Vision, Purpose and Legacy

Your personal vision will change in the journey to your future

To paraphrase Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Our experience suggests this is a powerful truth when it comes to the self: without clear pictures of who you are and who you want to be as a leader, it is difficult to see the right path to follow from the former to the latter.

We have developed an iterative approach to helping guide this “personal visioning” journey. We believe it to be the most important part of the road map to one’s better leadership future. It is a multi-step, personal evolution that is easy enough to follow conceptually, yet requires enough discipline to last a lifetime.

People with clear personal visions should be able to describe any/all aspect of their ideal personal life and work life … to any audience, at a moment’s notice, within whatever time is available. This suggest a lot of practice in delivery! Here are the suggested steps of this key process:

Step 1: Write out your answers to these 3 questions, using 5-7 year timeline:

What am I doing? The focus here should primarily be on your professional work life: I am leading a large and diverse team on a highly-complex project. Executives trust me to make decisions and solve problems and be the face of my company to clients and to the industry.

Where am I and who am I with? Both sides of your life here: include qualitative references to your family, friends and key community members, as well as a boss, colleagues and direct reports. Perhaps you will want to describe a geographic location, a level in your company hierarchy? I am a branch manager. I am working with people who are passionate, hard-working and respectful. My leadership to my family and my project teams is defined by my integrity (doing what I said I would do), by my high expectations and by my emotional intelligence.

What am I known for? Might refer to a set of core personal values, the legacy you want to build, your personal purpose or the role modelling you want to be associated with. I am the best spouse, parent and mentor I can possibly be. My purpose in life is to help others learn what I have learned and then use that knowledge to achieve their life dreams. Life is not about me, it is about others.

Write yours out. The examples above may sound a bit “off the shelf”, as my friend Fred says, but I actually pulled them from the personal visions of ‘real’ people. Yours should be as descriptive as possible, so others can literally picture you in the act of being the best ‘you’ you can be. You can certainly make them more personal, as Fred suggests, making yourself vulnerable with statements like: “A project this complex, with a staff this large and diverse is going to be a scary challenge for me, I will have anxieties to manage”, but as James Clear in his advice from his book Atomic Habits says, “To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself” , so write it as if you are doing it now … it’s your vision!

And please write it in the active voice, as if you are doing it now … which is the point, isn’t it? Much more compelling to say this is who you believe you are, as opposed to this is who you will be one day.

Show it a loved one, a trusted colleague. Get some feedback. Change it up. Take every opportunity to tell it (or even just parts of it) to others, Gauge the impact … are you believable? Are you behaving in concert with your vision?

Your legacy isn’t something that is conferred upon you when you retire. It is building now, as you say and do your ‘self’.

Step 2: Start with the work you did in Step 1: highlight the personal values you referred to. Select the strongest one and prepare a 1-2 minute story on how/why/when that value became a character driver for you.

Tell it whenever you get a chance to fit it naturally into a conversation with another person or a small group. Get feedback. Try making it part of a presentation you have to make to a larger audience. Gauge your impact … are you believable? Is this truly the ‘always you’?

Prepare and deliver a second story on another strong personal value/character driver. Tell that one and get feedback. Repeat.

Repeat with a third story …

Step 3: Return to Step 1 and rewrite your personal vision into a short paragraph. Incorporate one of your Step 2 stories. Add word pictures so your audiences can literally see you interacting with others in your vision. E.g., “I am the face of my family and my company”, “I show respect by listening and by asking questions”, “I am excited to get to my challenging work everyday” , “I am surrounded by passionate, hard-working, fast-moving people” ”People trust that we will do what we said we would do, you can see it in their eyes. We learned that lesson in the school of hard knocks and we will never forget it”.

Tell it to others, Get feedback on you verbals and non-verbals. Repeat. Practice. Put parts of it into your everyday conversations. Gauge the impact.

Step 4: Repeat Step 3, this time in a full-blown metaphor. “Picture me as the face of my family and my company. My eyes see the future and understand how we will all need to adapt to meet it. My ears are attuned to the present so I can hear what is important to my spouse, my children and my co-workers, and why it is important to them. My voice is strong, I use it tell others what I believe in. My brain actively tells me that what I do, every day, is measured by what I have learned.”

Share the metaphor often. Get feedback. Adjust. Repeat.

Step 5: Prepare a succinct 1-3 phrase statement of personal purpose on why you exist. Use word pictures, metaphors. “I am a power source. It is my purpose to energize the leadership required for personal and organizational change. The targets of my power are also the sources of my energy”. “I am a mountain guide. It is my personal purpose to help others summit.” “I am a beacon to others, helping them navigate through un charted waters”, “I am a bridge between the excitement and drive of youth and the knowledge and wisdom of experience.”

You get the idea. Give it a try. Vocalize. Get feedback. Adjust.

Step 6: Draw your personal purpose. You may well be surprised by what you learn. For example, the “power source” referred to above didn’t realize his targets were also his sources of power until he drew it out.

When you like what you’ve drawn, post it somewhere obvious as a constant reminder to yourself of why you are on this planet.

Step 7: Never stop thinking about who you are and why you are here. It is most likely you will still be figuring it out when it is time to go … but your life will have been as clear as bell sounding in a crisp country morning.