A Vision For Your Business Worth Seeing

Written by Blaine Brazzle on Feb 27, 2010 7:40 am

I don't know if you have ever seen the movie the Shawshank Redemption or not, but it is a great movie.

It is a story about a man named Andy who is wrongly imprisoned for a crime that he didn't commit and the 20 odd years he spends in prison. It is not just a story about an imprisoned man, and more his impact on the people who he is imprisoned with, especially the man that becomes his best friend, Red. It is a movie that hits me hard everytime I watch it. In the end Andy must be free, no matter what it takes, and he succeeds by escaping. He creates a vision for what he will be once he is free and shares it with Red, the day before he escapes. His friend Red is finally release from prison a few years later, and he meets up with his friend Andy down in Mexico and seemingly lives happily ever after.
I love the movie because of what it represents and what the vision Andy has for his life means to me. There are many of us who are imprisoned, although there are no visible walls or bars that confine us, we are imprisoned nonetheless. We are in a prison for our minds, for our spirits, for our hearts, and for everything we could be but aren't. We follow a routine of simplistic lives, unrealized potentials, untapped abundance, squandered hopes and dreams. We have hopes and we have dreams but something keeps us from realizing them and fulfilling them. We lack a strong enough vision to anchor us in our convictions, to push us forward when we are tired and the road seems long, to catapult us beyond our perceived limitations and compel us to push aside our obstacles.

Our Fears become our God. We believe so faithfully that we aren't who would should because of what is happening around us or what has happen to us. We give in to doubt and embrace defeat so easily that it sickens us to think of trying again for fear of another failure. Instead of grounding our inner self and strengthening our resolve, we quit. We quit in so many ways that we are blinded by darkness that surrounds our failed attempts.
No more! No more giving into fear. No more limiting ourselves to what others think we are capable of or worse of all what we limit ourselves to do and be. No more quitting when things get tough. No more tripping over life’s obstacles. No more excepting defeat and no more believing in failure.

We, each of us, will create a vision so powerful, so profound, so intense, and so vivid that we cannot help but do everything possible to fulfill it because it is so a part of our being we cannot imagine our lives without achieving it and living it.
So create it. Make it real for you. Map out exactly how you want it to be and what it will look like and feel like when you get there. See your vision in your minds eye and write it all down...ALL OF IT...every detail. Once you have it, read it...every chance you get read it. But don't just read it, feel it and see it as you read it. Envision and reenvison it, again and again. Make it a part of you, the present and future you.

Forget the past, live it from now on. Unleash the Alpha within you and become the person you mean for from yourself to be.
Freedom has a price, for Andy in the Shawshank Redemption the price of freedom was worth whatever it took to get it. If you want your own freedom, you must believe in it just as much as Andy did, and keep going forward.
You cannot travel the road to success if you are always looking in the rear view mirror and you cannot get to where you want to be without a map.
In the end you must be a believer, in everything you do, in your progress both in yourself and your business, and you must believe in the vision you set for yourself.