Clarity: The quality of being coherent, intelligible, transparent, & pure.
The ability to CLEARLY see where you’re going, and what you’re doing. A sense of alignment between what you think and what you feel.
All of these things are what clarity means to me.
And it wasn’t until I started to gain some that I realized how long I’d lived without it.
And how many people live without it every day.
In my work with emerging entrepreneurs (usually women starting their own businesses of various kinds and genres), I have honed my ability to help my clients gain clarity. Sometimes it’s around their messaging (what they are saying) and sometimes it’s around their marketing (who they are presenting themselves to be). And sometimes – it’s just a pure mindset shift that opens their eyes and causes that breakthrough! I love all of these because the feeling of watching that lightbulb go off over their heads just lights me up!
So I thought I’d try to bring a few of those ideas here, to the blog, in the hopes that maybe you too can have a lightbulb moment of your own!
1. What are you seeking clarity around or for?
This one seems a little repetitive, because I’m trying to help you gain clarity, and how can you get that if you don’t even know why you need it? you need clarity to know why you need clarity! But even just digging into this question a little will kickstart your thought process. Because if you close your eyes for just a minute, and let all the other distractions or “lesser” projects kind of fall to the side, you will give your brain permission to bring up the main issue – the “thing” around which you are seeking greater clarity. Once you’ve honed in on that big thing, allow yourself to brain dump all the tasks or needs around that topic, and after you’ve emptied your brain of all those ideas, you can start to sift and sort through them to figure out what is really your main priority, and the supporting activities related to them. You will realize that things that you thought were crowding out your attention really aren’t all that important once you know exactly what it is you are getting clear on.
2. What is the end goal of this project/task/issue?
Sometimes it is so easy to talk ourselves out of clearly knowing our next steps because we are too focused on “all that we have to do”, that we forget the true awesomeness of whatever that final destination is. While this is all normal and natural human behavior, keeping the “main thing” the “main thing” will start to create that sense of clear and true knowing of where you need to focus your efforts and energy, and allow you to realize that so many tasks we busy ourselves with really have nothing to do with getting us to that end goal. Write down what your end goal is and post it somewhere you will see it when you feel yourself starting to get overwhelmed. Maybe that’s by your desk and maybe it needs to be stuck to your dashboard. Wherever that is for you – get it out and get it visible. Then read it out loud to yourself a few times a day.
3. What is your biggest challenge with the issue you’ve identified in step 1 above?
When a client comes to me all flustered and completely overwhelmed by her task list, or by the project right in front of her, one of my go-to techniques is to ask “ok what is the biggest challenge to you right now?”, followed up with “what is most challenging about this right now?” Those two simple questions typically end up laser focusing what seemed like an insurmountable list of demands into one or two (typically much easier) tasks that we can tackle together. And usually, once those two things are taken care of, the rest of it begins to flow like melted butter!
So my challenge to you is to ask yourself, and spend a few minutes really thinking into this – what is challenging me MOST about this issue right now? Journal out whatever comes up for you.
You may realize that it’s either a.) much more handleable than you had thought, or b.) that when you focus on the biggest challenge first, the rest of them seem so much smaller by comparison.
I hope these tips for helping gain clarity around anything that you’ve been challenged with lately have been helpful. I know this is a deviation from what my normal blogs are about, and i promise, more of that is coming. But this was something that came up for me today that I realized some people sometimes just need help getting a little bit out of their own head, because the answers are usually right there all along! It is my sincere hope that this helps you, and if it does, please pass it along! Or let me know how it helped! I’d love to hear any and all stories like that!
It’s late on a friday and I am about to go enjoy my nice warm bed and sleeping IN! (Sleeping in is my love language, i’m convinced of it. And my kids do not speak my love language at all!)
Peace out party people – catch you on the flip side!
T.