Having built 100s of visions with my clients over the years, this is what I've observed:
1) Being proactive about the step after next only gets you so far.
My clients are typically proactive. Either they have been promoted or they have been offered coaching because they are stars in their organisation or they have actively sought out coaching because again, they are those proactive individuals.
They are very ambitious and they're also interested in the step after next.
But if we only plan that from a bottom up perspective, if we only construct from where we're currently sitting, with the current resources available to us, then we massively limit what's possible.
Taking my own example. If I had allowed myself to be constrained to knowing the 'how' in my 10 year vision, I would have discounted it.
I'm not talking about landing on a distant planet, but I'm talking about something that felt just outside my personal realms of possibility.
The numbers didn't add up.
If I had allowed just my logical brain to build that up in a bottom up way, I would have discounted the possibility and stuck to the safer path.
The crazy thing for me is that decade later I look at that vision and cannot believe how little I knew.
I had no idea that podcasting was going to be huge. I had no idea about how online business was going to work. I had no idea about the executive coaching market and industry and how that was going to grow and explode.
So if I had based it on that bottom up calculation, based on my current understanding, again, I would have massively underestimated and I probably wouldn't have allowed myself to entertain that vision and lean into it.
2) By solely focusing on the next immediate step, we miss valuable opportunities that are under our nose.
I recently worked with a very successful lady who was clear on what she wanted to do next. She was looking for a CEO role and that was going to be her next meaty role and then potentially some other board roles and then some NED portfolio.
However her current role was making her miserable due to a toxic environment and she wanted to leave asap.
After we completed the vision, she was able to see that the thought leadership & media opportunities she was not prioritising in her current role were hugely relevant to her 10 year vision - which had highlighted that she wanted a lot more autonomy and advocacy in her work.
By prioritising this work earlier in the week, she felt more joyful and had 'fed herself first', AND she felt so much more aligned with her work. She had more energy to manage the tricky environment - it didn't seem so bad any more. She even questioned whether she wanted to leave any more!
3) Logic and analysis can keep us stuck.
As professionals, we are often highly analytical, with great logical thinking. Great problem solvers, right?
Often this is described and simplified into being very left brained. There is obviously complexity here, but I'm not going to overcomplicate this or get bogged down in detail.
The right part of our brain that is the seat of curiosity, synergy experimentation, more metaphoric thinking, playfulness, artistry, flexibility and in general risk taking.
If we are only taking the left brained part of our thinking into our careers and applying that more logical way of thinking, then we're going to miss all of this.
We're going to miss this opportunity to be far more expansive in our ambition and thinking.
In the end, creativity is a fusion of our right and left brain thinking. But if we miss harnessing that right hemisphere then we are missing a real important trick - ESPECIALLY as logical thinkers.
Often we are doing well in our careers because of that executive function, that logic, that problem solving.
But that right hemisphere is likely to be more opportunistic, more future oriented, more open to change and it actually is obviously the center of our visualization capability.
So we are directly calling upon that part of our brain that perhaps hasn't always been at the front and foremost part of our career work.
We want to take those analytical strengths and amplify them by giving sufficient right hemisphere juice when it comes to your careers, your work and your life.
This is why I created my short Vision Builder programme. It takes a systematic approach to building a robust vision - logic meets magic! Check it out!
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