CHAPTER 4

Building a Personal Vision and Strategy

Introduction—Challenging Popular Assumptions

This chapter will hopefully help you to understand how to create the vision of your development process. During the first three chapters, we have focused on understanding ourselves and what personal development means. From now on, the core topics will deal with how to plan our way forward.

Firstly, we need to challenge two generally accepted assumptions. The first one is the belief that we can plan our long-term success goal—key performance indicators in business jargon. We cannot predict the results of our choices. “Success happens, the same as happiness” (Frankl 2017). This is one of the ideas that Viktor Frankl defends during his acclaimed Man’s Search for Meaning. One of the most common mistakes is fixation with certain self-imposed and ambitious goals—sky is the limit! The reality is that meaningful goals depend on too many factors that we cannot control. Success is not a logical and linear aim; it is a largely unpredictable byproduct of a chiefly uncertain development process.

The second generally accepted assumption is the dogma of maximizing the choices. It is probably the result of a wrong understanding of what is freedom. Freedom is about choosing, adhering the will to a choice, but not about having the possibility of choosing. This would be the hall of freedom, but it is not real freedom. We used to think that the more possibilities we have, the freer we are. It is a confusion between being independent in resources and using our own personal freedom to decide. Many people have plenty of resources but avoid constantly decisions for self-imposed reasons. Even more, there are people that notwithstanding the scarcity of resources, they afford risky decisions (see how many entrepreneurs started with underprivileged backgrounds). Maximizing choices does not guarantee our capacity to decide, our capacity for freedom, though in certain circumstances, it can help. This confusion has several consequences:

1. Regret and anticipated regret: Due to the very specific, ambitious and, as said before, unrealistic goals we set.

2. Enormous pressure in reducing opportunity costs: As we want to be sure we are not missing out in our objective of maximizing the result of our choices.

3. Escalation of expectations: Our constant aspiration of maximizing our choices makes very difficult our satisfaction—to be satisfied with whatever achievements we have accomplished.

4. Self-blame attached to all choices: The constant dissatisfaction produces a vicious circle—unrealistic goals or regret or self-blame.

At the end of the day, many times we get into a chronical frustration. Against this point of view, there is a much healthier way of understanding success, freedom, and life. V. Frankl would say:

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it…Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it (Frankl 2017).

The Importance of Finding a Meaning

We are much more than our achievements. Our life has a value that transcends what we can do and what we have. This is obvious and the value or motivation scales of Maslow and Barrett clearly reflect that. The different surveys on happiness prove again and again that human motivation is extremely complex. A very simple scheme (see figure 4.1) might help to understand the big picture:

image

Figure 4.1 The thinking process

Source: The authors

Whatever we do, it helps us to have resources, which eventually assist us on becoming who we want. Other people use a similar scheme with three questions: what (instead of do), how (instead of have), why (instead of be).

This sort of scheme helps us to put in order our thinking process at the time of planning. Creating a vision on our development process starts with the answer to the question why or who do we want to become.

A vision that implies a decision on who we want to be makes it easy to instill the passion toward this vision. This vision should also include the different elements of our life: family, career, friends, community, hobbies, health, and relationships, oneself. Moreover, what matters most is to find a certain balance between them all.

Once we build a vision of ourselves, we will have a sort of benchmark for career–life choices. As we will see later in the workbook, this vision could change and more certainly will change. So, what is the sense of a vision then? It gives us a long-term logic that allows us to keep certain coherence and, therefore, a reasonable level of focus.

Most of the time managers focus their career plans on what they want to have in a certain period of time (positions wealth or health or status). Further, most of the time they create plans (do) to achieve those goals (career training, choices, etc.). The problem of focusing on these two questions makes managers career plans very risky. The fundamental reason is that the outcomes of our actions hardly depend only on our actions. Setting up only these goals without transcendental meaning (mission) leaves the manager on a very fragile career path.

Dilemma of Freedom of Choice

Imagine a fish is in a fishbowl. Is the fish actually free?

Given the lack of ability of the fish to live outside the water, it is quite obvious that it is not independent from the fishbowl. The issue here is whether pure independence is possible in general and whether absolute freedom exists at all. It is important for managers to understand that all of us are fish in fishbowls (systems, structures, rules, etc.), meaning that we have limitations toward our choices. This thought immediately gives us a reality check that can push us to understand that freedom of choice is always on the one hand limited and, on the other, deeper that apparently looks like.

We introduce with this example, the main criteria to design our personal vision: the life stakeholders’ net. In the same way that the fish needs to take into account her physiological needs in order to choose staying in the water, all of us need to understand the relevance of linking our goals and needs with the goals and needs of all stakeholders of our lives and careers. An individualistic approach to career–life choices does not work because it is unrealistic.

Vision Building—An Exercise

We offer a template for preparing your vision. Many other similar exercises are available on the net, though we created a way that fully matches our previous discussion on the stakeholders’ net. Take a 5- to 10-year perspective.

Use these questions as a starting point for your envisioning process. It may be helpful to close your eyes after reading each section to let the answers come to you.

Questions to consider

How I Want to Look Like

Imagine yourself living to your full potential. How do you feel about yourself? What are you doing? How are you living? What other people think about yourself? Which sort of achievement distinguishes you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Relationships and Friendships

Think of your closest relationships. Who is with you? Who are your dearest friends and colleagues? What do you offer the other people? What do you do with your friends? What do your friends give to you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family

Bring your family into your vision. Who are they? What do you do with them? How is your relationship with them? Do you see children in your house? What brings you joy in the family routine?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work Life

Where are you in life? How is the organization where you are working? What is the quality of your day-to-day working life? How have you demonstrated your values? What have you achieved? What rewards are available to you? What are your main achievements?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Health

How do you feel? Include emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual health in your vision. Which activities can help you to stay at the health level you wish?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other Activities

Which dreams do you want to fulfill? How will your traveling routine, social life, and hobbies look like? What aspirations would you like to pursue? What do these activities give you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your Vision of Yourself

After re-reading at least twice the previous answers, write a short paragraph of the vision you have for yourself. This vision should look like a creative and unifying summary of your previous answers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Validity of a Vision: Dilemmas of Success

Once the vision is ready, probably, the question is for how long it will be valid. It is a fair question, given the continuous changes we experience. The value of a vision is not so much about the precision of the goals we have set, as the contribution of the vision to give us a framework for thinking about our career decisions.

During the next chapters, we will work on defining our vision more specifically. The vision you have just written is not more than a summary of what you care mostly—your big why’s! We will go from this general why to the more specific what and how. It is important you keep in mind that there are four current cultural dilemmas that will challenge your vision constantly:

1. The meaning of money for you: This is a very personal question, but we are experiencing a growing interest toward the purpose of our work and a diminishing interest on the financial gains of our work.

2. The desire toward autonomy: As the level of general education and a respect for individual freedom in society have been increasing, people’s desire for autonomy has also increased. In this sense, your personal vision will be always under tension regarding the necessity to compromise with the stakeholders of your life and career.

3. A fast-moving market economy: The lifecycle of companies, products, and professional careers have been substantially shortened partly due to technological advancement. This means that any long-term thinking requires the ability to create different scenarios in response to changes in technology. We must continuously think about how we can be ahead of the curve.

4. Stress in pragmatism: We live in a culture where functionality and efficiency are more important than ideals and inspiration. That does not help in the development and implementation of an inspiring vision. We are pushed too much into creating effective plans; however, an inspiring vision needs ideals that can stimulate different and difficult paths of action.

Conclusion—The Power of a Personal Vision

On September 18, 2007, Carnegie Mellon, professor and alumnus Randy Pausch, delivered a one-of-a-kind last lecture that made the world stop and pay attention. It became an Internet sensation viewed by millions, an international media story, and a bestselling book that has been published in more than 35 languages (Carnegie Mellon University n.d.). Randy Pausch clearly points out the most important things in life and how his dreams (aka vision) impacted his professional and life decisions and success. Yes, a vision is a very powerful tool, and Mr. Pausch proved it in his acclaimed lecture.

In this chapter, we have explained the relevance of a vision for personal and career development and how to design it. Friedrich Nietzsche would say: “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” (Nietzsche 1974). A vision energizes because it articulates clearly our main motivations and gives us a broad perspective in terms of our career goals and ambitions. This broad perspective allows us to have less fragile goals as we do not focus only on very specific achievements that we can hardly completely control.

In a nutshell, a vision gives us a sense of transcendence to our specific plans and helps us focus on our strengths rather than our weaknesses. This is the basis of what we call today positive psychology, which has proven to be very effective in motivating people and companies on overcoming challenges. Finally, a vision makes us focus our attention toward the future rather than in a past that no longer exists.

Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics would distinguish between filling and flourishing. His point was that a truly meaningful life is not so much the one where all needs are satisfied, but rather the life where our own personality has been developed to the full. That is what a vision allows to keep in mind and the reason for its power. Seligman goes even further, and he would say that a meaningful life is one where we use “signature strengths and virtues in the service of something much larger than you are” (Seligman 2017). A vision then would not be only about who we want to become, but which impact we want to leave in the society around us. And, this is a matter of the next chapter—making the vision more complete, holistic, specific, and driven toward the common good of the society around us.

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