Strategy at its best can be sexy. Because Strategy at its best is about the courageous effort to fulfill desire.

Strategy is where yearning is met with planning.

Strategy could be defined as the application of careful thought as to how you can best use your available resources to create the outcome you desire.

Which means that good Strategy demands that you name and own what you desire.

Strategy gets immediately less sexy when we give glib answers to the question of what we want.

When we skip the deeper digging into what we really, really want. When we take as a given what we think we should want or what someone else wants for us. When we fail to make that desire OUR OWN.

The reason so much Business Strategy is crap is that it is built on the assumption that you want more and more and more clients. And more and more and more money.

And of course as business owners, we DO want clients and we DO want money. Most of us do want a viable business that brings in enough money so we can keep going, so we can pay ourselves, so we can have decent lives.

But there is SO MUCH variety within those things.

What kind of clients?

How much money?

Doing what kind of activities in exchange for money?

Canned blueprints stink because they tend to assign you the outcome. A six-figure coaching practice. A “leveraged” information-product business. A lifestyle business.

But maybe what you want is a small stable of high-end clients who have you on retainer for years on end.

Or maybe you want a huge following that adores you and buys your books and comes to your seminars and attends your online classes.

Or maybe you want short, intense engagements with clients who cycle back to you every few years.

If you want a good Strategy for your business growth and development, you need to invest time in the question: “What do you really want? What does your ideal business look like? What kinds of things do you do in exchange for money? What kind of daily, weekly, quarterly, yearly rhythm do you crave?”

In fact, in order to have good Business Strategy, you need to answer bigger questions like: “What kind of life do you want to live? How lavishly or simply do you want to live? What kind of activities do you want to fill your days? How much time do you want to work? And how much time do you not want to work? What else will be in your life besides work?”

Because the business you want to build is the business that supports the life you want to live.

So do this for me today, or tomorrow if you are reading this late (because it’s 5pm in New Mexico as I write this and the sun is starting to set.)

Set a timer for 15 minutes.

Take three deep breaths and imagine for a moment, in the magic of the light, that almost anything is possible. That you can be a creature of desire. That your life can be shaped in a way that would most fulfill you. That your life and your work can be sweetly, beautifully designed to be exactly the way you desire.

What would that look like?

What would that life look like?

What would your work look like?

Let your hand move across the page as if your pen were a wand.

What will you create?

And as you write, or as you read over what you write, notice. Where in your body does it ring true. Where in the bowl of your belly do you say “Yes! Yes! That is EXACTLY what I want!”

That’s the desire.

And that’s what all of your Strategy needs to be pointed to.

So tell me, sweet pea, what is one thing you truly desire, in your life or your business, that you want your Strategy to support?