Visioning is a powerful tool that acts as an internal compass, helping you navigate life intentionally and proactively. Having a Vision can help you make better decisions, faster.
Visioning is the process of defining what success looks like for you at a specific point in the future. Whether it’s short or long term, a Vision is all about the evidence you’ve gotten to where you wanted to go.
Creating a vision allows you to clarify your destination and chart a course to get there.
You can let your future happen to you, or you can make your future happen. Either way, you’ve got to take responsibility. And It is incredibly powerful to know that while there is so much you cannot control in the world around you, you can be intentional and proactive about the future you create for yourself.
How creating your Vision works
Over the past several years I’ve developed three in-depth processes for clarifying, refining, and aligning to your Vision.
Clarify: Get rid of the noise and get crystal-clear on where you’re headed. Go far beyond surface-level goals by peeling back the layers and connecting the dots around what has led you to where you are. This enables you to take stock of where you are now. Imagine the relief when you solidly trust in your nonnegotiables, Core Values, and Core Mission.
Refine: Let’s dive into every facet of your life, from financial to relationships and even spirituality. This step of the process involves taking your core values and nonegotiables and turning them into a detailed Vision of what success looks like for you in the future. This is where we intentionally get specific – what do you want your like to look like?
If you work with others or have a team, you can utilize this fully articulated Vision to help them see the future as clearly as you do and engage them in making it happen.
Align: Create the Roadmap to get where you want to go. Now you’ll work backwards from your fully fleshed-out Vision and determine how to start making it happen. This process starts with plotting out the milestones in your Vision to determine your short and long-term priorities. Typically Year 1 is the momentum setter, and we’ll identify the driving forces that will ensure everything else falls into place.
Creating your Vision
This is a very simplified view of the Visioning process you’d take to create your Vision. To understand what these steps entail, learn more about Vision Courses.
Choose your timeline - 3 or 5 years I’ve found to be best.
Get ready to reflect, write, and
Go through the Visioning steps laid out in the program.
Write your narrative and refine it.
Share it with the key stakeholders in your life.
How long should it be?
Great question!
Results you can expect
The word I hear most often from Visionaries that go through this process is clarity. With your Vision in place, you’ll have an invaluable filter between what’s an opportunity and what’s a distraction so you can make better decisions, faster. With your Vision and Roadmap in place, you may be surprised at how quickly things will start accelerating from there.
Visioning is not free lunch
I always tell people that I will help them write a Vision but I will not help them write a fantasy.
Your Vision has got to be at the intersection of exhilarating and realistic.
You can have the most phenomenal Vision and the most impressive Roadmap, but if you create both and use neither, not much is going to change.
With your Vision in place you’ll still have challenges. Lots of them. As one of my mentors, Zingerman’s co-founder Ari Weinzweig says, being a Visionary just means that you’ll start to have better and better challenges instead of the same challenge again and again.
How to get started
If you’d like to get started with Visioning today, you can keep accessing any of the Resources on this site. Please explore my offerings and see which of my online courses currently serve you best.