Most individuals have an easier time thinking about what the next month or year might be like for them. It gets a bit more difficult when peering into a future that could be three, five, or ten years from now. For some people, it’s hard to do this since we are asking our minds to picture a state of life that’s quite intangible in the present time. However, just as a company or organization develop their vision, an individual is no less in need of knowing what their future is expected to look like. This is the focus of the chapter Personal Vision in the book Time To Get Real!

First let’s define what we mean by a personal vision. Wouldn’t it be great if you could peer through the window of the future and see exactly the way things will be for you 3 or 5 or 10 years from now? It would be great but you can’t do it. The best an individual can do is to narratively depict that future as they want to see it with as much detail as possible so that they can almost feel as if they will one day inhabit that vision. So, a personal vision describes what your tomorrow will look like. The vision itself has great value since it is a magnet pulling you toward your future. In addition, a vision will have multiple uses in the present.

Not only is a personal vision a tool to be deployed for decision making, but it is also aspirational, motivational, and becomes a driving force when reviewed on a periodic basis. A vision can be shared with others in order to demonstrate that one has thought about and made decisions about where they want to take their life. This is especially helpful when seeking mentoring from trusted individuals. Although it may not be possible to achieve 100% of an individual’s personal vision, even the achievement of 70, 80, or 90% of their vision can be extremely satisfying. It may not be possible to get everything one wants. However, without a vision, and without trying to attain it, it definitely won’t be possible to get what one wants.

It may help to think in a more vivid fashion about your future. So, let’s say that your life to date is represented as a car driving on a specific road. That road falls behind you. In front of you is the road that you’re going to be traveling in the future. It includes all the choices and decisions you will make as you drive your life forward. When you deploy your life and career plan, it becomes the engine to drive you down that road. Farther in the distance there’s a hill that turns into a mountain and at the top of the mountain is your personal vision. That is what things will look like for you when you arrive.

You may be a young person early in your career and without a lot of experience. Therefore you may choose to look out only three or four years into the future. So your arrival destination for your life and career plan would be three or four years from now. Of course, when you arrive at that destination, you will need to develop a new life and career plan by revising your current plan and developing a new vision. If you’re a person in mid-career, you may want to use your life experience to look out a little further, maybe five or six years, thereby basing your personal vision on how things might look at that point in your life. A person could be very near retirement and not have thought very much about planning for the future. Instead, this individual should focus their vision on their last year of work followed by their first two years of retirement in order to create a bridge to their new way of life. That new life might include some or no paid work, volunteerism, free leisure time, consulting, and travel.

The road that you are going to travel to your personal vision may not always be straight. It may have side streets down which you are forced to venture. For example, you’re squarely on the road toward your vision and you suddenly lose your job. You may have to take a new position in the short term that takes you off your main path. It may not be the right “next job” for your personal vision. Or illness rather than job loss derails you. No matter what occurs, keep trying to find your way back to your main path. The important thing to keep in mind is that if you know where the road is leading, and recognize which events happening in your life will slow you down or move you off your road, you should be able to find your way back. If not, it’s then time to think about developing a new personal vision based upon the changes that have taken place in your life.

After having worked through the chapters in the book Time To Get Real!, you will know where you are in your life and career, and by building your personal vision you will know where you want to end up at a specific point in time. The important thing is to determine how you are going to get there. You’re going to get there by having a strong life and career plan and activating it. The actions in the plan will lead to the achievement of your interim goals, which power you to the next stop along the road to your vision. Check all of this out in our book, Time To Get Real!, which guides you through the Life and Career Planning Model©.

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