Where you are with your business and where you want to be are two entirely different things for most organizations.

Most CEOs I mentor at one stage had companies that were struggling to grow.

So don’t be put off by the process of identifying strengths and weaknesses. It’s not easy.

One of the best tools for getting started with crafting your Painted Picture is to begin with an inventory of your company or business areas as they stand today. One of my favorite ways to do this is through a SWOT Analysis, which will determine your ‘Current State’.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Sitting down to analyze each of these terms as it relates to your company can be extremely eye-opening.

Before you begin creating your Painted Picture, do a SWOT Analysis. I advise CEO’s that I coach to give all of the key people in your company or leadership team a stack of Post-It Notes (or any small pieces of paper).  Give them ten minutes at most to write down one idea per note pertaining to of the four areas represented by SWOT.  When time is up, have each person read each of their notes out loud and post them up on a wall by category (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).

After everyone does this, start taking stock of the current state of your company, and where you want to be headed in the future. This will give shape to the key projects you need to complete in order to make the future happen the way you want it to.  Those projects will serve as the basis for your Painted Picture, and the starting point for your own process of reverse engineering.

What have you learned in any recent SWOTs you’ve done.

Have you ever observed an athlete right before a competition? The next time you watch the Olympics take a look at the high jumpers.  You’ll see many of them standing very still just before they start running to the bar.  Then they’ll close their eyes and you’ll see their head bobbing up and down as they imagine running up to the bar—but they haven’t even moved.  Sometimes they even throw their head backwards a bit as they jump over the bar in their mind.  Then they open their eyes, stare at the bar intently, and begin to recreate in real time what they just visualized.  Downhill skiers do this too–they’ll use their gloved hand to pretend to ski the entire course (some imagine it quite realistically in their minds, and you’ll see them respond physically to imagined obstacles on the hill). Whatever the sport, these athletes are using visualization to achieve their desired results, and by imagining the obstacles they might face, they prepare themselves mentally and physically for the challenge.

The visualization techniques used by athletes should also be applied to business. I’ve had enormous success with the process after learning about it from an Olympic coach and sports psychologist. This coach worked with high performance athletes to help them visualize their task prior to the event taking place.  He showed us a variety of examples of where athletes using a process of visualization would so strongly ingrain the success and actual performance of the event into their mind, that when they competed, they simply recreated the vision they’d burned into their memory bank.  They could, in fact, ‘see themselves’ competing, and as a result, their vision of success became a reality. This has been core to my mentoring and coaching CEOs.

For more information on this topic, check out: Building a World Class Culture and Leadership at 100MPH.