Vision

Vision is your connection to what you most want to create, or what is most deeply motivating to you. My neighbor Alan says, “it’s your North Star—it’s always there, even when it’s a little cloudy.”

Sometimes we tend to get lost in the details of our day-to-day work and lives, and lose track of the bigger picture. Making time to reflect on your vision in a regular coaching session can be one way to counterbalance this tendency. There are different levels of vision that we might consider. What’s your vision for this week or month? What’s your vision for your current role at work, what you hope to learn from it and where you want to go next? What’s your vision for the organization you’re founding and what you hope it can achieve, and how do your current activities connect with these goals?

The deepest levels of our vision get to the core of what we ultimately want our lives to be about. When we can get into greater alignment at this level, it can release a ton of energy.

Recently I discussed death with a client. Remembering our impending death is a powerful way to refocus on our deeper vision. It’s a common trope that this perspective will steer us towards valuing our families and relationships, perhaps above all else. The saying goes, “No one ever says on their deathbed, I wish I had worked more.” And there is a beauty to this clarification of priorities, cutting away what is ultimately empty.

But I think career goals can also emerge as meaningful and important in the light of death. If your work is really aligned with your deepest values, then maybe it really is how you want to spend some of your time in this life. Maybe your deepest values describe the kind of impact and contribution you want to make in the larger world. Or maybe your values are about how you want to grow as a person, or even what you find fun and enjoyable.

My friend Alene has found a wonderful alignment between her work and her values. Alene grew up with pet birds. One day she connected the fried chicken she was eating to the feeling of holding her beloved bird. She immediately realized that she no longer wanted to eat birds, and over time, animal rights activism became a big part of her life. She went to Harvard Law School and became a lawyer for animals, eventually founding her own legal nonprofit.

When she was clarifying the focus of her new nonprofit, she landed on protecting farmed chickens as her main goal. This fits well into an effective altruism perspective; the plight of farmed birds is considered a high-priority issue among those who think quantitatively about animal welfare, both because of the sheer number of animals and also in terms of their level of suffering in factory-farmed conditions. But for Alene, this particular mission is also connected to something deeper—her care for birds.

I’m often struck by the nuance and connection Alene sees in birds as we walk around town, birds I would have hardly noticed. She wants baby birds to be raised by their mothers, because she knows their mothers miss them. She wants all birds to have friends, because she knows how social birds are. When Alene sees a bird, she sees a person. Her vision is a world where no birds are mistreated. And her vision for herself at work is that she gets to bring the lawsuits she wants to bring; she gets to do the work she thinks is most important for helping birds.

I don’t think Alene will regret doing this work on her deathbed.

What’s the work you won’t regret doing? What are you deeply motivated to create? What vision is always there, shining behind the clouds? And how do you stay in touch with it?