What’s Your Big Picture? (Part 1 of 2)
(Image from Pixabay)
What’s Your Big Picture? (Part 1 of 2)
‘If you do not create and control your environment,
your environment will control you.’
Marshall Goldsmith
Charlie was frustrated, overwhelmed and feeling exhausted. No matter how hard he tried to keep on top of everything at work, more kept hitting the deck. It was relentless. Of course, the company underwent some forced changes due to the global pandemic, but this meant he now needed to achieve more with less.
If that wasn’t enough to deal with, there were challenges at home. Charlie already spent most of his time working as a senior executive in a large corporate organisation. Yet, he also felt guilty that he wasn’t spending enough time with his children and his wife.
Charlie had focused on his career so he could provide for his family, but if he was honest, he also wanted to grow and develop as a leader. He was fortunate that his wife could work from home and had enough flexibility in her day to take the lead role with the children.
Sitting at the annual school concert, Charlie realised that he had missed much of the first ten years of his children’s lives and wondered if he had made the right choices. Had he given much thought to what he wanted in life, or had he been too focused on his career?
Charlie recognised he had lost sight of his big picture and now was left feeling somewhat unfulfilled. He had been living his work life in parallel with the rest of his life and realised he’d lost touch with his overall life plan. His career had started to control what did and didn’t occur in the rest of his life, and Charlie knew he needed to be more intentional about creating the life he wanted. He needed to recreate his big picture.
Have you ever felt like you have been so ‘busy’ trying to achieve everything you have on your radar that you’ve lost perspective and perhaps a bit of control around what you really want to achieve?
If you feel like this, or have felt like this in the past, you’re not alone.
(Image from Pixabay)
Our big picture is our overarching plan for who we ultimately want to be. It takes into consideration every aspect of life so we can maintain a sense of balance and control. It allows us to be deliberate about what or who consumes our time, money and effort.
The big picture motivates us toward a higher sense of purpose, so we feel fulfilled and know that what we do matters – a lot.
It is the master map that guides us to our true destination. It helps us move from feeling we are merely existing to living a full and purposeful life. The big picture helps us strategically plan the life and career of our dreams.
We will all spend an allotted time on earth, but we want to look back and know that we had an impact and made a positive difference to the people around us, when we get to the end. That we weren’t just counting down the days in some unconscious haze. We can and should have more, and that is a choice – our own choice.
Being clear on what we want to achieve and knowing where we are going means we can think through our career options and align them with who we are and what matters to us. Not everyone has this level of clarity,
and I see examples of it every day.
Most people spend more time planning their annual holiday than identifying what outcomes they would like to achieve in the major areas of their life. It’s not that they can’t design the life and the career they want; it’s
more that they are unsure how to do it. So, it can be a bit like, ‘you
don’t know what you don’t know’.
When working with leaders, I’m always keen to understand their big picture early on. After all, if you don’t know where you are going, how on earth will you know when you’ve arrived.
We are all going to live our days on this planet, so why not live in ways that truly make us happy.
So, do you have a current Big Picture Plan?
Next week in Part 2 of this series, we will look at why having this Big Picture Plan is important and what it’s made up of.
Stay tuned!
Need some help
If you would like some help identifying what you truly want in the future but have difficulty in formulating that picture for yourself, then let’s chat.
Alternatively, you could grab a copy of my book Inside Out: Why Leadership Starts With You.