Create a Vision that's Challenging & Limitless.

Starting your own business teaches you a thing or two about leadership. I started Gondo’s Kitchen, my pop-up dining business, on 2014 — right out of university. One thing that school or university does not teach me is that leadership success always starts with a vision. One of my role model, Eleanor Roosevelt, envisioned a world of equal opportunity for women and minorities.

I’ve been privileged to meet with many great leaders throughout my career and learn first hand from them exactly what it is that makes them such successful leaders. It comes to my surprise that their answers come down to few fundamentals. Having a vision is one of them.

I give real thoughts on setting my vision — considering the values, ideas and activities that I’m most passionate about, and those are the things I pursue. And for me, my vision should be challenging to put into action. Two years into my business made me realise the importance of setting realistic, demanding goals and then trying to achieve them relentlessly. Because after all, persistence matters just as much as inspiration. As one of my mentor once told me, “Persistence breaks resistance.”

I’m very fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time with children as a Sunday School teacher. Whenever I spend time with them, I enjoy listening as they talk about their dreams of what they’ll do when they grow up. Reminds me of myself at that age, and I believe we all have those dreams too. But as we get older, people start to talk us out of them. Even today, some people often talk me out of working in the kitchen and having my own restaurant business, as they think it is too tough of a job for a woman. Imagine if I don’t have that goal to achieve, I’ll be too focused on my limitations.

As much as filtering out distractions is important, having the right focus is also an essential leadership skill. That is by having a balanced focus on yourself, focus on others, and focus on the wider world. Having this focus helps me with better decision making, devising strategy, innovating and managing my business.

In having “the” vision, we need to have the right focus and goal. Goal setting not only allows me to hold the rudder of my life’s direction; it also gives me a benchmark to determine whether I am actually succeeding.

Setting this goal is a process with careful consideration, but here are my rules:

Firstly, motivation is the key. It’s crucial to have a goal that motivates you, because something that’s important to you means there is a value in achieving them.

Second, write it down. Make your goal real and tangible. And be optimistic, use the word “will” instead of “would like to” or “might”. Last but not least, make an action plan and stick with it! It’s so easy to get too sidetracked with the outcome that we forget to plan all of the steps along the way.

Goal setting is not a one time thing, it’s an ongoing process.

All in all, every leader needs a vision to give them clear direction for their action to translate that vision into reality.

Stephani Gondo.