What is Vision?
This post is about How to Formulate a vision. I will clarify the meaning of this important function of your conscious mind. Vision is your imagination to experiment with an idea toward a potential future state for a situation, place, or thing. Your vision is about being led by an idea, not wishful thinking, which is a combination of ignorance (avoiding realities) and arrogance (delusions based on both ego and pride). The right vision creates a gravitational pull in your life to lead you up.
The first step in formulating a vision is to explore all of the possibilities for your idea from the view of what you believe are the results of the effort that you are willing to apply: probable, possible, likely, unlikely, or miraculous. These are the only 5 possible outcomes that motivate your effort. With clarity on the feeling and motivation you have, you can make a decision.
With different possibilities assigned by your confidence score, you can articulate a vision for your effort and expectations.
How to Formulate a Vision
For the sake of argument, consider the vision for a person recently released from prison. Depending on the character of that person and their emotional state, there are only a handful of actual possibilities to guide their behavior:
- Give up – Live on the charity of society at large without giving back
- Be the Same – Return to prison for yet another offense at some point
- Concede – Join the working world in whatever capacity is available
- Double down – Become a more sophisticated criminal and hope no re-capture
- Aim higher – Re-invent yourself into an entrepreneur or success story
Are there other possibilities besides these? Vision in this example enables our recently released citizens to contemplate their path and effort. A vision is not necessarily a positive outlook. If you have a negative outlook, the purpose of the vision is to alert you to this fact. A subconscious reaction can make you feel uneasy, uncomfortable, and wary of what you believe is an outcome. This can be due to a pattern established in your experience that bears similarities to the current situation.
The Opportunity
The opportunity in a situation for you is to create a vision and to fulfill that vision by challenging yourself to rise above the limitations of your past. You can do this with an augmented mentality. The opportunity in every challenge can be defined for you as a story. Within this story narrative, you have a choice on how to consciously act. There is a character arc for you in that situation. You can play one of several different roles to influence the outcome according to the vision you choose.
Once you have decided on the various possibilities and decided on your vision, effort needs to be planned and applied to make that vision reality. Communicating a vision as described can also be effective for consensus building. A Leader makes their decision-making process objective and clears the way for their team at the outset of work. Exercise the SELF-CARE process where you identify an opportunity and build your confidence by eliminating the fears that keep you down.