Visions - Do They Matter?

I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve created this past year. Specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot about why visions really matter. 

We talk about visions a lot, as leaders and within organizations and companies. Spiritual leaders also talk about them. It’s the “V Word” that gets thrown around a lot. But why do visions actually matter? 

I’d like to share three pretty big reasons why visions matter. 

When You Don’t Have a Vision, You’re Susceptible to Overwhelm

By going through motherhood, I’ve learned that if you don’t have a vision, you’re at risk of being overwhelmed by all of the other opinions that are out there. 

When it comes to raising a child, every aspect comes with opinions from others - how you feed them, how you help them go to sleep, how you dress them, what you name them, etc. What I noticed for myself, entering this new process in my life, was that the areas of raising my baby that I was sure of (I had a vision of the mother that I wanted to be) felt intuitive and aligned. 

I don't want to say it felt easy, because “easy” is a funny word to use about raising a baby, but it definitely felt in flow. 

But the parts that I didn't have a concrete vision around felt very anxiety-inducing, for me. I constantly felt wrong. I was constantly looking for resources to tell me what to do. It was just much more scattered.

Part of what a vision makes available is it helps you create what works for you rather than making you work really hard to meet other peoples’ expectations.

When You Don’t Have A Vision, You’re Motivated by Pain

“Pain pushes until vision pulls.” - Dr. Michael Beckwith

I’ve found that a lot of people, especially at this time of year, have a sense of heaviness. There's not much left; you're in the final quarter. We have feelings of, “I don't know if I want to do this anymore” or we feel a sense of reluctance or experience false starts. 

When we don’t have clear visions of where we're heading, we're just motivated by the stuff that's icky in our lives, such as: “I'm not making enough money, so I should make more money” or “I'm not in a relationship and that's bad, so I should find a relationship.” 

These issues all sound very significant but not particularly fun or enticing to complete. 

But when we create visions for where we're heading, and start actually like moving towards what we want, we can infuse that process with some fun, with some excitement, and with some motivation. 

This also gives us our power back. It becomes something that we get to own and that we want to do instead of just something we should be doing. 

Having a Vision is Truly Freeing

Vision is lofty on purpose. Think about the visions of organizations - they're usually huge. They're bigger than a lifetime, or they might be far out in the future, 1 year or 5 years or 10 years. 

Part of why that matters is that there's something freeing about the visioning process when you let it be out in the future, because you aren't the person yet who's lived that future. 

In other words, you're not thinking, “These are the skills and resources that I have right now” which causes you to think smaller. Instead, you get to imagine “This is the leader that I'm going to be in five years” or “This is the mother I'm going to be in two years” or “This is where I want my organization to be in 10 years.”

Some people would call this manifesting; I like to call it setting the template or the intention for who you’re stepping into. 

This is important because moving towards visions, even the ones that we are really committed to the day-to-day, isn't always sexy. It isn't always exciting. It isn't always what we want to prioritize. But when we can connect to that bigger vision, it makes the day-to-day tediousness, the lulls, or the stuckness more worthwhile. 

How are you connecting to your vision these days? Are you finding yourself in the vision reinvention process? If you’re looking for some guidance on this process, please get in touch.