Hey everybody, it’s Richard Milligan, welcome to another episode of recruiting conversations. I’ve got a bunch of new technology here, and so I’m a little bit, I’m pausing, as I come into this just goes like everything working everything here working, alright? Like a look around me and I’ve got like three new monitors, I’ve got new mics, I’ve got new speakers, I’ve got a new location for my web camera for my iPhone I record on my iPhone 10, this as well and it goes on my YouTube channel, and so I’m like I’m looking at everything to go yes, okay, thumbs up! it is working and so it is possible to be smaller than technology but I also know I’ve experienced the other end of that to where I have not been able to figure it out, and I’ve had to call in people that are more knowledgeable than me, but today’s not that day. Today is a day where we are going to talk about vision and values, now if you’ve listened to my podcast much at all, you know vision and values is something that’s really important to me. Now typically how I approach this is we’ll talk about attractive leadership and how the attractive leader has these three traits that represent them, right? They’ve got a clear vision a clear value system they then are able to articulate around them extremely well, and then they live and they act in alignment with it, and while that sounds super cool and it is my job, I find it as my job to oversimplify things, right? Because one of our tag lines is that we are part of recruiting made simple. We believe that recruiting is simple we own the copyright on both of those statements, and we actually own the website the URLs recruitingmadesimple.com and recruitingissimple.com calm and so I’m always trying to formulate ideas to oversimplify things so that people can move towards them. I find for so many years, I never moved towards that vision and values because to some degree it felt as though it was a game of word craft, like I’m trying to formulate these thoughts and these ideas that clearly represent Who I am, and it really felt as though I had to come up with multiple paragraphs, multiple statements that articulated that extremely well, and so I just never did it. I gave him multiple shots there were seasons where I had a partial vision or partial clarity around it, but I until 2013 in 2013, where there were a couple of events in my life that took place that led me to this, to actually owning this, and making it through this.
For the majority of my career, while I was clear on my values, and I was clear on my goals, I knew I was headed, I was not able to truly articulate a well to people. I was living it out, until and I would say that to larger I was living it out, now I think ultimate clarity comes from really getting to a place where you’re so crystal clear that you’re constantly articulating this, you’re now putting out on a mousepad painting on the wall, right? You’re bringing it up and all of your meetings, like I never got to that place and so because I ever got to that place, I couldn’t say that I was a hundred percent living inside my vision my values own, that I was there probably 90 percent. So, I think a lot of my bad decisions that I made came from not living in alignment with it, what I found is that man difficult decisions became much easier for me, when I had clear vision and where I actually had this ability to articulate my value system very clearly, that clarity gave me the ability to move towards things and to move away from things very quickly. So, with that said I want to give you some more I want to give you some more input around the vision piece, because I know a lot of people struggle in fact when we first started coaching around vision and values, what I found is that it took about eight weeks for people to get to a place where they had ultimate clarity on this, now when I first started coaching I was actually offering an eight-week coaching program and so that was a problem, like if I’m spending the entire weeks trying to coach you to building a recruiting system and now the only thing we’re going to accomplish is vision and values which can tend to be you know something that’s the theory to a lot of people, they understand the importance of them but they’ve never practically seen it lived down and articulated over a season work to where it impacts their business, and so a lot of people don’t feel as though that’s something tangible value. So that was a problem for me my coaching is I had to solve it and we created some great tools for people in how they come to this much quicker and now I find that people are able to get to a place where they have clarity on their vision in terms of creating it in the first couple of weeks that were working with them. Now I say creating it because I do believe creating it is the first phase of vision, not perfecting it, I think a lot of times we get caught where we try to perfect the vision versus just creating it. So, creating it I always make that Phase one I applaud people for getting through a place where they’ve got it written on paper and now they can begin to truly get ultimate clarity on it, and what I found is that that second stage I call the three C’s of vision, which the first ones creating, second ones clarity, and the third ones casting, if you get to a place where you’ve got clarity on it, then you can move into this place where you become a visioner which is someone that can actually cast a vision so clearly, and they can get anyone excited about joining them. Now, if you’ve ever met a visioner you’ll know what I’m talking about, I’ve seen from a practical perspective a lot of these come through, network marketing, and a lot of that happens because network marketers are really clear on why they’re doing what they’re doing and what they want to accomplish and so that clarity gives them some things that are very tangible things that we’re going to talk about today, that leads them to being great recruiters of people.
So, let’s talk about that let’s talk about how do we get through these three phases of creating you know clarity, and getting the place where I can cast this vision so clear that people want to be a part of this. So, here’s part of my own process okay when I started this organization one of the things that I did was I sat down and I wrote why we do this document, if you want to if you want to, if you want to get an idea what they were that what that document looks like you can actually go to recruitingconversations.com/vision and there will be a copy of our vision here, the one of the reasons I want to share that with you is it’ll give you an idea of what a vision document can look like. Now for us there’s multiple pieces to this one is why do we do what we do, and that gave us by writing that that gave us ultimate clarity on taking that first step of actually creating the vision. So, you know in that you know some of the things that we say is that we do this because we love people and people matter to us, we do this because we empathize with the recruiting leaders struggle we do this because great leaders influence things outside the walls of their business leadership. So, that why we do this document really moved us to a place emotionally where we had lots of clarity as you know this being more than a company this being more than a job or a career this was our calling. So, imagine that if we believe that we’ve been led to this place inspired his place equipped to do this, right? Then we’re going to have way more passion about why we’re doing what we’re doing then the person who’s simply operating from an unarticulated, unclear, I put in quotations “True North” right the person who’s actually that believes they’re moving in the right direction simply based off a feeling or based off of their belief that what they’re doing is the right thing. So, I started with why do we do this now what came from that was a ten-year vision and in the ten-year vision, one of the things that we said was really what do we want to accomplish, how are we gonna measure success, okay? So, the in the ten-year vision in 2017 one of the things that we said was we would measure success by helping 10,000 recruiting leaders each year live an ideal life ins lifestyle only possible through growing their brands, okay? So that was part of our vision now when we started this in 2017, 10,000 the number 10,000 was a monstrous number, okay? I’m trying to be you know putting to put a lot of emphasis on that because it was huge if you haven’t actually helped one person and you want to help 10,000 people each year, you know make something as big as living an ideal life and lifestyle happen, like that’s a really big vision, so here’s why the vision was so big, one is okay I am that kind of an individual my personality profile index tends to skew towards being someone who dreams big, right? I am more of an idealist, and maybe a realist but one of the things that I knew is this, that if I was going to accomplish something of significant and I do believe that I’ve been created for something of significance and I hope every single one of you believes the same thing about yourself, that I needed to stretch myself to get there, okay? Getting to a hundred seemed pretty reasonable, getting to a thousand seemed like a stretch, getting to ten thousand was a big stretch for us, and what did that mean it meant that we were gonna have to think outside the outside the normal context of coaching and consulting, like we were gonna have to do some pretty big things, we’re gonna have to create a lot of content, we’re gonna probably have to write some books, or I can do have to do a lot of video coaching series, a lot of webinars like we’re really having to think creatively outside our normal boundaries, outside our box, in order to get to that destination, but here’s what we did we said what’s it going to take in year one so while I had a 10-year vision, okay? So we started with why are we going to do this why are we going to do, what we’re going to do we started with the ten-year vision right how many recruiting leaders each year did we want to help we backed it all the way into year one, okay? So in year one in 2017, we said we wanted to help a hundred recruiting leaders live an ideal life and lifestyle only possible through growing their brands, what do we do well we were into in that first year we actually helped a hundred and thirty eight people so we beat our goal we were extremely excited about that because we had to build a brand, create a lot of awareness around what we were doing, and so in that we accomplished our one-year vision, and it moved this one year closer to 2027, vision which was deal 10,000 people each year, okay? Now why do I share this with you, one of the reasons why I share this with you is this, if you’re going to actually create a vision it needs to be something that’s very tangible that’s so clear, what is that finish line that you and that you’re going to actually drive towards that you’re going to cross one day, and it needs to be big and it needs to be bold, and here’s why, if I’m going to call people into this thing that I do which is helping recruiting leaders live an ideal life and lifestyle possible through growing their brands, right? If I’m going to call people into this, okay, then I’m gonna have to cast a really big vision because I’ve got to get them interested, excited, bought in, all those things have to take place. Now, it’s pretty easy to get bought into a hundred people in year one right that’s pretty easy to do. Now, 10,000 but you’re you know ten years from now, is huge right so it’s going to take a lot of other resources, a lot of other ideas, a lot of other passionate people surrounding me to get there. So part of casting a big vision is this I want to attract the right people, I’m going to attract people that want to be a part of something bigger, than what they’re currently a part of right. So by casting that big vision I’m attracting people in that would say I want to be a part of that story, okay? Here’s what I know, most people are would say their content or they’re at, so one of the things you’re up against us are recruiting leader is that when you make contact with people, most times people are going to say that they’re happy where they’re at, so how do you call someone that’s happy where they’re at into your story, into your journey, into whatever your vision is, well one of the ways you do that is by casting an extremely big vision, okay? Now you’ve got to believe in this and if you set here with me, and you saw how I actually have a plan to get to 2,000 recruiting leaders each year, it hurts your brain, right? 2019, we’ve got a book coming out in October, we’ve got a second book coming out the beginning of 2020, we’re doing the daily video content at scale we’re doing podcasts, we’re constantly writing articles we have two and a half I don’t if that’s possible but we’ve got two plus another half of a content writer full-time freelance writers writing for us, those are the things that we’re doing simply because we have a 10,000 recruiting leader promised to ourselves that in 2027 we’re going to get there, and the only way we’re going to get there is by funding a lot of passionate people that want to be a part of something bigger than they were currently a part of. Here’s one thing that’s jumped out at me most people are content where they are, most people are happy for the status quo, now here’s this is interesting and when I saw this for the first time, I think I actually laughed out loud physically laughed out loud, lol, right? I laughed out loud of this because the works the framework the phrase status quo in Latin, actually means “mess we’re in” okay think about that like if you are content and you’re settling for whatever it is where you are and you’re not being called into something big or something much larger that a lot of times you’re settling for something that’s typically a mess that you’re in, it’s like it’s a very average at best, most people when they say I’m happy where I’m at are happy in a place where it’s average, like I honestly believe this, and when someone shows up and someone’s excited about where they’re going and someone has a big vision, it can actually articulate to you the things that they believe and why they’re going to get there, that actually plants a seed of desire in that individual, if you’re just content, if you’re just settling for the status quo, right? And so as I as I look at this, and I say why is it important to have a vision, and not just any vision why is it important have a really large vision, it’s because you can get people excited about the clarity of where you’re going, and the energy of where you’re going because most people are settling for a smaller story, and you’re calling them into a much larger story, okay? So this is part of the importance around vision, now I’m going to upload this a recruitingconversations.com/vision our entire document which will be why do we do this, what’s our 2019 vision, what’s our 2027 vision, because that’s the tenure vision, and it’s got a list of our core values. Now, our core values is the lens that we pursue our vision through, what does that mean like the way we’re going to act, the way we’re gonna operate is in the lens of our core guys that’s going to tell me in the day-to-day, like what are we going to do like one of the things as part of our core value system is no jerks allowed, like I don’t want people inside my organization that are individuals who aren’t aligned with all the other into individuals and so an easy way for us to see if someone in this really truly in this with us, that’s aligned with us is someone that comes in and creates discord, whatever you want to call it confusion that doesn’t want to be a part of a team that’s a jerk, okay? That’s, a that’s the easiest way to articulated to you, is so I’m being a jerk they’re just not we’re just not going to tolerate, we’re not going to allow if that’s who you want to be you’re not a part of the team, okay? One of the other things that we say is we trust and the good intentions of others, what does that mean, what that means that when we have some of these specific situations we put in that go on between you know one person or another person as human beings we can be messy and sometimes we don’t communicate well, and that’s just part of being a human being, that when someone does something that appears to not be into in the good intention of somebody else, we’re still going to trust that they’re thinking along the lines of you know teamwork, and unity, and camaraderie, and so if it means we have to have a conversation around their intentions we will, but we’re going to trust, we’re going to trust in their good intentions, okay? One of the things that we say is that we embrace high expectations, okay? We are constantly improving we practice open real communication these are the things down these are the values that we’re going to actually in the day to day live out that we’re going to move us towards our vision through, okay? So some of it’s very practical in the day-to-day, the vision is what were what’s the big finish line, that we’re gonna actually a compliment we’re gonna cross, okay? vision literally means to see, right? Like one day, I anticipate we’re going to see that finish line, we’re going to cross that finish line of that 10,000 recruiting leaders that we’re going to impact in one year, okay? But we do that in the day to day through the lens of our core values, now why, like right I know a lot of people will say well, I get at core values clarity, I get a vision right, it’s kinda like a goal, I get it it’ll help us move the needle our business, but here’s why it matters more than you think, clarity matter, okay? Clarity of mission gives you passion, like when I said Dallas alone for the first time coming into organization I go over that vision that your ten-year plan is to actually impact 10,000 recruiting leaders, like I can get really excited about that, and the reason why I get excited about this because you know I think there’s an intersection where recruiting and leading overlap each other, great leaders are great recruiters and great recruiters are great leaders, that’s what I found. So, if I can impact a leader by improving their leadership capability and also impact their ability to grow a team, I can get really excited about that because ultimately what I do right because I have clarity on this remember, I got lots of clarity around why I’m doing what I’m doing, ultimately what I’m doing is when I improve a leader I improve a team, I improve the lives of other people, right? On the team, so, I get really excited and I can get really passionate about that piece so clarity matters because it gives you passion, another reason why clarity matters is that, it gives you direction, right? I’m talking about a book another book, I’m talking about daily content, I’m talking about freelance writers, I’m talking about like you know things that are going to move the needle on our company because I think that in the era that we live and you’ve got to be a media company first, I’m coaching consulting recruiting leader coach second, I’m the media company first, so because I’m a media company first like if I’m gonna go impact 10,000 recruiting leaders and that gives me the direction that I need to just act in the day-to-day so not only is clarity give me passion, clarity gives me direction, and then the last part of this is look business is not easy, ok?
In business and ultimately there’s five stages right it’s the dream, and we can get really excited about the dream and that’s when I wrote that, I wrote that why would do what we do document, and that inspired me to take the leap, which is the second typical phase in business, but then you got this big dip, it’s a big fight zone right and in a fight zone, like anything of significance that’s going to happen typically happens because you’re willing to fight for it, right? And then the final two stages which are not relative in this conversation right now, but eventually if you fight long enough you’ll get the energy, and you’ll get the direction that you need to actually start to climb, and then if you climb long enough if you stay in that climb zone long enough you actually achieve and you accomplish whatever it was you set out to accomplish. So, those are five stages but clarity, gives me perseverance, right? Like if I’ve got to go through a fight zone, I gotta climb a mountain to get where I’m going like clarity of knowing why I’m struggling, right? That matters like why am I doing this, like what am I doing this for, like why should I struggle period in the story if I don’t have clarity, like I give up, I get absolutely give up, here’s what I find yeah most industries average ten years somewhere around two and a half to three years, most people are in a position for around two and a half to three years, okay? If you don’t know why you’re struggling or what you’re struggling for, then why struggle? Move on. So I find that people leave one organization and go to another organization because of a lack of clarity, if clarity gives me passion, there’s a lack of passion, if clarity gives me direction, there’s a lack of direction, if clarity gives me perseverance this willingness to fight and I lack those three things then why wouldn’t I leave a team, a leader, and organization and go someplace else. So, it does matter this is why vision is very practical, this is not theory, this is why core values and understanding your core values is very practical, it’s not theory, okay? So I’m gonna calm down for a moment, because I can get really fired up about this and there’s there are lots of reasons why, look vision has impact of my family, but the reason why I have a strong healthy family today is because I have a vision, and I’ve got a mission, and I understand my core values, I’ve got purpose statements inside my family unit, right? So it’s impacted me at a very personal level it has definitively defined my business career, the whole reason why I’m able to code, just because of the successes and the wins that I have I wouldn’t have been had those wins those successes, if I hadn’t started with defining a very clear vision, and being very clear on my core values and being able to articulate that to people it wasn’t until 2013 that I began that, and when I began that things change from me almost instantly, within 90 days inside my business.
So here’s what I believe, people move towards clarity, so ask yourself right now, you have a clear vision, do you, am I able to articulate my core values very clearly? And if I’m not, okay, then I need to do that, that’s phase one identifying those is phase one, phase two is being able to articulate it extremely well. You can write why I believe document, why I do what I do document like I have, that will help you move towards being able to articulate it, okay? Now, go back to one of my podcasts that I did on storytelling, because storytelling your values, storytelling your vision is an additional next level that I find the best the best too. And not only have identified it, they able to story tell it to you. The reason why storytelling matters is that your values didn’t just happen upon you one day, okay? Your values matter to you because your life experiences, like when you go back and you look at why things are important to you, they’re important to you because of the story of the journey to get to where you are, like I’ve had bad leaders as much as I’ve had good leaders, okay? What I could tell you is that inside the bad leadership that I’ve had the bad leadership that I’ve had has actually been a determining factor in some of my values as much as the great leadership that I’ve had. Like model something for me poorly and I don’t want to be like that anymore, model something for me well and I want to be more like that, right? So, a lot of times our values come through those, it can be how we were raised, how we were taught, but again that’s an experience, right? So taking the journey and follow the timeline of your life back a lot of times back to these places where we have fresh starts, new beginnings a lot of times we leave something and move towards something else because of our value system. So, it’s a great place to go back and to say what’s the story of that moment why did my values leave me from one place to another place, and defining that moment will help you get clarity around what your values are, okay? So remember this, clarity matters, where there’s clarity you have passion, where there’s clarity you have direction where there’s clarity, you’re willing to fight you’re willing to persevere, the twelve lettered dirty word perseverance, that no one likes to hear, but what I’ve found is that all great things come from perseverance, a lack of clarity will never lead you through a season of suffering, through a season of struggling, ultimate clarity will. So, if you want something worth having in this life, then you gotta start with vision, you’ve got to start with values so this podcast today is trying to make this very practical to you it is a hard cry, it’s a plea from me, to start here so to find this for yourself, and for your team, okay? on the on the recruitingconversations.com/vision, I’m gonna put a couple of additional tools a couple of additional resources there for you, that you can tap into one is a presentation around creating vision, one’s gonna before we talked about the 4Crecruiting vision and values, we’ll put that there as well. There’s lots of methodologies to come into clarity on your vision so we’re going to lay that out in a simple PDF document you’ll be able to download, and so I hopeful that this podcast motivates you and inspires you to take some next steps, and getting clarity on your vision, defining your value system, because it matters to your career, and it matters to the people underneath your leadership. So, until we meet again on another recruiting conversations, pass this along to somebody, and the reason why I’d say this one particular, I’ll pass it along is that of the hundred thirty-eight people that I coached in 2018, only one person had clarity around their vision their values, these are the one-percenters, the people that are in my coaching are already the best of the best, these are people willing to pay for coaching, they’re the one percenters of that less than 1% of the one-percenters, have clarity around their vision their values, you want a big advantage, if you want a big advantage as a recruiting leader, start here, okay? Pass this along, trust me the people that you’re going to pass this along too, most likely lack vision and lack values. So, share the joy of this moment and lots of great content that can be had from the links that I’ve given on this on this a podcast as well, and so we talked again on another recruiting conversations have a great week everybody, have fun recruiting, and we will talk to you then.
