Your Whiteboard Probably Needs a Facelift: Wiping the Slate Clean
For us, the whiteboard represents fundamental principles essential to business growth and success. These principles comprise the “Whiteboard Strategies,” the first being the Clean Slate Principle: The whiteboard illustrates and represents exactly what you can accomplish in business and in life.
Most of us see only what is around us. We’ve always been told that we can be anything we want, but we rarely SEE IT. We are essentially wearing societal blinders.
Using very simple tools like a whiteboard and marker, you can design your future free of any constraints you may be presently experiencing. Mapping your future out on a clean surface allows you to create an extremely different version of reality than what surrounds you. It also allows for fine precision when setting goals and mapping out plans. You can literally create the life of your dreams on the board, and then strategize exactly how you will realize it. This brings a material reality to your dreams. They are no longer phantom ideas, but realistic outcomes with feasible action steps that will lead you to their realization.
Along with your environment, you are primarily influenced by the five people with whom you spend most of your time. If there are aspects of your environment or the people around you that are detrimental to your goals, a blank whiteboard offers an opportunity to diffuse their influence and draw your future on a blank slate.
It’s very easy to fall into a cycle of outcomes dictated by your circumstances, whether they are aligned with your highest ambitions or not. Why? Because they are comfortable. They are familiar. In a way, they feel like home. But just because a shack feels like home, that doesn’t mean you can’t live in a castle of your own design.
This is where the power of the Clean Slate Principle comes into play.
When we were first embarking in our professional careers, our experience of successes was very connected to what we thought was possible, which was pretty average. Average was what we had grown up around. Most of the adult role models we’d encountered during childhood had achieved average levels of success. The public schools we both attended, the opportunities we encountered, and the friends who surrounded us reaffirmed this experience of normal, middle-class success. Since this was the majority of what we saw and knew, it shaped our vision of reality and what we thought was possible to achieve. As expected, our early experiences of success were fairly limited.
It wasn’t until we erased these ideas and expectations—which were perfectly normal and fine, but limiting our ability to reach beyond average—that our career trajectories began to shift notably.
Wiping clean the whiteboard of expectations that we had unconsciously adopted during childhood allowed us to unleash our ambition and dream of something greater for ourselves. It was around this time that we began entertaining the idea of stepping into entrepreneurialism and establishing Hard Money Bankers.
If your whiteboard is cluttered with limiting beliefs about what you can accomplish in your personal or professional life, then you are denying yourself the right to create from a clean slate of limitless possibilities. It took time for us to realize that we could expect more for ourselves than what the majority of people around us were accomplishing, and more than what our community’s value system told us we deserved. Our lives didn’t have to be average. Why were our expectations saying otherwise?
The truth of the matter is that you aren’t beholden to anyone else’s beliefs about what is possible. You have the capability of deciding for yourself how you want your life and career to unfold. You have the option to start fresh, from a clean canvas, and create what truly motivates and drives you to succeed. All that is required is the willingness to create from a clean surface—the willingness to embrace the creative potential of your own blank whiteboard.
A blank whiteboard and a marker represent an empowered position from which you control the unfolding of your future. They represent the shift from a reactive-based mentality, in which your future is dictated by your present life conditions, into an empowered state of mastery that enables you to realize your highest ambitions.
Such ambitions are not reserved for the elite. Anyone can erase limiting beliefs and draw something new. Yet only those who are willing to press a marker to a blank board—and create a vision fueled by ambition—will experience elite success.
This article is an excerpt from the book “The Whiteboard: Go from Blank Canvas to a Productive, Leveraged, & Highly-Profitable Business” by Chris Haddon and Jason Balin. Please click here to see more.