“Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Is one of you looking to be an investment banker and the other a yoga instructor? Because that isn’t a problem, as long as you’re headed in the same direction with kids, religion, health, finance, friends, travel, and the other pillars of your life. Yoga and banking may have more in common than you think. Service, growth, resilience, compounding gains.
Do you share a worldview? Do you share goals, aspirations, principles? This is called looking in the same direction.
It’s important.
Sometimes these pillars can be hard to identify.
Friends can help, hopefully family will tell you the truth. Outside instruction is available and many married couples would recommend it.
My wife and I had two options when getting married in the catholic church. We could either go away to traditional church camp and talk about the rhythm method for a few days, or we could go to a family psychology center in Redmond, Washington. We chose the latter and lucked out getting a great counselor who worked with families, specializing in the way kids express themselves through art.
She gave us a fun assignment.
Grab some crayons and paper, and then draw your family ten years from now. We got after it for fifteen minutes and then reconvened to discuss. Can you imagine if one had a picture in Hong Kong, no kids, living in a high-rise. The other had us here in Washington, four kids, station wagon, living in the suburbs. That would be a good indication that we are not looking in the same direction.
Even a slight difference in direction will be magnified on a 10-year time horizon. You’ll look back and wonder how you grew so far apart.
Lucky for us, I had two kids and she had three. We both had a house, car, and basketball hoop out front. The pictures were very much aligned.
We need to have a similar approach in business. Make sure our goals are aligned between employees, customers, and stakeholders. Same vision, looking in the same direction.
This takes some time up front. It’s worth it. If the pictures don’t match you’ve got a problem.
Ask questions, listen, probe, offer perspective, edit back from ideas to real courses of action. At the end of these exercises, you’ll better see if all sides are looking in the same direction. If we are communicating well. If we are understanding each other.
What are some good questions to see if you are in sync:
- Give me a thumbnail sketch of what things look like in five years?
- What are your goals for the next year or two?
- How have things changed over the last year or two?
- What change would have liked to see but didn’t?
- How have your opinions changed? What are you doing or seeing differently?
- What do you wish you could go back and do over?
- What people do you admire? What companies? Organizations?
- Can you give me a book recommendation relating to you or this space?
- How can we level up together?
- What does total failure look like from my end? And what does success look like?
Some of these questions can give you a better feeling for direction. They will give you an understanding of the relationship. They will help you see if you are gazing at each other or looking outward in the same direction.
