The Importance of Creating a Leadership Intention Statement

To establish fact and belief, you have to write out exactly what it is you want to attain. You have to feel it. You have to see it. You have to visualize the attainment of what it is you want to be intentional about creating. Then you’ll have that emotional response, and it’ll trigger the reference points in your mind to go do the things that you need to do in order to make your picture come to life.

But if you don’t write something down because you don’t have a picture, and you don’t visualize it, and you don’t put any energy behind it, it does you no good. So a picture and experience in your mind creates the triggers and the reference points you need to allow you to get the confidence to see a bigger result.

Your self-activity involved in this accomplishment is so important, because if you first need to position yourself by creating a picture, feeling what it feels like to accomplish things to move you to that picture. Say you’re hiring your first employee ever, or say you’re bringing in your first partner into your business, and you say to yourself, “You know, many of my friends have told me it’s very hard to integrate a partner into a business, so I want to have an partner integrate simply. I want to have no resistance. I want to have no stress, no friction, no anxiety.”

Now if you say that, what are you going to have? You’re going to have stress, friction, resistance, anxiety. Why? Because the mind doesn’t differentiate “do” or “don’t.” It only knows what you tell it. So don’t tell it to do what you don’t want it to do!

What you need to do is pay particular attention to exactly how to create an intention statement:

“I want this. I will attain that. This is going to happen. This is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. Never talk about what you don’t want.”

And when you’re building and developing your team, don’t ever talk about what they should not do. All you’re doing is reinforcing and implanting in their mind to do what you’re telling them not to do, and then when they screw up, you beat them up, and you reinforce it over and over and over.

So if you want to develop your people at the highest level possible — if you want the least amount of friction and resistance and things that distract you from the success you want to have — then always talk about where you’re going and create an intention statement that matches your leadership philosophy.