Lack of Clarity

Dennis J. Bonagura
Bergen County, New Jersey

The key to successfully developing your business is pretty simple: Just continuously do the next, right thing to make your business better! Pretty simple, right? So why don’t we do it? In three words: “Lack of clarity.”

For many business owners, clarity is lacking in four primary areas:

Lack of Clarity of the Most Important Thing to be Worked On (Objective)
Lack of Clarity of the Best Strategy to Start with to Achieve the Objective
Lack of Clarity of All of the Things that Must Be Accomplished for the Best Strategy to be Fully Implemented
Lack of Clarity of Specific, Tangible Action Steps with Deadlines

Let’s address those areas in the order they’re listed:

Lack of Clarity of the Most Important Thing to be Worked On (Objective) - Instead of having a laser focus on the top priority, it is common for business owners to have series of fleeting thoughts regarding the important, strategic work that needs to be done. As quickly as the thoughts come in, they are set aside until later. Unfortunately, “later” never seems to come. This results in a lot of “looping” in the head which causes stress, frustration, and burnout.

Lack of Clarity of the Best Strategy to Start with to Achieve the Objective – Once you have a clear idea of the most important thing to be worked on (objective), you can’t stop there! You have to have a clear overall strategy (or top-priority strategy) to help you achieve the objective. If you don’t have strategy, you are relying on “hope.” As we all know, “hope” is not an effective strategy!

Lack of Clarity of All of the Things that Must Be Accomplished for the Best Strategy to be Fully Implemented – When you create a checklist of all of the things that must be accomplished in order for your priority strategy to be fully implemented, you have a roadmap to execute the strategy! In fact, if you put the “must do’s” in the chronological order they must be implemented, you’re in essence creating a “connect the dots” program for implementing your strategy. How powerful is that?!

Lack of Clarity of Specific, Tangible Action Steps with Deadlines – All of the best planning in the world is useless unless until it is put into action. Without action, nothing happens. When you give yourself specific action steps (nothing overwhelming) with specific deadlines, you add regimentation and discipline to your work. This gives you a huge advantage over people who leave execution (action) to chance

Note: For most busy business owners, a good rule of thumb for assigning strategic action steps is to keep your action steps to around two hours per week. After all, there are the day-to-day things to do on top of the strategic work (action steps). Be sure you aren’t biting off more than you can chew. It’s better to achieve a series of small victories rather than to over commit and fail.

Once you have (1) Clarity of the most important objective, (2) Clarity of the priority strategy to begin with, (3) Clarity of all the things that need to happen in order for the top-priority strategy to be fully implemented, and (4) Clarity of specific action steps with deadlines, you’re off to a great start! But there’s something else that’s critically important. In fact, this is where most people fail: There needs to be a forum of accountability to measure the results of the action steps and plan the next wave of action steps to continue the journey until your objective (goal) is met.

Without this, there’s a lot of starting, but not a lot of finishing. What a waste of time, money, effort, emotion, and opportunity!

Imagine if you had someone to help guide you through the initial planning and then stayed with you each week to help you plan the following week’s action steps. It would be like having a personal trainer to help you in your business development!

Why do the world’s best athletes, performers, and business leaders hire coaches? Because coaching works.

If you’re tired of every day being a continuation of the same old thing, maybe it’s time to do something different.

Dennis Bonagura a Professional Business Coaches Alliance (PBCA) Member is North America’s premier alliance of independent business coaches. PBCA member-coaches are highly-trained, effective professional business coaches who have direct access to best practices, strategies, tools, and knowledge in all areas of business effectiveness and personal effectiveness. They know business and they know coaching.

Now it’s time for an action step: If you’re interested in exploring the possibility of having your own business coach, please email dbonagura@PBStrategies.com and he will be happy to schedule a no-obligation phone call with you.

Please don’t wait to email because if you do, human nature will kick in and you’ll never get around to doing it.

We wish you the very best in achieving the vision you have for your company!

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