The Magical Mindset that Produces Results Every Time

Have you ever been driving to a place you’ve never been before and become disoriented?

Maybe you turned left when you should have gone right, or you zoomed past your exit because you were talking.

How likely is it that you’ll end up at your destination without at least pausing to take stock of where you are and making a new plan to get where you need to go? Not very.

The same principle holds true in leadership. When you find yourself off course, you must make course corrections.

Accidental successes are neither repeatable nor sustainable. That’s why you must lead on purpose—be intentional.

Perfect Requires Practice

Think about the ballerina who stands for hours en pointe, wooden blocks digging bloody gashes into her toes, so she can hop to her toes effortlessly and glide across the stage when the curtain goes up.

Those graceful movements don’t happen by accident. She practices for decades to perform with excellence in that moment.

If you prefer an example with more speed, think about the painstaking years that go into engineering a Formula One race car. An entire team of experts meticulously designs every aspect of the vehicle for maximum speed and aerodynamics to achieve a single purpose—to win the checkered flag.

Likewise, no mountaineer ever reached the summit accidentally. Careful planning, intentional preparation, and a firm understanding of your destination position you to reach whatever your own summits may be.

Do You Have a Destiny Mindset?

All of it makes up what I call the Destiny Mindset. As you may notice, the words destiny and destination share the same root—destinare, which is Latin for “make firm, establish.”

While the word destiny carries the idea of being “predetermined and sure to come true,” your destination is something you “determine, appoint, choose, make firm or fast.”

Unless you predetermine your destiny, you’ll never reach your destination, let alone make the moves required to get there.

Without intentionality, you’ll be the disoriented driver cruising down the road, always in motion, but clueless about which way to turn.

Sure, you’ll get somewhere, but will it be the destiny you long to fulfill?

I challenge you to refuse to operate in this haphazard way in your leadership.

Don’t mistake movement for momentum or action for results.  

The Right Destination Requires Intentional Planning

It all begins with realizing that excellence is never an accident. It’s always the result of being intentional. You have to have a plan. If you don’t know where you’re headed, you won’t know how to prepare for the journey.

When you’re not savvy about the trail, you get caught up in the action of the day-to-day and forget to watch for checkpoints. When you’re stuck in fire-ready-aim mode, you can easily drift off course.

That’s why you must have an intentional plan to ensure you’re hitting the right target consistently. So what sort of things must you be intentional about? Here are a few to get started:

  • Mindset. Your mindset dictates everything else you do and everything you believe. If you aren’t intentionally monitoring your mindset, you’ll unintentionally believe things that will pull you off track.
  • Yourself. Being intentional about yourself means understanding who you are and who you are not. It’s about having a plan to lead when strong and team when weak. It’s being honest with yourself about who you are and who you hope to become.
  • Your summit. Not every summit is worth climbing, so be intentional about choosing yours. Once you know where you want and need to go, you can get intentional about making the climb.
  • Your team. Provide good leadership for them, because they are a critical component of the climb. Good leadership is an art, and, as Seneca put it, “That which occurs by chance is not an art.”
  • Your culture. Good culture empowers your team and kickstarts execution. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
  • Operations. Be intentional about what you need to deliver. Then create a solid plan to get it done.
  • Your organizational structure and goals. Do you do business by design or by accident?
  • Your customers. At the end of the day, they will determine your success or failure.

Too many good people simply accept whatever happens to them as their lot in life.

However, when you adopt a Destiny Mindset, you plant your flag and proclaim to yourself and the world: I believe I have a higher purpose. That purpose is my chosen destination.

I believe each of us is destined for greatness.

Visualize the leadership destiny you want—it has to start there—then develop an intentional plan to reach that destination.

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