On Being Vision Driven - Talk 9 of 25
Topic: On Being Vision Driven
Theme: Vision
Author: Barry Sweet
Date: January 7, 2018
Video Production by Tim & Karen Morse. Morsephotography.com
Music: Swirling Brook by Megan Nugent
Research says that if you write down your hopes and goals it increases their probability of occurring by 40%.
Well, “Them’s gamblin’ odds”. If that's true we'd all be crazy not to write down our hopes and goals because it would increase their probability of occurring by 40%! If I knew I could win 40% in Las Vegas right now, I wouldn't be here, I'd be in the car, because those are great gambling odds. And when it comes to your hopes and goals, you're crazy not to write them down. In our house, we had a dreams jar… and I would walk past that thing every day. But one day after a decade of having dreams jar in our house I walked past it and I backed up…
It was a ceramic jar with a big fat cork… I pulled the cork out dumped all the dreams out on the end table and it was all on little scraps of paper, dinky little pieces of paper and every single one of those dreams had come true except for one. The power of writing down your hopes and goals and your dreams. When I was a kid, I saw my friends living these haphazard lives where life happened to them and they didn't happen to life. And so I made a sign and I put it on the ceiling of my bedroom so that every morning when I woke up it would be the first thing that I'd see… and it just simply said Be Deliberate.
Two words… and that sort of direction in my life has helped me do almost every dream I've ever had… and I'm a Park Ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park!
Like a total life dream… and it doesn't mean 100%…
It means 40%… you're increasing your probabilities, is what you're doing… but you're raising I think, your consciousness… when it stays in here (in your mind) I'd say it's 20%. And when you write it down, it jumps to 40%. And I've been saying lately, that if you do an Internet Search and jumps to 41%, and if you make a phone call it jumps to 42%, and if you put it on the calendar, it jumps to 43%. We need to use these things, because they can work to our advantage for us reaching our dreams and our goals.
But we've also got to remember what Sam Flournoy says, which is “Life doesn't always let you steer, but when it does… grab the reins with both hands”. And that's what we're doing when we're writing down our hopes and goals and we're grabbing the reins with both hands.
So I learned from Faith Evans about Feng Shui and she basically said “If you got a bunch of mess underneath your bed there's a bunch of mess under your life too and in your life and so clean out underneath your bed, make sure that nothing is underneath there, vacuum all the dust out and then you've got a fresh start at having nothing pushing you from underneath the subterranean levels of your life so to speak”.
And so I thought “Well… I'm going to utilize all the things I know… I'm going to write down all my hopes and goals and I'm gonna to put them underneath my bed.” So that's the only thing that's underneath there. And I went through a phase (it was a phase) that that money became important to me. It hasn't always been, I've always chosen experiences over money. But when things get low you shift a little bit… During that time I stuck all my hundred moneymaking ideas underneath my bed and I slept with them underneath there for about three weeks and I start to feel dirty because I don't want to have money be the ruler of my life and the center hot coal of my life. And so I took them all out… and then I wrote down if I had only one thing that I could have come true what would I want that to be?
And I put that that is my one dream for life… and that's what's under my bed right now. So if I've got only one thing to motivate me, it'll be the thing that I really really want.
So, here's a story to give you an example of the power of writing these things down. At the beginning of every summer season. I have my staff fill out a hopes and goals sheet. They put their name at the top and they put down their hopes and their goals.
There is a difference between a hope and a goal. A hope is something you've got no control over at all. Nothin’. No control at all. “I hope a bag of money falls out of the sky into my lap”. (Sorry for all the money references suddenly). A goal is something you can actually achieve like “I hope I can summit Longs Peak this summer”. So one you have no control over and the other you do have some measure of control over. Sarah had worked for me for a number of years and at the midseason evaluation I go over their hopes and goals and see how they're doing and at the end of the season, I go over their hopes and goals and see how they're doing. And they involve professional goals and personal goals. I don't step over the line of personal, but I do put my toes right on it, so that I am close enough to as a boss that they know that I care about them. And she came to me after a couple of years of working for me and she said “Barry I never put any stock in writing down my hopes because I've got no control over them. But I got to tell you… I am so in love…” Because she had written down in one of her hopes that she hoped that she'd fall in love that summer. So she said “Now I put stock in that too!”
Hopes and goals… write them all down. Bring it out of the subconscious level of who you are into the conscious level and I think what it does, is it acts as a focusing device that helps you to focus and think about making the phone call and thinking about doing the Internet search and thinking about getting it on the calendar. Whereas when you leave it only in the mind it… can get lost in the mist.
And so there is a quote on the wall at the Wilderness Office now from Sarah Crosier and it says “If you can see it, you can do it”.
And then, somebody did an upspin on it. And in pencil beside her writing, it said: “If you can visualize it, you can do it”.
This is the power we've always heard about visualization, but it's the power of writing things down and having it come from your heart. So it's not somebody else's hope and dream and goal, but it's yours. It starts the machinery and the gears of bringing the things about. It's the beginning of it. It pulls it from 20% to 40… and then who knows where we can go from there.
And so… a quote from Michelangelo “I saw that angel trapped inside the marble and I carved until I set him free”.
If you can visualize it you can do it.
My son as a high school senior wanted to throw a drive-in movie party for his friends. We don't have a drive-in movie theater (they kind of went by the wayside years ago). But yet he wanted to do one. So… we have an FM transmitter. Some of you that used to go to the drive-in movies had the little box and the wire that would come from the post you hanging on your window.
Others of you started with “Tune into 106.9FM” and then they broadcast the sound of the soundtrack to your car stereo. And it comes thru the speakers. And because of a party that we threw, a Tree Dance, we had an FM broadcaster just like the drive-in movie theater does. And so we got a sine wave converter, hooked it up to the car with this projector that we had. Landon sewed together Six King Size sheets all together with a sewing machine and made a screen 27 feet wide by 20 feet tall. And he has a friend down on Highway 7 at a summer camp that has a forklift and down there with a view of Twin Sisters Peaks in the background… they laid a beam that was 27 feet long with thumbtacks all along with those King Size sheets tacked to it. They lifted it up in the air, put the sign wave converter and the projector on top of the Chevy Tahoe and with the FM transmitter sent the soundtrack to all the car stereos. He had little signs that said “Drive-In Movie Theater” that lead you out into the woods to this big meadow and then you get out there and there's a big field full of cars. Twin Sisters is the backdrop… a big gigantic movie screen. And he showed Pirates of the Caribbean to all of his friends for his high school graduation party.
If you can see it, you can do it. And he saw it… and he did it.
Wonderful things can happen… and this is the power of being Vision Driven.
You've got to have a Vision to start with.
There's a quote at the Wilderness Office that says “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible” -Jonathan Swift. An art of seeing the invisible…? Yeah, it's how all great things happen.
People see it before it exists and then they make it happen. We used to watch Star Trek and see them with their little comm units and now we all have cell phones… it starts somewhere, even if it's in a fantasy world.
Here's the power of being Vision Driven… How can we make home a better place? How can we make work a better place?
When I'm at home, I think “What can I take from home to make work a better place? And when I'm at work I say, “What kind of knowledge do I have that I can share with my home?” And with those things you end up making the world a better place. We're looking for ways to make the world a better place and it starts in those two places that we spend most of our time.
But there are these Windows of Opportunity in life that go by… And here's how the Windows of Opportunity go by… They come by us, and we go “Oh look…! A Window of Opp...” and then it's gone. Noting that that's a reality of life, we have to wake up every morning, get the sleep out of our eyes, get down in the starting blocks and then watch and wait for the Windows of Opportunity to come by, and when they come by… we go “Oh, here comes one…! There's my Window of Opportunity…” And we have a chance of jumping through when it comes by. These are Time Sensitive Events that we've got to watch for. We can't wait, because they go by too fast.
One of the pieces that help me, that I use, for keeping balance in direction and guidance is to understand the idea of the Guiding Walls of History.
Here's what I mean by the Guiding Walls of History (looking down again from the top).
The National Park Service has a twofold mission that we've talked about before and we have to do both of those simultaneously. We can't do one or the other. We've got to do them both exactly 100% at the same time. It's funny, but it's true. But what we do, is we cannot lean to one side or the other. We cannot err to one side or the other. We've got to make sure that we do them both simultaneously. But here's what happens in reality, we’ll lean to the side of resource protection or visitor service. So for a while, we lean toward visitor service and then we'll go back and lean toward resource protection…
And then we'll lean toward visitor service and back to resource protection. Visitor service, back to resource protection. And what we do, is we do, what I call “A crooked straight line through history”.
We never get too far to one side, before the other side says “Hey hey hey!” And then we have to come back to the other side. And we never get too far out of that side before someone says “Hey hey hey!” we've got to counterbalance or counter ballast to the other side. So it's a crooked straight line through history. Having a twofold mission is one of the most brilliant things I've ever learned in life. I found that the greatest ideologies of life have a twofold mission. With a one-fold mission you can get way off track, but with a two-fold mission, it's sort of a self-sharpening system that always keeps you on track.
Let me show you some examples from politics and religion.
For a while we're Democrat, and then we're a Republican for a while, and then we're Democrat, and then we’re Republican for a while. Democrat, Republican, Democrat doing a crooked straight line through history. If we were Democrat all the time people would go “Wow, not good”. If we were Republican all the time people would go “Wow, not good”.
So what it does is it always self-sharpens and keeps us balanced so we don't get way too far off track on one side or the other.
Here's an example from religion. This guy comes to Jesus and he says “Hey what's the greatest commandment?” And Jesus says “It's to love God and to love other people”. And if that guy had a brain he would have said “Hey man, that's two things… how can you have me do two things at once?”
But we've seen people that love God only.
And we've seen people cut off people's heads in God's name because they love God only. And we've seen people that only love other people… and they miss this entire dimension of a spiritual life. But when you do them both at the same time, it keeps you balanced and on a “Crooked straight line through history”. Here's an example from physics from everyday life.
We call it walking… but we go on the left leg and then the right and the left and then the right…
If we only have one leg… it's rough, you end up veering to one side… or the other. The wisdom of guidance and direction is to make sure no matter who you are or what you're doing… To have a twofold mission… because it will keep you ever in check, ever in balance, so that you don't get too far off to one side or the other.
Back to having a twofold mission. I taught one of the camp counselors this who had become a Director, not a Camp Counselor any longer. And she said “Barry, remember years ago you gave the talk on having a Two-fold Mission and you encouraged us to find out what our life Two-fold Mission was so that we can stay in balance our whole life? She said “When I became a camp Director I decided what my Two-fold Mission was… andit is confidence and humility…” And I just smiled because I thought “Oh that's just absolutely beautiful, because she got it”.
She needed to be confident to be Camp DIrector. You can't be wishy washy. But she didn't want to be haughty and proud. She needed to have some humility. And I thought that was beautiful. And you know, if you push me… I think I said something like this in a previous conversation that mine are laughter and depth. If you push me… I want both of those things. What is your Two-fold Mission in Life?