Your Strategic Thinking, Your Mission

An amazing thing happens when you start thinking strategically in an informed and intelligent way—namely, you set yourself on a mission. It may start from something as simple as thinking you’d like to go to a ball game with some friends. So you talk to them about your idea—your vision. Then together you decided, “Yeah, let’s go; it will be fun.” And with that you have set a goal for your vision and your decision. Now you are ready to think strategically.

Thinking strategically means that you start thinking about how to make your vision or decision actual. How will we do this? Well there’s schedules to coordinate and schedules clear. Then there is the process of buying tickets. Oh, before that someone is designated the person to buy the tickets. Then money is collected from everyone, then the person buys the tickets. Next comes the process of how to get there— going together in a van? Everyone taking his or her own car, etc. Working out the details for how-to get something done is why we need strategic thinking.

Yet in that process something else happens. It happens to you and to anyone who is a part of the plan— now you are on a mission. Now you have translated a wish or a want into a specific desire, and from the desire you created a vision. Once you said yes to the vision, you made a decision. Now you are committed. And now you have purpose, an adventure to experience, a mission to live.

If this strategic thinking process happens with something that simple, imagine the effect of learning to do high quality strategic thinking! Imagine the power and wonder and magic of becoming a highly skilled strategist!

What amazingly glorious and sad about strategic thinking is that it is both simple and yet to do it well requires learning—significant learning. Actually this kind of thinking is not automatic. You do not learn it by osmosis. The only way to learn it and learn it well is to study it. A beginning place for studying it is in NLP #101 when you study the Strategy Model. That study will give you the pieces (the variables and elements) of a strategy and enable you to sequence out the steps in your strategies. After all, you have a strategy for learning, for studying, for getting up in the morning, for choose a career, for handling problems, etc. You have hundreds of strategies.

But not all of your strategies do you good. You may have a strategy for procrastinating, losing your temper, getting depressed, depressing other people, etc. You learned such strategies mostly unconsciously, repeated them until they became habitual, and now the “run your life.” Now they have you rather than you having them.

Also, many of our strategies simple do not work at all or not very well. You may have picked up bits and pieces of a strategy to be a leader, to create a new product, to be an entrepreneur, to parent your children, to develop a particular skill ... and you can ... well in part. But if you are not reaching the vision of your desire in terms of its quality or excellence, then something is probably wrong with the strategy.

This is where informed and intelligent strategic thinking comes to the rescue. By examining your habits, your skills, your competencies, your visions, etc., you can develop insights about your strategies and how to enhance them so that they serve you. When you become a skilled strategist, you have the tools for how to figure things out and improve them. It will begin to make you much more of an efficiency expert and someone who is in charge of the strategies that you have developed.

I was surprised in researching and writing Thinking Strategically (2025). My biggest surprise was how pervasive strategic thinking is in our lives. It is in nearly every kind of thinking skill. And it is essential to achieving your highly desired outcomes.