All right welcome back to the Becoming Your Best podcast. This is your host Rob Shallenberger and hope you're having a wonderful day wherever you are in the world today. Well today's podcast is focused on principle number two of highly successful leaders and that is leading with a vision. So let me ask you a couple of questions and just think about what comes to mind. When you wake up in the morning are you excited to get up and get out of bed? In other words, how do you feel in the morning when it's time to wake up? Are you excited and anxious to face the day because it's going to be another great opportunity or is it one of those where you just feel like you're kind of dragging yourself out of bed? Well here's another question. Do you have a clear vision or direction for your life? So if I was to ask you what's your vision, you know, where do you want to be in five in ten years? What does that look like? Would you be able to describe that? And this is one of those characteristics over and over and over that we saw in the most successful leaders is they had a clear vision of where they wanted to go. So, for example, look at you know great leaders through history such as George Washington, having a vision of a free liberated country. Or Bill Gates having a desktop computer in every home. Mahatma Gandhi to liberate a nice nation peacefully. You know, it's these simple visions that created a powerful direction for a lot of people. And that's what a vision can do in your life as it gives you a very specific direction. Amongst a team, if you're running or leading an organization, it creates that alignment with your team members. And that's the idea that everybody listening to this podcast is a leader in some form or fashion. At a minimum you're leading your own life. You may have a family and in that case you're leading your family. Or you may have a team and you're leading a team. In every one of those circumstances a vision is a critical piece of that puzzle. In other words, when you're speaking of your team, what's the direction your team is going? Well if you're talking about a family or you as a couple, what direction are you going as a family, as a couple? And then especially personally which way are you going personally? What direction are you going? And so the focus of this podcast is really those three areas and that is how to develop a vision for a team or a company. How to develop a vision for your family. And then, what I consider to be most important, how do you develop a personal vision? So let's start with the company vision. And, as you're thinking about the why, the why is always important to understand. Now think of this from a leader's perspective. You will have a culture by design or a culture by default. And that's one of the things the great leaders do is they establish a culture by design. In other words, it's not gonna happen on accident. If you're not focused on developing the right culture then it's going to evolve into whatever it evolves into. And that's what a vision can do, is it aligns and starts to create that culture a direction for the entire team an organization. So imagine in your mind a bunch of arrows and if those arrows are all pointing different directions and you start to move them, you know, there's no energy. Everybody's going a different direction. However, now imagine in your mind a bunch of arrows that are all aligned pointing the same direction and that's what a vision does. It aligns those arrows, it aligns employees and resources so that they're all moving the same direction. I mean, think about this. Almost everyone listening to this podcast has been a part of an organization or at least walked into a company where you could quickly tell that nobody was aligned. And you could feel that energy in that type of team. At the same time you've probably been with an organization at some point along the way where you felt like they were firing on all cylinders, all going the same direction