Lock and Load

In the military sense, this means to lock your sights on the target and have your ammunition ready to fire.

In other words, create a link with what you want to achieve and be clear about what you need to do to achieve it.

You and I create links or connections all the time, with our phones, with our broadband, with the mail, and face to face.

To communicate with our ‘target’, the person or group with which we want to communicate, we need some form of connection.

And then we need to ‘lock on’ to that ‘target’ through the link; through our communication.

But you and I know only too well that sometimes that link breaks down or degrades.

We lose the phone signal or it becomes so bad that the connection keeps breaking up, becoming useless.

Our broadband goes down or for some reason starts to run very slowly, again impeding the quality of the communication.

Our mail gets ‘lost in the post’ and even when talking to someone in person, face to face, sometimes we find it difficult to communicate because we’re ‘not on the same wavelength’.

When we are communicating you and I need to be sure of two things:

We need to ensure that the ‘link’ is robust and you and I also need to ensure that we are communicating on the same ‘frequency’ as our co-respondent.

I was recently having a conversation about the sound system in a church. It wasn’t working properly.

It was ‘working’ but the quality of the sound wasn’t up to scratch and there were intermittent breakdowns in the system.

The wires were tested and found to be intact, so the connection was there. But it raised the question as to the ‘quality’ of the link. In the end, because the system was quite old, it was decided that the wiring would be replaced with new.

When you and I communicate with people we must ensure that the quality of the connection is high, that the link is robust and won’t break down.

But this doesn’t just apply to communicating with others.

It applies to communicating with oneself, and it also applies to everything we do.

To achieve our objectives, to hit out ‘targets’, you and I need to form a strong unbreakable connection with whatever we are thinking or doing.

You and I need to ‘lock on’.

To lock on to our ambition, our vision, our belief, our objective – to create a robust connection with whatever it is we want.

This is not the same as ‘focus’.

This is where the ‘load’ comes in to play.

You and I have the target in our sights, we can see it on the radar, we know ‘where’ it is and we’ve ‘connected’.

But can we see it clearly? Is the vision of what you and I want to achieve clear? Can we see the detail, exactly what we want our ammunition to hit?

Is the target, vision, ambition, objective, in focus?

And, if you and I are communicating with someone, there are two aspects to consider.

Besides being focused on what we want to achieve you and I also need to be on the same ‘frequency, the same ‘wavelength’ as the person we’re communicating with.

We have to understand clearly what we are talking about. It’s no good having a conversation, or trying to, when you and I see one side of the coin and the other person only sees the other side.

It’s just not going to work – we must ‘tune in’ with each other first. Or maybe we have to make the effort to tune in to their wavelength by seeing things from their point of view and not ours.

You and I are often exhorted to ‘focus’ on what we are doing and told that by doing this we’ll achieve the result we want.

This makes sense, and we do it.

And then we wonder why it ‘doesn’t work’.

We can fire our guns or launch our missiles in the general direction of our target, but even if we know exactly what we are trying to hit, in every detail and even if we know exactly where it is, we aren’t going to get the results we want.

We might, but it will probably cost more and take longer than we planned.

It doesn’t matter how good our focus is on our goal; if we don’t connect first making sure it’s a strong connection then we won’t achieve our goal in the way we wanted.

First, connect, lock on.

Only then can you and I get our ‘target’ in focus and deploy our resources.

But before you and I can ‘lock and load’ on an external target, or vision, or ambition, or goal, or objective, we fist need to ‘lock on’ to ourselves.

Make that connection between our inner self and the universe, make sure we are properly ‘wired up’ – ‘connected’ – and then you and I can ‘load up’ and focus on those things we want to achieve.

I’m locked and loaded.

How about you?