From Vague to Vivid: How Clarity Can Transform Your Life and Work

Several days ago, I watched a very inspiring movie on Netflix called ‘’The Swimmers’’.

It is about the life story of teenage Syrian refugees Yusra Mardini and her sister Sarah Mardini.

Yusra and Sarah were competitive swimmers, and the story was about how they fled the war in Syria and the pain that they went through until they reached Germany and applied for an Asylum permit.

The movie ended with Yusra Mardini fulfilling her dream and reaching the Rio 2016 Olympics as a member of the Refugee Olympic team after a lot of pain, drama, and challenges.

This photo is courtesy of Women's Health website

The story is really inspiring, and they passed through a lot of problems until they reached Germany. I highly recommend that you check it out if you want to see a real example of resilience and determination in action.

And even though there are a lot of things that we can talk about when it comes to this movie, there is one part specifically that I want to borrow and talk about as an opener to this article. The part when they reached Germany.

When they reached Germany, they were asked to move and live in a camp full of refugees where each ‘’room’’ contained 3-4 females.

Also, they were asked not to leave the city (Berlin) and to wait until their request is approved and they are granted an official residence permit before they can start thinking about their lives or what they are going to do in Germany.

But Yusra (the main character) had another opinion.

After taking some days to adapt to the new life circumstances and situation, we started seeing her waking up very early in the morning before sunrise to run on the streets.

she even started using some of the furniture as well as her clothes as equipment that could help her in her training (resistance training or stretching). She was even doing lunges to train her lower body while walking in the whole building and between the people.

Not only this, but several days later, she went to a swimming club and asked the coach to train with the team, and when he told her that they did not have a place for her, she didn’t accept ‘’no’’ as an answer, and she kept trying to persuade him to test her until he agreed, and later she joined the team.

Now I want to stop here and ask you ‘’Do you know what is the reason that made her do all of this even though -on paper- she should be doing nothing and waiting for her documents and then thinking about her life in Germany?’’

The answer is in one word, Clarity. And clarity here means to know exactly the happy ending or the final picture and what you want to achieve.

And when Clarity is there, most of the time it brings with it a burning desire and determination to succeed. And this is what a lot of people are missing.

On the other hand, this is also why a ‘’lack of clarity’’ is sometimes tricky. Because in a lot of cases, what seems like laziness or procrastination is sometimes a lack of clarity, but we do not understand that it is a lack of clarity. And when people lack the clarity and direction needed to move forward, they freeze. And this is why ‘’Clarity’’ is the foundation of top performance.

And as a rule, if you want to be a top performer in your field, you need clarity. If you want to become a better leader, you need clarity. And if you want to become happier in life, you need clarity.

Because, as we discussed in the previous article, one of the main things that makes us feel happy and alive is making progress toward achieving a meaningful goal. And to have a meaningful goal, you need clarity.

Speaking about ‘’meaningful’’ goals, I want to make something clear that confuses a lot of people.

Meaningful goals must be meaningful to us. It doesn’t have to be meaningful to everyone else and it doesn’t have to be a goal that will change the world.

It can be a goal that can lead to positive consequences in our lives, the lives of our families and friends, or even the community that we live within.

Why do we have issues with clarity?

The issues with clarity start with our time when we were kids and because we were not trained on how and what to do to gain more clarity.

Let me give you an example…

When we were kids, it was common sense that we didn’t try to seek clarity because the path was already decided for us.

We have to go to school until we finish high school and then choose if we want to continue or if we want to go to college. And if we decide to go to college, then we have to choose what to study.

But before this checkpoint -the high school point- the road was already paved for us, and we had enough clarity to proceed.

On top of that, there was a motive. Because we used to hear ‘’If you study X and become Y, then you will most probably have a job that secures a high salary’’, and this was tempting for us as we were getting older as all of us wanted to feel more independent and safer and we saw money as something necessary to achieve our goals in life.

This motive pushed us to keep moving forward and to try to get better grades even if some of us hated studying and even if we hated some subjects at school.

Then comes the first true checkpoint which is the time after getting your first job.

After getting your first job, you find yourself thinking 1000 thoughts such as:

• Do I like this job?

• Do I want to continue doing it and if yes, for how long?

• Should I try something else? Or it is too risky?

• Do I want to be a manager and climb the career ladder one day?

But here is the problem. Our brains like shortcuts. Our brains do not like to use their resources and consume energy.

That is why do not feel surprised when you find yourself willing to ignore any topic if it is mentally exhausting or requires a lot of focusing and thinking.

So, most of us navigate life without trying to find ways to answer these questions fast.

We even try not to think about them unless necessary or unless we are forced to, and without training ourselves to learn how to gain more clarity and how to find answers to questions that are exhausting us mentally.

Clarity and Mediocre Leadership

Let us leave ‘’clarity’’ now and speak for a few seconds first about leadership. So be patient with me as I have a point.

Unfortunately, nowadays, the word ‘’leader’’ lost a lot of its magic because of its overuse, especially on social media.

And there is a huge difference between filling a managerial role and being called a leader. A manager is not automatically a leader but can transition to become a leader.

A manager focuses more on systems and procedures and maintaining the status quo, while the leader focuses more on vision and the people who will fulfill this vision.

So let us speak about one of the biggest mistakes organizations make in appointing managers if they decide to appoint someone internally instead of hiring an external candidate.

In a lot of big corporations around the world, an employee can be appointed to a managerial role because simply there is an opening that the organization needs to fill fast. So, the hiring manager usually does one of the following:

a- Either he/she selects one of the team members that he/she likes and appoints him/her to this managerial role mainly and solely based on his/her performance in his/her current role.

This selection is regardless of whether this person showed any signals that he/she can become a potential leader or not

(for example: I saw people appointed to managerial positions in several multinational companies even though almost everyone on their teams and the other cross-functional teams hated them, and even though they were famous for being rude, unsupportive, and unfriendly).

b- Or the hiring manager goes to his team and announces that there is a managerial role ready to be filled and that he/she is willing to discuss this opportunity with anyone interested from the team.

And when no one shows interest, he/she goes to the team members and asks them personally ‘’who wants this managerial role?’’ And if no one steps up, the hiring manager chooses one of the team members randomly and this person says to himself ‘’Why not? let us try’’.

And from my experience, this way of appointing managers will mostly lead to mediocre results.

On the other hand, let me share with you something that I have noticed after serving clients from more than 15 countries in the past years.

One of the things that I have noticed is that any extraordinary leader that I was lucky to work with excelled in 3 things:

1- He/she wanted to step up and lead people without the need for any external pressure (Clarity).

2- He/she knew ‘’why’’ he/she wanted to lead, and he/she had the RIGHT reasons (Clarity and motive).

3- He/she is deeply in love with personal growth and developing himself/herself and others and he/she wants to take the people somewhere (vision).

That is why, clarity is super important.

And in my own opinion, you cannot become an extraordinary leader if you do not have enough clarity to know that you want to lead people and why you want to lead them (and hopefully for the right reasons).

How to gain clarity?

Let us be honest, Clarity regarding life’s path sometimes comes directly from the environment that you are living within. For example, you were born and raised in a family full of doctors, so you dream of becoming a doctor.

Or like in sports and the movie that I mentioned above, the father was a competitive swimmer, and he was dreaming of competing in the Olympics but when this didn’t happen, he encouraged his girls to adopt his dream and to learn swimming and aim to compete and to reach the Olympics.

So, this works as a starting point but still, the kids need to fall in love with the sport and the process.

A lot of times you can encourage your kids to start something that you personally love, and they drop out later because they have no interest. So yes, you can put them at the beginning of the road, but they still have to love the thing that they are doing and the process.

But outside of these examples, you need to ‘’work’’ on gaining clarity exactly like anything else that you would like to achieve in your life. For example, if you want to live a healthy life and have a good, athletic body, you need to dedicate time to planning and preparing your meals and going to the gym or playing sports.

And when it comes to clarity, one of the biggest mistakes that people make is that they ‘’DO NOT’’ think. They keep running in the same loop again each day between preparing their kids for school, working, preparing food, and eating..etc. Always on the run and never stopping. And because of this, they do not give themselves time to think.

To gain clarity, you need to dedicate a time slot for ‘’thinking and reflection’’ each day even if just for 10 minutes (and then you can increase it later).

You need to have some free time to deeply know yourself and increase your self-awareness. This is a crucial step that you cannot miss.

Also, to gain clarity, you need to use the same principle that your parents most probably used with you when you were a kid.

When we were kids, our families wanted us to be busy doing something that could help us develop. So, a lot of families thought about sports. But what sport exactly? They most probably used the concept of ‘’trial and error’’.

When we were kids, we never knew what sport we would like to practice, but we decided simply to…just try. You try football or handball and keep an eye on how you feel and your progress as well as your relationship with the team members, and if you are happy, you continue. If not, then you move to another sport.

Unfortunately, when we grow older in life, we lose this flexibility. We want the first thing that we do (or try) to make us happy or successful immediately. We don’t want to experiment a lot.

And even if it didn’t work or if we felt that it was not the right thing for us, in a lot of cases we prefer to keep doing it because the known is far better than the unknown and trying new things.

And this feeling of flexibility declines more and more as we age. The older we become, the more we want to stay in a specific area or zone and do not want to try anything new.

The problem is ‘’how are you going to know more about yourself and how you react and behave in different situations if you do the same things each day and the same situations keep repeated over and over?’’

One of the most important things that can help you increase your self-awareness and know yourself more is to subject yourself to different situations and different experiences in life. This will not only increase your knowledge about yourself but also will break the boredom that comes from having the same routine each day.

So, in summary, to gain clarity, you need:

1- To know who you truly are and what you want, and to increase your self-awareness.

2- To be flexible, to create situations, and to go to places regularly where you can build new experiences.

3- To dedicate at least 10 minutes each day to do nothing except think and reflect.

In one of the next articles, I will share with you strategies and questions that you can ask yourself to increase your self-awareness. So, make sure that you subscribe to this newsletter in order not to miss it.

One final story...

During the COVID-19 time in 2020, and while the whole world is closed and everyone is hoping to keep his or her job, I started getting more requests from people who want to start their businesses (as this is one of the services that I offer).

I was very curious and surprised, especially that most of these requests came from people who are already established in their careers, and in leadership positions in big corporations.

And since I could not hold my curiosity, I asked these people ‘’Why are you coming to me now and willing to start a business now? The world is falling apart, and you are not even at risk of losing your job as an executive inside your company?’’

The answer was always the same ‘’COVID, and working from home broke the daily never-ending routine that we were doing unconsciously. When this routine broke down, I had more daily time to think about what I truly wanted in life and what I wanted to achieve in the next years. And what I found out is that I am not really enjoying what I am doing currently and that I would love to start a business and see where it will take me as I want to build something with my own hands and leave it for my kids to run later.’’

This is the power of breaking your unconscious daily routine and giving yourself time to think