Who are you now? Where do you want to be?
Establish where you want to be, not what you want.
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Professor Norman Drummond is a stalwart of quality leadership in the Scottish business world. He believes that every life project, change of job, or new opportunity should begin with the same two questions that caterpillars struggle with every day:
Who are you now?
Where do you want to be?
He doesn’t ask “where are you now?” or “what’s your status today”?”, questions which lead to a laundry list of things you have, people you’re working with, and successes you can claim.
All that feels quite good at the time, the stuff of personal reviews where we put ourselves across in our best possible light. The answers to these questions create barriers to change, strangely, because people are lulled into believing they’re actually doing everything the best they can.
No. He asks “who are you now?”, which leads to adjectives, emotions, feelings and maybe a hint of aspiration. There might be a hint of desperation sometimes, too. All of this is fuel for understanding what you want to change.
When he then asks “where do you want to be?”, it does the opposite. Most people ask “what do you want?” instead, which in turn leads to aspirational adjectives and possessions (with no plan of how to make that happen). It’s the stuff of many a vision statement or strategic plan.
Indeed, nearly every time we start out on developing goals with school leaders, their ‘goals’ are in fact laundry lists of operational imperatives that need to be undertaken.
But the focus is often on inputs and processes: we can spend this, do that, create this thing. There is almost never an indication of the outcome that’s expected: people will be able to do this, they’ll feel this way, they’ll be making that happen.
By asking “where do you want to be?” he stimulates answers about the outcome in a personal way (how do you want to feel, and how does it represent a different and better place in your life from where you are today?).
You can take this further, and ask yourself whether the opposite of the answer you give to ‘where do you want to be?” makes any sense. If it does, then you’ve got a clear focus, because it helps you make distinctive and genuine choices as you go.
Have a go. Does it make a difference to the way you start thinking about the next step in your future?
