After I published last week’s article, I received some inquiries from a few people who are not in official leadership positions in their work, but still recognize the need to be theleader in their own lives. I was excited to hear from them, because this is truly where leadership begins. If you can’t effectively lead yourself, how could you possibly lead anyone else?
Foundational Leadership Characteristics
Again, as I’ve shared in other articles on leadership, the building blocks are basic, fundamental, and necessary for any leadership position, whether it’s leading oneself, leading volunteers, leading a team, or leading an entire organization.
Those foundational building blocks are: Self-Awareness,Other-Awareness, Clear Vision, and Living & Leading with Intention. You can refresh your memory on those ideas by reviewing the last article here. Today, I’m going to focus on the Vision portion, as the exercise I take individual coaching clients through is a bit different than what I would use with a leader responsible for a team or an organization.
Designing Your Life
In my work with individual clients, we typically begin our work on a specific challenge or goal the client is focused on, but along the way, our work often shifts to a more holistic approach in which the client decides he or she wants to look at the bigger picture of his or her whole life, not just one piece.
Why think small? After all, if you can design a piece of your life and craft a strategic plan to achieve it, why wouldn’t the same process work for all areas of your life?
First, you’ll need to give yourself permission to imagine, dream, and explore. In fact, I encourage you to speak that permission out loud in a confident tone. While we are all born with insatiable curiosity, vivid imagination, and unbounded creativity, it is often beaten out of us as we grow up and make our way through traditional education systems. This may not happen intentionally – meaning the people around us who do this aren’t likely thinking of what they are doing as intentionally shutting down that side of us – but it happens, nonetheless.
Repeat after me: “I give myself permission to imagine, dream, and explore…to be curious and allow ideas about how I want to live my life to bubble out of me freely and unabridged.”
Reserve the Time
The exercise I’m going to share with you will take some time – 7-14 hours, more or less, depending on how much thought you’ve already given to your vision and how much free reign you allow your imagination. I encourage you to get your calendar out right now and block out the time… and treat these appointments with the same level of importance and commitment you would afford someone you were paying money to see. This is that important!
You’ll want at least an hour for each session, for 7-14 sessions. The difference will depend on if you want to give yourself time to imagine every dayor every other day. The rule of thumb for the exercise is to work through it with at least 24 hours in betweensessions but notmore than 48 hours in between.
The idea here to is to engage your curiosity, imagination, and creativity. It’s not a race or a competition. I actually had one client who was so focused on completing the exercise, she only heard me say how many times she should do the exercise and missed the time interval direction entirely. She very nearly sat down and wrote out her vision 14 times in as short a time span as she could manage, because she was so driven to complete it! Do that and you will miss the point and the magic of this simple exercise altogether!
Choose a time of day when you know you’ll be able to relax and flow through it unhurried. Also, if you’re aware enough of your personal creative rhythms, intentionally choose a time of day when you are more creative. Find a place where you can be comfortable and do the exercise, uninterrupted. Inside, outside, on a bus or a train, in a coffee shop or in your office… There is no one perfect location for every person, but I trust you’ll know yours.
Finally – and this is possibly the only rigid direction I’m going to give you, and it will make the most difference in your experience and outcome: Do NOT do this on any kind of electronic device. Select a nice journal, pick up a blank notebook, use a legal pad… the kind of paper doesn’t actually matter, but it needs to be pen or pencil on paper, written longhand.
Your brain engages and works differently when you put pen to paper, and this will unlock your creativity at higher levels than any keyboard will ever allow.
The Exercise
Take a new journal, notebook, or pad of paper and write out your vision for your life — work, home, family, relationships, free time, exercise, travel, learning, everything— in as much detail as you can.
Write in the present tense, as if it is already your reality… Like this: “I am living in my dream house. It’s a one-level craftsman bungalow with four bedrooms…”
Don’t edit or filter along the way or worry about how someone else might think of it; you don’t have to share it with anyone (and in its early stages, I encourage you not to share it!). Think about the colors, the textures, the sounds, the smells, who is with you…include all of this.
Just write until it’s all out of you. Set it aside for 24 but not more than 48 hours.
Do the exercise, again, but don’t read what you wrote the previous time. Start on a new page. No filtering, no editing…just write it all out.
Do the exercise, again…keep at this process for at least 14 days, or longer if you’re moved to do so.
Don’t worry if what you come up with each time is different than the last time. Just keep writing it out. As you go thru this process, over time, you’ll get more in touch with what you truly long for and will see it more clearly.
Once you know what you desire to create, it’s easier to start taking steps toward it. Know that it’s an iterative process — do this a couple of times a year, or at least once a year, because your needs and desires will change over time. And as you achieve different goals, have experiences, and acquire things along the way, your needs, wants, and desires will change.
Clarity Creates the Filter
This is the “leading with intention” part of leading yourself. Once you’ve articulated what you want to create in your life – at least for this next season – you can move forward with more confidence you’ll actually get to experience it.
“Without vision, the people perish…” This verse from the bible can be interpreted in many ways. For the sake of today’s thoughts, the idea is that with no clear vision for what you want your life to be like, any life will do. No vision allows you to just get up each day and do whatever, repeating those actions and behaviors day after day after day, marking time but not really living. Essentially, you are the walking dead, simply passing the time until you die, and it’s official!
Once you’ve crafted your life vision, you can set about the work of crafting a strategy and action steps to bring it into reality. It’s helpful and powerful to remind yourself of it every day. You may choose to create a vision board with images that spark your thinking, passion, enthusiasm, and energy. Or maybe the words on paper are powerful enough for you.
To really reinforce it and keep your engine stoked, say it out loud every day. Read the words or tell the story from your selected images and allow yourself to be fully in the moment and emotion of how it will feel when you truly are living your dream life and doing your best work.
And remember: Any strategic plan you develop, any decision you make, any crossroads you reach, and any opportunity that presents itself should all be measured against your vision. If whatever comes up will support you in achieving your vision, the answer is “Yes!” If it doesn’t, no matter how cool, interesting, or compelling it might be, the answer is “No!”
Leading Yourself – The Cliff Notes
Regardless of your position, title, responsibility, or authority, at the very foundation of your life is the right and the need to lead yourself. How you do that is entirely up to you. And while others will have the opportunity to influence what happens to you – if you allow them that influence – the choices are really yours to make.
You can’t live the life of your dreams, have the ‘dream job,’ or fully live into any other area of your life if you can’t articulate what those dreams are. This is why having a vision for your life is so important.
I heard someone once say that if you don’t have a vision for your life, other people will plug you into the gaps in their dream wherever they can make you fit… and you’ll spend your life building someone else’s dream. It’s true. Far too many people – and many of them are well-meaning and may even be your loved ones – have ideas about who you should be and what you should be doing with your life.
If you’re not careful and don’t chooseto step up and lead yourself, they’ll have their way. Likely, at some point, you’ll come to some new level of awareness where you snap out of it and think, “This isn’t what I wanted for my life. How did I get here?”You get to that dissatisfied place by going through your life on auto-pilot.
I’m on a mission to awaken you so that’s not your experience.
Wake Up!
Do the Vision Exercise… and do it again, and again, and again!
Then come back and tell me what you’ve discovered.
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Copyright 2019 Laura Prisc, Conscious Leadership Partners www.consciousleadershippartners.com
Laura Prisc is The Most Trusted Authority on Conscious Leadership; she is a certified Gallup Strengths Coach, certified People Acuity Coach, Gallup-Trained Builder Profile Coach, and a member of the John Maxwell Team.
