January is always seen as a good time for goal setting, somehow the change of year brings about a chance to reset and refocus. I work with people in a variety of ways to help them with visioning and goal setting, my belief is one size doesn’t fit all. Some people like visuals whilst others like lists, others enjoy simply to talk it through. Whatever the vehicle, it’s important to create a vision for the future, and to continually revisit it, not just in January – on a regular basis. 

What is visioning?

As a leader of a team, getting clear on your own vision for yourself and building your self-awareness are the first steps to being able to set the vision for your company, function and individuals within it. Visioning is about stating, in clear terms, what success looks like for you. And of course the word success means different things for different people. In this blog we are focusing on personal visioning – I will discuss company and team visioning in a future blog.

It often entails being curious about:

• what you would like to achieve in the coming year and beyond
• who you are when you are at your best 
• what interests you and brings you joy 
• what work energises and excites you
• what hobbies, interests and extracurricular study or volunteering etc could be a passion
• what relationships matter, and dare I say it, working towards eliminating those that don’t

I wanted to share my vision board with you, see below as an example of what one could look like.

What gets in the way of visioning being successful?

• Treating it as a one-time only January event and not reviewing it – we are continually changing and situations also bring about change too.
• Going it alone – often we need support from a coach or other professionals to truly ensure the visioning process has been clearly articulated.
• Keeping it in our heads – there is something about saying it to someone else, writing it down or having a visual that keeps it alive.
• Time Poor – we end up being so busy doing the doing that we forget why we are doing what we are doing! 

Benefits of visioning

• You can use your vision to assess potential opportunities – whether that is work or home opportunities. It almost becomes your filtering process that you can put anything in your life through to see if it is going to fit for you.
• We become choosier about what we do in life and who we spend time with therefore increasing satisfaction levels.
• We are more content and therefore this spreads to those around us.
• We role model, taking responsibility for our own vision, and people around us are likely to want to do the same – partners and direct reports for example.
• We are at our best more of the time as we are filtering our lives through a lens that we have decided on, not someone else.

Ways to vision – using coaching sessions 

• You will spend time increasing your self-awareness, sometimes we will use a personality profiling tool such as MBTI, Hogan or Strengthscope to accelerate your awareness. 
• Once you have the awareness of what makes you tick we will start the visioning process, where you will articulate what you want from life over the coming year and beyond.
• We will use a range of tools, from talking it through to using words that resonate for you, to drawing pictures, to writing it down to finding pictures and creating a vision board. We will work out together what works best for you to have a reminder of your vision.
• We will notice blockers to success, what gets in the way and discuss strategies for dealing with these.
• We will hold you to account in taking action and review and tweak the vision on a continuous basis.
• We will understand your measures of success and celebrate these.

Working with an executive coach can really help to implement your own personalised vision, using self-awareness at the core. I’d love to hear what you think about visioning and goal setting, and what works for you? 

We work with lots of different leaders looking to be at their best and one of the ways is through developing a personal vision of success. Visit our website to understand more about our executive coaching programmes.

If you wish to work on this, or have any questions for me, please get in touch for a no obligation initial consultation.