What if you don’t know what you really want?

 

Early in my career, I didn’t fully appreciate the power of having a vision for my work and life – and I think a lot of people tend to do what I did. They drift from job to job and go from one opportunity/ recognition/ highly visible project /mandate to the next, taking what life gives them and making the best of it.

When you ask them what they REALLY WANT, they’ll say, “I don’t know. Never really thought about it.”

Or, they may feel they don’t have the luxury of tuning into their vision because they think they just have to do work. Some may feel it hurts too much to visualize that beautiful version of their future because failing to achieve it would be more painful than never visualizing it at all. They don’t allow themselves to go there in fear it would set themselves up for disappointment.

I’ve come to realize that the real disappointment is depriving yourself the joy of embodying your true potential. And in the words of George Eliot, “It is never too late to be what you could have been.”

But how do you go about finding a vision that is true to you? 

Vision is something that comes from the inside out. Though others may try to impose a vision upon you, it doesn’t become real for you until it strikes a chord from within you. If you’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince yourself to do something that isn’t resonant for you, you may be trying to go at it from the outside in.

So, you need to interrupt that pattern and spend some time tuning into your own desires. Here are three suggestions to help you establish that connection:

• Consider what you find yourself drawn to, enjoying, or dreaming about? What do you want? And what will that give you?
• If it’s easier to think about what you don’t want, you can start there and contemplate what the opposite of that (what you want in its place) would look like.
• Reflect on what your most recent experiences could be preparing you for. Perhaps the hardships you’ve endured have provided insight into what you could do to help others find their way through tough times or to create what you most want to be a part of.

Tuning into your vision doesn’t mean you need to recreate everything in your life or quit your job. On the contrary, it will give you the clarity you need to make the most of your current environment and take action that will bring you more of what you want (and less of what you don’t).

It’ll bring the energy and enthusiasm necessary to move from being a passive participant in your own life to being the hero of your own story – and the kind of leader that helps others do the same.

For more on creating your vision and taking steps to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be, download my special report, “Why Real Leaders Don’t Set Goals (and what they do instead)”.