Career Bites #10: Be a Longterm Visionary

When my clients struggle to envision their long-term futures, it happens usually for one of two reasons.

The first I like to call Option Paralysis. The fact of the matter is, we live in truly amazing times. Never in the history of humanity have so many possibilities been immediately available to so many of us. The options force us to confront the fact that our potential is infinite and our possibilities are unlimited. It means we have to confront the reality of our freedom. We are free to choose EXACTLY what we want from the endless buffet of career options.

It is hard enough for humans to choose among 3 or 4 options, never mind from among an unknowable infinity of choices. And even understanding your values doesn’t help much because if you look at the things you care about and love, a still baffling array of jobs, roles, companies, and industries align. Add to that the fear of making a wrong choice, and you end up with a recipe for existential angst – an ongoing feeling of anxiety that you aren’t being all you could be and it’s entirely your fault.

The second reason people struggle to envision the long term is what I like to call Short Term Myopia. This means that your preferences are anchored to where you are now, and you can only imagine yourself one or two steps away from here. Maybe you’re an accountant, and you don’t mind working with numbers, but you find accounting boring. So you know you want to move away from accounting, but it can be hard to really separate yourself from the past and imagine a truly different future that fully inspires you. This, again, is just human nature. Our thoughts are consistently conditioned by what we see and know, and it can be hard to set them aside and create a new vision.

The solutions to both of these problems are the same when you are creating a long-term vision: ignore reality and just dream big. Here is one simple process – actually a powerful tool, a visualization process that can exert a profound impact on how you think – that will allow you to do think big:

• Find a time when you can have an uninterrupted hour alone.
• Sit in a quiet, comfortable place and relax.
• Meditate for a few minutes if you know how to do so. If not, just sit for 10 minutes and listen to the sound of your own breathing. Notice all the other sounds in the room. Just observe quietly.
• Then ask yourself: if I could do anything with my life, what would I do?
• Follow your mind as it wanders, notice that some pictures will be very vivid and specific, others will be vague and foggy. Some will have very strong feelings attached and give you a rush of energy.
• As you notice things you want to remember, write them down. Don’t censor yourself, just write down the things that occur to you to write down. Pay particular attention to the ones that give you energy and feel uplifting.
• Then go back to imagining.
• Repeat until an hour is up or you are out of ideas.

What you do with your notes is up to you. You could revisit them immediately and try to shape them into a concrete picture of your future. You could look at them later and see what new ideas they inspire. You could repeat this exercise as a visualization technique on a weekly or monthly basis and see what emerges as your path to fulfilling your dreams.

Think of your long-term vision as the North Star to a sailor. He’ll never reach it exactly, but it will always tell him if he is on the right path. The purpose of a long-term vision – having ultimate goals – is to inspire you and to help you make good choices in the present. No matter how specific your vision is, it will likely manifest differently from how you imagine it – very likely in a way that surpasses what you thought was possible when you dreamed it up.

So avoid the temptation to turn your long-term vision into a concrete goal and follow a detailed plan to achieve it. Instead, just hold it in front of you as the inspiring place you are headed and then make smart choices in the short-term to move you closer to it.