By Melissa Lagowski
CEO/Founder/Queen Bee
Big Buzz Idea Group
What does it mean to manifest something? The spiritual definition of manifestation is “the public display of emotion or feeling, or something theoretical made real.” This concept is part of the Laws of Attraction where positive thoughts beget positive outcomes.
So, are you a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty type of person? Throughout the pandemic, we and many of our clients have continued trying to be optimistic, to roll with the punches, to make lemonade out of lemons. But have you seen this recent meme:
Enough is enough already!
We at Big Buzz Idea Group are ready to leave the twists and turns of the past two years behind us to focus on the positive as we continue to adapt to the new way of business – and to level up from intention to manifestation.
Have you stopped to consider the vast changes that have transpired since covid erupted? Have you thought about how much change took place in just the first six months of the pandemic? While it was different for everyone, people were incredibly adaptable and resilient.
It is quite impressive how quickly most organizations were able to pivot to work remotely (by leveraging technology in new ways to stay connected), while other nonprofits remained in the trenches to serve and support less resilient individuals through the unexpected shifts. We found ways to continue fundraising, and we know many organizations who launched new fundraising initiatives to stay afloat when large annual events had to be cancelled.
Our clients also had to ramp up communications since increased information had to be shared with board members, funders and constituents. Development teams bounced from having to plan a fundraiser only to be forced to delay and/or adjust the event midstream when new guidelines came out.
There hasn’t been a period in recent history when we had to adapt faster to change. But as Darwin stated, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
Kudos to all of you in the nonprofit and association space who have adapted and continue doing so even now! You possess the resilience needed to make it for the long haul.
Now we encourage you – even challenge you – to manifest the absolute best future for your organization. Intention is required to create the best future for your organization, so carve out a bit of time for yourself, or even brainstorm with your team, to decide what the ideal future would be for your association. At Big Buzz, we firmly believe in goalsetting, so hopefully, you have strategically set three to five goals that your nonprofit will hit this year.
Next, take each of those goals and start to frame out what success for that goal would look like. It is not enough to just state the objective and be done; you want to detail what it looks like when it becomes reality – imagine what the outcome looks like in its full form. But “be careful what you wish for.” Without fully thinking through specific processes to reach your goal and documenting the details, your goal might come into fruition, but it might not look at all like you were hoping.
As an example, we have set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) to double our services in the year ahead. We know that many nonprofits are still struggling, especially with the current staffing shortages plaguing the economy, and we want to help as many organizations as we can through this next hurdle.
But this big goal is not enough to manifest the future we desire, so we have applied detailed conditions and goals to help us achieve very specific results that will shape the future we envision. For example, we want to continue providing quality services in a variety of areas, requiring us to hire passionate and experienced individuals to support the teams that we work with.
And we are very intentional to choose clients who align with our organizational values of growth, teamwork, gratitude, integrity and profitability. We serve Executive Directors and boards who are working to grow their organizations. We work with organizations who fully value their team members and their partners, preferring to elevate those who value kindness and want to leave this world a little better than they found it.
We desire clients who mean what they say, and we aspire to be the honest, trusted partner that our clients have been looking for. We expect to forge relationships that will last far into the future and to leverage the investment in our partnership to the maximum advantage of the nonprofit.
By devoting energy to building out the vision of what we want to manifest, we have the potential to not only double our services to this sector, but to exponentially increase our impact in the nonprofit community – an amazingly powerful and motivating goal for the year ahead!
So, we ask you: What do you want to manifest this year?
