Your company is an organism; its cells need to divide to multiply, they need to differentiate to become something new. Don’t worry about what you’re going to lose—think about what you’re going to become.

An identity crisis knocks a company’s compass off kilter. It clouds its people’s ability to make clear decisions, to choose which route to take, and to allocate the proper resources. How can you hire the right people if you don’t know what you’re hiring them to do? How do you know which projects and products to support if you don’t know how they will ultimately fit into the whole?

Almost every leader will say that their lodestar is defining their business focus, which comes down to what you can do to build long-term value. “If anything, what the last few years have taught us is that building long-term value is critical for any company,” says Dave Peterschmidt. “If the company is going to be in there for the long haul, it has to understand the core value it brings to the market and the reason for its existence in a crowded marketplace. Then you can do an assessment to get the company tracking toward long-term values.”

Think of that assessment as conducting a reality check of the operating environment. If you want to get the company tracking toward long-term value, consider what conditions pertain that will help or hinder you. The answers will shape your short-term agenda.

The pain of hating our own creation is a consequence of our investing too much of our sense of being into the company, the product, the creation. When we hang our sense of self on the whisper of an idea; when we unwittingly insist that our love, safety, and belonging depend on what we do and, most important, how others feel about our feelings, our actions, and our work; then we leave little space for anything other than bitter, existential suffering.

For many, that place where we’ve come to think we belong has become stultifying; it’s where we are small, unseen, unsure, and unwilling to claim our strengths, our capacities, our courage, our leadership. We are frozen by the belief that it’s just too dangerous to reach into the black bag and grab hold of the disowned, dismembered parts of ourselves.

All Loyal Soldiers then have one basic task: to keep us safe from the wars that raged in our childhood. No matter how awful these strategies have come to make us feel as adults, they were brilliant in their own ways.

In creating strategy, it is often important to take on the viewpoints of others, seeing how the situation looks to a rival or to a customer. Advice to do this is both often given and taken. Yet this advice skips over what is possibly the most useful shift in viewpoint: thinking about your own thinking.