Why High Achievers Need a 10-Year Vision (Not a 10-Year Plan)

This is the transcript of The Refreshing Leadership Podcast episode: Why high achievers need a 10-year vision (not a 10-year plan), published on 23rd March 2026.

Today I'm sharing some training from inside my Vision Code curriculum. I have shared some of this audio before, but today I wanted to share the video with slides as well. This might be one to watch on Spotify, which shares the video, or on YouTube. On both of those you can also add comments, so if you've got any questions it's a little bit easier to interact.

Having the visuals and slides should make it easier to digest, take notes, and share with somebody you think might benefit. It also gives you a taste of what the sessions inside the programme look like.

This is still one of our most popular episodes, alongside the abundance series, and it's one that has brought in the most coaching clients - because when you grasp this stuff around vision and 10-year vision, things really do start to move in the right direction.

We've had a lot of new listeners recently, and spring is the perfect season to leap forward and take action. So it felt like just the right time to bring this episode back. If you are ready to sharpen your vision and start taking some bold, intentional spring strides, this one is for you.

Reason one: being proactive about your next step isn't enough

I typically work with proactive clients. They've either been promoted, been offered coaching because they are stars in their organisation, or they've actively sought out coaching because they are ambitious and interested in the step after next.

But if we only build up from where we are currently sitting - only looking upwards from that perspective - we miss tremendous value. We miss the bigger picture that you get when you approach it from the top down, when you do the visioning work first.

This has a tangible impact. You will miss opportunities that are right under your nose if you don't do that big picture visioning.

Let me give you a simple example. I recently worked with a very successful woman who was very clear on what she wanted to do next. She was looking for a CEO role, then potentially some board roles, and then a NED portfolio. It was only when we did the 10-year vision that she was able to say: actually, in 10 years I'm not doing any of this. I've started working for myself in a much more autonomous way, leaning into the areas of massive personal meaning and interest to me. It was a much more independent career that she wanted to be leading.

What she realised in this process was that the expertise she was going to need at that point - and be known for - she was already being asked to do thought leadership work in her current role. Her current role had a lot of toxic elements, and she was generally very frustrated with it. But once we did that vision, she realised she could make some simple switches to prioritise that thought leadership work early in her week and early in her day, feeding herself first and knowing she was serving her longer-term vision.

Without me actively asking her about it, she said that her whole approach to work had completely changed. What had been feeling heavy, burdensome, and exhausting was now starting to feel like an incredible opportunity to pave the way for future steps.

This story is not necessarily the position you are in - you might be facing a different set of circumstances. But what it highlights is that there are often opportunities right under our nose that, if we're only thinking in a bottom-up way about our next step, we may very easily miss.

Reason two: high achievers tend to underuse the right hemisphere

The second reason is why I designed this programme specifically for people like you - often professionals, highly analytical, with great logical thinking and great problem-solving skills. This is often described, in simplified terms, as being very left-brained.

The right hemisphere is the seat of curiosity, synergy, experimentation, metaphoric thinking, playfulness, artistry, flexibility, and risk-taking. If we only bring the left-brained, logical part of our thinking into our careers, we miss all of that. Creativity is a fusion of right and left brain thinking, and if we don't harness that right hemisphere, we miss an important trick.

The right hemisphere is more opportunistic, more future-oriented, more open to change. It is the centre of our visualisation capability. So in this work, I am directly calling upon that part of our brain that perhaps hasn't always been at the forefront of our career thinking.

If you take a random, intuitive idea that pops into your mind on a walk or in the shower - that's the right hemisphere. But to do something about it is going to require a different process, and that's largely in the left hemisphere. So when you get into the solution-based elements, you will make full use of those rational processes. What I'm doing is taking all of those existing strengths and amplifying them by making sure we are giving sufficient right hemisphere thinking to your career, your work, and your life.

The other important part is that we don't just want to be in task-based, logical thinking when it comes to our careers, because our work can be so meaningful to us. It can really speak to our values and what we find important in life. By doing this vision work, I invite you to bring that thinking in as well. When people are caught up in the here and now, with so many obligations and things on their plate, it's hard to step back and give those deeply held values a place in how we think about our work. This step back really does allow us to bring our full selves to the way we think about our careers.

Reason three: we underestimate what's possible over 10 years

This next reason speaks to a couple of my favourite career and time gurus - Dorie Clark and Laura Vanderkam.

Laura Vanderkam often says that we overestimate what we can do in a day, but underestimate what we can do in a year. When I look ahead at my typical day, there might be hundreds of things I want to get done. The reality is, if they are meaty, needle-moving things, I'm probably going to get a lot less done than I might hope. But over the course of a year, so much more is possible than we often give ourselves credit for.

Dorie Clark takes this a step further and says we overestimate what we can do in one year, but underestimate what we can do in 10 years. In the near term, we overestimate, we get disappointed, we want things to happen more quickly. But over a longer timeframe, so much more is possible. If we can really hold that understanding, we unlock so much more potential in ourselves and we get to stick with our meaningful goals.

Cal Newport would say this is very much in tune with slow productivity - massively extending the timeframes over which things are possible. This allows so much more space, room for error, and room for life to happen, without taking us away from the big goals that matter to us.

That is why I love 10 years. Anything is possible. I have written visions where I had no idea how they were going to come about - things that felt just outside my personal realms of possibility and that I couldn't compute. If I had only allowed my logical brain to build things up in a bottom-up way, I would have discounted those visions entirely.

A decade later, I look back and see so many things I had no idea about at the time. I had no idea that podcasting was going to be huge. I had no idea how online business was going to work. I had no idea how the executive coaching market was going to grow and explode. If I had based everything on a bottom-up calculation from my current understanding, I would have massively underestimated what was possible.

Reason four: vision makes decision-making easier

Having a 10-year vision is an incredible lens and filter for decision-making.

I was coaching someone recently who worked in a high-octane consulting environment. She told me that everyone just stayed late because that was what was done, and she didn't have a clear sense of her next steps - so she just defaulted into the same behaviour.

I shared a counter-example from my own experience. When I was in consulting, I used to be part of a dance troupe. On certain days when it wasn't critical - when we didn't have a trial the next day - I would say I was sorry but I had to leave for dance rehearsal. People would look up and probably think I wasn't dedicated to the cause. But I was very clear about my vision and my priorities, and I was willing to receive those looks because of my bigger vision. I didn't want to sacrifice those years and miss out on being part of that dance troupe. It was a much easier decision to make because I had that clarity.

I see this a lot in coaching - people come to me with dilemmas. Should I take this opportunity or that one? Should I take a lateral move or a linear one? When we have a vision, it becomes so much easier to see which steps are aligned with it. And sometimes both options are aligned with your vision - and if you know that, you can be secure in your decision-making, knowing that either path is going to be fine.

The problem happens when we don't have that vision. We become everybody else's instrument. We become at the mercy of other people's visions and other people's demands because we don't have a clear sense of our own.

Reason five: vision is a massive time saver

Once we've done the vision work, it becomes so easy to eliminate activities that are not aligned with it and give that time back to the rest of life.

I have worked with people who came to me overwhelmed - working all weekend, working late, not really having an off switch, going to sleep on their phones. After doing the vision work, it was so easy to eliminate chunks of that time. I had one client who, within that same month, told me he had completely stopped working weekends - something that had previously been an absolute default.

I have been genuinely floored by how much time is saved in people's actual lives when they have this vision. Because they are no longer just doing the busy work. They are no longer just people-pleasing or doing what they think is probably the right thing to do.

This also translates directly into coaching. I don't want people to spend time and money on coaching unnecessarily. I want it to be absolutely worth it - for them and for their organisation. That is why I want to make sure we are working on the most important things, and the way to do that is to have worked on the vision first and foremost. Otherwise we keep hitting dead ends, realising that something isn't working because their heart isn't in it and it's not part of their longer-term vision.

Reason six: vision transforms comparison and envy

This final one is one of my favourites, and something that comes up a lot with clients.

Status anxiety, comparison, envy - we know these feelings exist, but we don't always want to label them. What I love about the 10-year vision is that it almost flips those on their head.

When we are not clear on our own path and we are measuring ourselves by arbitrary external standards, we are going to do a lot of comparison. We are going to see things other people are doing and think, that's what I should be doing, and we're going to feel destabilised when we see people doing great things.

But when we are constructing a vision, comparison can actually be very useful. Looking at role models, noticing what produces that twinge of envy - these become helpful clues in building the vision. We take those feelings and use them to understand what might fuel us, what might excite us, what might be a deeply held desire. And we convert those into our vision.

So two things are happening here. First, when we have our own clear vision, there is going to be a lot less comparison and envy - because we are marching to the beat of our own drum. It becomes so much easier to see the world around us clearly. Second, when we do still notice those feelings, we are able to look at them differently and ask whether they can actually help us construct our own vision.

A total flip.

You now have your rationale for why this is such a powerful undertaking - whether it's for decision-making, bringing your values into your career, saving time, or starting to view the world very differently. I invite you to start looking through that lens, and to examine any comparison or envy you might have pushed away before through a different lens. Because we actually want to harness that and use it.

Well done for making it through to this point. We are getting increasingly ready to do your own visioning work.

About the Vision Code programme

To give you an idea of how it works: we start with a few videos like this one that prime and prepare you with all the building blocks you need to create a really robust vision - one that is genuinely exciting, but not just a case of cutting out magazine images and sticking them on a vision board. We cover your zone of genius, your past experience, your strengths, and some of the blockers that might be in your way. Once you've done all of that groundwork, we do the exciting visioning work, and you walk away with your written vision on paper.

After that, there are two hours of intensive one-to-one coaching - either in one two-hour block or two separate one-hour sessions. That is when we take your vision, troubleshoot any areas you're uncertain about, and turn that 10-year vision into a three-year critical path and a one-year plan.

This is my signature programme. It's what I do with all my corporate clients, my workshop participants, and my private clients. And I have loved seeing the results - sometimes hearing from people years later about what has come from taking the time to do that vision.

Overall, this will take five to seven hours of your time spread over a few weeks - a very manageable amount. And I can guarantee you will save many multiples of that time very quickly, by getting clear on exactly what is important and what to say yes and no to.

If you want to see how this programme has impacted real people, go to my LinkedIn, scroll down to my recommendations, and you will see countless mentions of the Vision Builder programme - now called Vision Code - and how it has transformed people's work and lives.

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About Maya

Maya Gudka is an executive coach specialising in C-suite career progression and leadership development. She works with senior leaders in major organisations on strategic career planning, executive presence, and building sustainable influence. Maya hosts The Refreshing Leadership Podcast, which ranks in the top 2% of podcasts globally and has nearly 300 episodes exploring the challenges faced by ambitious professionals.