Grand Canyon Thinking

If you're an ambitious, goal-oriented entrepreneur, you are going to look at your watch or look at your calendar sometime during this month. I promise this. Maybe you’ve done it already and express something along the lines of “oh my gosh” is it already, or is it already the end of- and you're going to say the name of the month. 

Now why do we do that? What's going on there?  Well here is what it is. We have set some amazing, big, hairy, audacious goals for this year... and we haven’t made the progress that we originally intended. That’s really essentially it. 

Now why haven’t we made the progress? Well, it comes into the category of what I call “Grand Canyon Thinking.” It’s one of the most pesky, problematic, persistent pitfalls that plague entrepreneurs. “Grand Canyon Thinking.” 

So let’s look at the analogy here for a second. If you go to the Grand Canyon, if you’ve ever been there, you probably went to the South Rim. It’s beautiful there, there’s a lot of great things to see there on the rim. There’s some amazing viewing points and so forth. And you're going to be gazing across this amazing creation of nature, The Grand Canyon, and you'll look across and spot the North rim. And if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably going to have this fleeting thought at least - and maybe it would be very serious... "I wonder what it’s like over there."

In other words we’re not going to be just satisfied with where we are. We’re going to be reflexively looking at the next leg of our journey even though we didn’t think about it in advance. We see it, it becomes an aspiration and we decide we’re gonna try to go after it, right? 

Now oftentimes we stop there, you see. And so the aspiration is not the same as the achievement plan to actually get there. Let me give you a little better formula here that really works for the entrepreneurs that I work with that are plagued with “Grand Canyon Thinking” which is really kind of most of us. 

So the 4 P’s that I teach here are first, pause. Now this is an unnatural thing for entrepreneurs but if you can get into the habit of as soon as you detect that you’re about ready to set a big, hairy, audacious goal, the next thing you do is pause. What are we going to do with the pause? 

The next P is to plan. Then we are going to put together a plan for how we are going to make this journey. How we’re going to achieve this aspiration. Now, let’s just kinda click into the “Grand Canyon Experience”, you know if you’re looking from the south rim over to the north. You could drive around, that’s a lot of miles. You could fly across, that’s kind of cool. But, it’s expensive.  You could hike down and back out, what an experience that is. But then all kinds of things kick in there... you’re going to have to have equipment, you've got to  pay attention to the temperature change, there’s water down there, how are you going to get across? I mean, there’s a whole host of things there. So we have to pause, and make a plan. That's the second P. 

But then when you make that plan, here's the third P. You'll probably identify some things that you'll need to prepare. So in this case it’d be great wouldn't it to have the advice or the coaching or the counsel of someone that's  done it before? Maybe even hire that person to guide you down to the bottom of the thing and back up, or flying across whatever you decided to do there. You may need some money, you might need some physical preparations or physical conditioning before you take on something like that especially if you are going to hike it. 

And so you see, every big goal comes with not only a plan, but also preparation. 

And now finally the fourth P,  now we can proceed. So you want to avoid that proverbial ready, fire, aim reflex that we typically have as a small business owner/entrepreneur/ big thinker. We want to pause, plan, prepare, and proceed. 

And so now when you look at your calendar, when you look at your watch this month, that’s the time for you to go,  “alright let's take a pause here let's look at where we are, where we are going, what the goal is, create a new plan, prepare for that plan, and then execute it, and proceed.” 

So, use that to your advantage, let's rock on here to change the world through Entrepreneur Excellence.

Hey thanks for joining me today with this quick Entrepreneur Excellence insight designed to propel you to lifetime best success in business and beyond. And if you're looking for more insights like this, we push them out on a regular basis directly to your inbox just look for the place to opt in on this page. I'd love to see you on a regular basis as we continue to change the world through Entrepreneur Excellence.