Three Core Questions to Start Your New Year

Happy New Year!! May this be your best one yet!

The start of a new year is an excellent time to renew and refocus ourselves, our teams, and our organizations. It’s an essential part of centering or grounding ourselves. In The Tao of Leadership: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching Adapted for a New Age, John Heider writes:

“The leader who is centered and grounded can work with erratic people and critical group situations without harm. Being centered means having the ability to recover one’s balance, even in the midst of action. A centered person is not subject to passing whims or sudden excitements … the centered and grounded leader has stability and a sense of self.“

My energy force field vibrates from the core of who I am. A team or organization’s energy and culture vibrate from its collective core. That core is formed by what I or we focus on, and the context of our lives or team and environment. I have long called this central leadership principle Focus and Context. It’s at the hub of our Leadership Wheel. This is one of the central frameworks that Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success,  The Leader’s Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success, related workbooks, and our training programs are built around.

I’ve been caught up in many debates over the years on definitions of organizational vision, values, and purpose/mission. Whatever they might be called, the key questions forming our Focus and Context are:

• Where are we going?
• What do we believe in?
• Why do we exist?

Where we are going involves the use of imagery and visualization. This has an incredible self-fulfilling power and vibrational magnetic energy that new research frontiers like quantum mechanics and mind-body medicine are only beginning to understand. What we believe in defines our deep-seated values or attitudes that establish the frames or filters we wear to define whatever is happening to us as good or bad. These values also guide our behaviors. Why we exist takes us to the fundamental issues of finding or defining deeper meaning for our teams, our organizations, and our own time on this earth.

For over 30 years, Jim Clemmer’s practical leadership approaches have been inspiring action and achieving results. He has delivered thousands of keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats to hundreds of organizations around the globe moving his audiences from inspiration to application. He’s listed in the World’s Top 30 Most Influential Leadership Gurus based on research with 22,000 global business people, consultants, academics and MBAs. His website is www.JimClemmer.com.