what is driving you.

After all, every emotion has its reason, so yes we are coming full circle.