One of my favorite Stanford Bschool professors tells us the #1 question to ask

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Seven years ago while completing my MBA at Stanford, I took a wonderful class called Leadership Perspectives with Professor Joel Peterson.  In the class, we learned what it means to be a principled leader, what role values play in an organization, and how successful leaders apply their values in their daily business lives.  Many lessons emerged for me in this class, with one of them being a go-to of mine daily. 

One day while lecturing, Professor Peterson told our class “Always make sure you are clear as to what winning looks like.  In any situation, project, business venture, etc., ask yourself ‘what will winning look like once this is complete?’”.  This advice became seared in my mind.  Peterson asked us to, at the beginning of any activity, create a vision of what it would look like to come out of it “winning”.  Clarity is key, thus creating very clear outcomes and metrics as to what “winning” would look like is at the heart of this piece of advice. 

I remember sitting in class and remembering Steven Covey’s “Begin with the end in mind” from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  Yet for me, what Peterson said touched me in a different way.  Maybe at the moment I wasn’t recalling Covey’s habit well (after all I had read it ~10 years before or so).  But the idea of creating a vision of myself triumphantly winning, at the top of the mountain, jumping for joy, for anything that I put effort into before the activity even began, was incredibly empowering.  How could I end up in this “winning” place if I didn’t first visualize and set the intention to end up there to begin with?  It made so much sense.

Today, I’ve done enough research to know this strategy is implemented by some of the best athletes and artists.  Olympic players visualize themselves finishing the race in first place and standing on the podium receiving their gold medal.  Artists visualize themselves performing in front of a sold out audience and moving the crowd deep within their soul. 

I now do this every single day, multiple times a day. Here’s how I do it:

  • In my morning meditation, I take 5 minutes to go through my day, event by event, meeting by meeting.  I visualize the outcome I want from each activity, clearly defining what winning would look like for me.  It gets interesting when you incorporate difficult people that you have to encounter.  Avoid getting into fights with them in your head at that moment (trust me, many of my meditations have been derailed by doing this!), and actually visualize how you would interact with this person despite them being at their very worst.  I promise you, this will make an unbelievable difference in your life. I finalize with a visualization of what it would look and feel like to have an overall “winning” day.
  • I FEEL the visualization.  This is a crucial piece that I would add to Professor Peterson’s advice.  I do not believe it is enough to visualize, I believe you have to FEEL the emotions that go along with winning.  FEEL what it would be like to successfully navigate a difficult person.  FEEL what it would be like to make a tough presentation.  Feel how you would be breathing, how the sound of your voice would live in your body. Get close and personal with the feeling until the emotions are real and with you at that moment.
  • Repeat before any activity throughout the day.  As I’m walking to a meeting, I do a mental check and ask myself “What do I want out of this meeting?”  As I pick up the phone I ask myself, “What do I want out of this conversation?”  It sounds exhausting to remember to do this, but I promise you that if you build this muscle and strengthen it, you will start doing this subconsciously without much effort.