Effective strategies for creating and achieving your career vision!

I remember years ago dreaming about working from home in an inviting, sunny office, spending much of my time being creative as I helped people to achieve their career goals. It was a new year, and I took the advice I’d heard from many coaches and wrote down my future desires. What I was doing at that time was creating a career vision. And it turns out that just a few years later, that vision became a reality!

Today I want to speak with you about effective strategies for creating and achieving your career vision. In this blog and the next 2 upcoming, I’ll help you…

1. Expand your awareness and understand of what a career vision is.
2. Articulate desired components of your career vision. You’ll want to jot some things down, so have a paper and pen handy.
3. Equip you with specific action steps to take to make your vision more of a part of your career world.

Also, there’s a surprise tip that I’m going to share with you that can make a huge difference in your success.

So let’s dive in! What is exactly is a vision? I love this description: “A vision is a picture of the future that produces passion.” So, we’re all where we are right now, whatever that might be for you, and for most people it is true that they want to keep progressing. That’s just part of human nature. In the ideal situation, we have some goals ahead of us that are inspiring that produce some passion for us.

A vision is made up of a number of inspiring components, a few of which coach John Graham does a good job of articulating:

• A means to pull in ideas, people, and other resources.
• It creates energy to make change happen and inspires individuals and organizations to commit and persist to give their best…a way to pull together a number of energy sources to accomplish something truly meaningful for you.
• It’s a practical guide to break down plans into action items, not just a pie-in-the-sky ideas.
• A way to keep focused. I love this because as we dive into whatever big projects we might be taking on, it’s easy sometimes to lose sight of the bigger picture, what we’re ideally working toward. A vision is something you can always go back to and ask yourself, “Am I on track here? Is this falling within the parameters of what I wanted to accomplish?”

My personal definition of a vision is that it gives you a bird’s-eye view of potential paths plus the start of a map for how to get there. Think of it like a pirate’s map–a treasure map—with a number of interesting sites with paths that go here and there. With a vision, you have an idea of roughly where you want to go, but there could be different ways to arrive at the destination.

In my next blog, I’ll help you articulate your vision. Tune in then!