Future Vision of Your Life is like Gazing Out to Sea
Future vision–a vivid picture in your head of where you want to be in five years is critical to your career. If you don’t visualize where you want to be or whom you want to become, your future drifts like the wind.
Likewise, if you take the time to think about the person you’d like to be…if your future vision is stamped with your personal values…if you know where you’re going and why, getting there will take half the work.
I had a chance to interview Herman Heunis, who runs MXit, a mobile service in South Africa. In the podcast, Heunis clearly explained his vision of MXit’s future.
So few job seekers or career searchers do this. Instead of taking a few days–even a week–to think about the future of their lives, many quickly re-write their resumes and madly start looking for a job. In our current climate, this can lead to personal and professional disaster.
Do you feel lost in the haze of the present recession? Have you decided to take any job that comes along or plow ahead trying to find work in your present career? Then you need a vision statement.
Companies of all sizes have vision statements, sometimes part of their “mission statement.” Here’s Coca-Cola’s vision statement:
Our Vision
Our vision serves as the framework for our Roadmap and guides every aspect of our business by describing what we need to accomplish in order to continue achieving sustainable, quality growth.
- People: Be a great place to work where people are inspired to be the best they can be.
- Portfolio: Bring to the world a portfolio of quality beverage brands that anticipate and satisfy people’s desires and needs.
- Partners: Nurture a winning network of customers and suppliers, together we create mutual, enduring value.
- Planet: Be a responsible citizen that makes a difference by helping build and support sustainable communities.
- Profit: Maximize long-term return to shareowners while being mindful of our overall responsibilities.
- Productivity: Be a highly effective, lean and fast-moving organization.
And Coca-Cola makes soft drinks! But you as an individual can create a half-dozen future vision statements just like Coke. In fact, inserting the word “I” in the statements above or borrowing a few words, you would have a vision statement that aligns with Coke’s.
- “I want to bring to the world quality ____.”
- “I want to be a responsible citizen that makes a difference…”
It’s not easy but writing down five or ten vision statements will help you clarify your values and how you can contribute to an organization’s growth. This step will help you as you craft your specific career search strategies yet to come. Here is another example of writing down your own personal future vision.
I’m a BIG fan of the TV series “Lost?” If you’ve watched the show, you know it’s kind of a sci-fi futuristic series about stranded people lost on an Island after their plane crashes.
Hurley, a portly young guy, soon realizes that stress, lack of food and monotony wasn’t good. No one was “having fun.” So he created a golf course–yes, a golf course–near the island’s shore, grabbed some golf clubs found on the crashed plane and encouraged everyone to de-stress for a while.
Some viewers might have found this ludicrous, but Hurley was one of the few survivors who realized that those who were lost on the island had no future vision of their world. Things seemed hopeless. No use planning your future when you’re thousands of miles from civilization without hope of rescue.
I wrote a personal blog post about it called “Hurley Creates Golf Courses and Hope on Lost Islands.” The golf course became a future vision of better times, hope, a future, time to spend with friends.
That’s what you’re seeking to do at the beginning of your career or job search. Take time to create a vision mission statement that answers two questions:
- Whom do I want to become in five years? The answer is not “I want to become a brain surgeon” or “I want to earn $200,000 and live on a yacht in Fort Lauderdale.” As a person, whom do you want to become? In your future world, what individual changes would you like to see in how you work with people or grow personally? If you could alter one thing in your life that would make you happier, what is it?
- What can I offer my family, my community, my company in return for personal happiness? I’m assuming you want to be happy. It’s the old law of “give and you shall receive” or the ricochet effect–”what goes out comes back.” You only reach personal happiness if you have “vision values.” Think seriously about this one, because your values are a major component of your vision–just like Coca-Cola’s.
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