Why You Should Define Your Vision Before Your Career Leap (Ep 24)
Do you know what you want out of life? It might seem like an impossibly big question, but defining your vision for the future is the best thing you can do for your life and career. Not only does it give you a map for your next move, but it also helps you identify the right opportunities and take them with confidence.
In this episode, I’m explaining why you should start your leap with a clear vision of your ideal career and life. I’m walking you through the process of defining your vision and sharing a bit about how this strategy has impacted my own career. Plus, I’m talking about the real, practical benefits of keeping your vision at the forefront of your mind and using it to make all your decisions.
In this episode, you’ll learn...
How I came to find this strategy for achieving big changes in my life [1:21]
What it means to define your “vision” for your career and life [3:33]
Why everyone knows what they want, even if they can’t put it into words yet [4:08]
How to overcome negative thoughts and mindset blocks as you craft your vision [5:46]
How the idea of a “dream job” can actually be harmful to your career search [7:08]
How to get started with your career vision today [8:38]
The practical benefits of visioning and how it can change your daily life [10:19]
How visioning helps you recognize and jump on new opportunities [12:19]
What having a vision has taught me in my own life and career [15:19]
How “big, hairy, audacious goals” can help you focus [16:10]
If you’re considering your own courageous career leap, be sure to tune into this episode.
Want to gain some clarity before your big career leap? Download my FREE Change Planner today
Links mentioned in this episode…
Listen to Episode 23 with Sika Stanton: https://www.lisahoashi.com/leaplikeme/episode23
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras
Download my FREE Change Planner: https://www.lisahoashi.com/change-planner
Transcript of Episode 24: Why You Should Define Your Vision Before Your Career Leap
And whenever I start to feel off track, because that happens, I can always return to my visioning practice and it guides me back again. A vision is your joyful expression of what's possible in life and work. It's your northstar, it's your roadmap, and your vision will guide you and keep you going through anything that the world throws at you.
Welcome to Leap Like Me If you can't shake the feeling that you're not on the right path. If you feel called to change things up but don't know how to begin, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Lisa Hoashi, and my specialty is coaching people at those crossroads moments in life when you feel called to take a new direction. Sometimes that means taking a leap. I want to share practical advice and inspiration for your leaps and how to keep going after your dreams in a challenging world. This season, we're talking all about career leaps. Come along for the conversation.
Hello, everyone. I'm really excited about today's episode. It is about something absolutely central to both my life and my coaching. Let me start by sharing this. I've always been someone who had lots of big ideas for her life. Around age 12, as I found middle school and then high school stifling, I began craving more freedom and adventure. I started to dream about my adult life and all the things I do. Then when I actually became an adult, I read all my new responsibilities. I found it really hard to actually make my dreams a reality. And looking back, I see this as the essential struggle of my twenties. So when I hired my first life coach shortly after I turned 30 and had a turning 30 crisis, and I learned from her that there were some practical and totally doable strategies for making real what I most wanted for my career and life. It blew my mind. I wondered, why didn't everyone know about this? I saw how revolutionary these ideas could be for people and all life stages and all walks of life. And it's a big reason why I'm a coach today, and it's what I'm talking about in today's episode. If you want in the next year to make some big, exciting strides to get closer to your dreams for your life and your work, the place to start is with your vision.
Today, I want to talk about how important it is to have a vision for your career and really for your life overall. We're going to cover some definitions. What I mean by vision, how you get clear on your vision, how you use it, and what you can do if you feel blocked when you try to envision your ideal life and career. If you're struggling with a work situation that is far from ideal, like it couldn't be further from it. Or if you struggle even to imagine what your perfect job would be, you've got to listen to this episode. Especially if you'd like to change that. Let's start by talking about what I mean by vision. When I began working with any client about their work goals, I asked them about their vision for their career. It's your overarching or expansive picture of what it is you want. What's your perfect job? What's your ideal work situation? And how does your work support your perfect life? Now, sometimes when I ask people, What do you want? They draw a blank. They give me a look. Or even confess. I don't know what I want. After my years of working with people around this question, I now know never to believe them when they say, I don't know what I want. Everyone knows what they want. Everyone has preferences, likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams, things they enjoy and want more. Sometimes people don't know what they want because they just haven't spent enough time and attention on the question. Often, though, hard things in life difficulties or old stories or beliefs can stand in the way of you accessing what you want. Maybe you don't believe it's possible. Maybe you worry about other people and what they might think. Maybe deep down, you're not sure if you're worthy of the things you really want. Or maybe you've tried, but you've had struggles and are feeling kind of discouraged. Here's a recent example of this. We are all living through a pandemic. This has been a trauma and there have been many losses, including many of our hopes and dreams.
As recently as six months ago. I had a moment when my own business coach asked me about my big dreams for the year and I found myself at a loss. So much of what I had planned for me and my business had been overturned by the pandemic. I felt shut down inside and a few days later I was on the phone with a friend saying Half joking and half not. She wants me to write down my dreams, but my dreams are dead. If you also feel inner resistance at the thought of daydreaming about your ideal work life vision for the next year or two. Here's my advice, and this is what I personally did a few months ago. Be gentle with yourself. Show yourself extra self-compassion for what you might have gone through. That makes us difficult. Be patient and persistent. Write down in bits and pieces what you do know about what you want and don't want and keep coming back to it and adding to it. Remember that it is a tool. The more clear you can get about what you want, the more likely it is. You'll get it.
By the way, you might think that writing down your vision sounds a lot like regular goal setting, and maybe you already set goals for yourself. Here's how I differentiate between having a vision and goal setting. Again, your vision is the overarching picture of how you like things to be in a perfect world. Your goals come out of that. Once my clients have started clarifying their vision for their career, for example, then our next step is to ask which part of the should we tackle first? That's when their goals become clear. A quick clarification. The other day, a fellow career coach who I follow on Instagram put up a provocative post saying she does not believe in dream jobs. I'm curious about you. Do you get an allergic reaction to the idea of everyone having a dream job? In many ways, I totally agree with this career coach. There was a time when I landed what I thought was my dream job and it went totally sideways, actually harming me due to many elements that were totally out of my control. So here's what I want to make clear when I talk about your dream job. Your perfect job. Your ideal job. I don't actually believe that exists. Just like I don't believe happily ever after exists in love, love, life, career. It's all a journey. So your vision will not help you arrive at some static place of perfection. Instead, it will help you take what you have and make improvements on it. Huge improvements, life changing improvements, deeply fulfilling improvements.
Along the way, You'll adjust your vision as things change, as you change, as you learn about yourself in the world. Your vision for your dream job is a tool and a practice that will help you refine and tweak what you have so it gets better. If you want to get started on your career vision today, here's how. Grab a pen and a piece of paper or open a fresh document on your computer and set a timer on your phone. It can be for just 10 minutes. Now, describe in as much detail and specificity as possible. Your perfect job. What are you doing? Where are you? Who are you working with? What kind of company or organization are you with? What's your salary and benefits? Get down everything that you know. Many people ask how far in the future might look. You can choose use. Whatever feels most useful for you right now are the most accessible. It can be 6 to 12 months from now. If that's helpful, it can be 1 to 2 years from now or even further sometime into the future.
Whatever you choose, it will have benefits for you. This might seem like a simplistic exercise, maybe even fanciful or silly. You might ask, What's the point? Recently, a client of mine, a director of operations in a fast paced start up, confessed that she didn't understand at first why I wanted to spend so much time on her vision for her perfect job, her perfect partner, and other aspects of her perfect life. Why spend so much time daydreaming up pie in the sky stuff? But now, as she's interviewing for a job that's remarkably similar to her description of her perfect job, and as she's dating a new guy who sometimes is somehow fits her description of her perfect partner, she gets it. When you see your vision starting to work for you, it can definitely feel magical. And some people totally embrace the woo woo elements of vision. It makes up a part of manifestation and using the laws of attraction, like when you put your intention out to the universe, it will be fulfilled and there might be something to that. I've definitely read a lot about the laws of attraction and use some of these ideas in my coaching. However, I'm an extremely practical person and so I want to share three of the more down to earth benefits that come from having a vision.
Number one, you know where to focus your time and energy when you are clear on your vision. You start even subconsciously making mega decisions that are going to take you closer to your dreams. A quick story. One of my clients, through our visioning exercises, realized that he wanted to quit his full time job, which had become incredibly stressful and do consulting instead, which would give him more flexibility, peace and time. He also realized that what he really enjoyed and wanted to do more of in the future was building things. He signed up for his first carpentry class at the local community college. Recently he wrote me. It's been several years and said that that one class then led him to more classes in design and fabrication, woodworking and more, until he realized that he had accidentally almost completed a new certificate program in digital fabrication. He wrote I can't tell you how excited I am about what's next for me. Thank you, Lisa, for helping me create a life where I feel happier, excited about new opportunities and above all, have agency. Incredible, right? Here's another benefit of having a vision. You are priming your brain to see opportunities when they pop up in front of you that you might have totally missed if you hadn't clarified what you wanted.
Let me give you an example of this. So I mentioned I hired my first coach shortly after turning 30, and this is when I had some really big questions about my career path. The first thing she had me do was make a list of the characteristics of my perfect job. And shortly after, I realized that my perfect job had been posted internally for months at the company I was working for. In fact, it had been literally dropping into my inbox every week via the internal newsletter. I'd written this job off for several reasons, which all seemed valid at the time, but now seems silly. If it hadn't been for the fact that I'd just articulated my perfect job with my coach. I never would have realized that I was about to miss a huge opportunity. I was almost too late to apply. A month later, I was in that job which surpassed anything I could have imagined for myself only a few months earlier in terms of salary, responsibilities, visibility, and straight up adventure. Finally, here's the third benefit of having a vision. Every time you sit down to daydream and state your vision, you are expanding your sense of what's possible. You are pushing up against your own self-imposed limitations or the limitations that people around you have for you. Think of your favorite rags to riches story, or a story of someone overcoming impossible odds to arrive at where they are today. What are they all have in common? They had a vision. Like my guest and friends, Stanton, who is in episode 23, whose vision is to join the ranks of the small group of black women cinematographers working in Hollywood. Or like many first generation immigrant families like my father's. They envisioned a better life for their children and worked so hard toward it. Like activists like Malala Yousafzai or Greta Thunberg. They're driven by a vision for social change. We all know the principles and power behind a vision, and I'm inviting you to use it in your own everyday life and career. Having a vision is like adding a new practice to your life. Your meditation practice is building your mindfulness muscle. Your exercise routine is building your actual muscles. And envisioning practice is building your muscle of imagining what is possible for yourself, for your relationships, and for your world around you.
Before we wrap up this episode today, I want to share a few more things I've learned about having a vision and what it can do for you. Since I started using this practice nearly 15 years ago, what I've learned is that having a vision can motivate you, energize you, and revive you when things get tough. It can offer you clues about what's most important to you. It shows you your values, your joy, and what you feel like is most meaningful in life. And a shared vision has a lot of power. It can unite you with others and strengthen your relationships. In a friendship, a partnership or marriage. It can hold you together in a team. It can inspire amazing results. And in a company or a cause, it can lead to incredible work and impact. For example, you might have heard of the concept of a BHAG, a big, hairy, audacious goal. If you read Built to Last Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry Porous, Jim Collins was the author. The super well-known book, Good to Great, which I also recommend and Built to Last. Though Collins and Porus show how companies who are able to rally their employees around a b hag were able to achieve incredible things. They write A true BHAG is clear and compelling and serves as a unifying focal point of effort, often creating immense team spirit. It has a clear finish line so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal. People like to shoot for finish lines. A BHAG engages people. It reaches out and grabs them in the gut. It is tangible, energizing and highly focused. People get it right away. It takes little or no explanation.
Two examples that they mentioned in their book are Ford Motor Company, who in the early 1900s pledged to democratize the automobile. Or how Sony decided in the early 1950s to become the company that most changes the worldwide image of Japanese products as being of poor quality. So here's one last question for you to keep in mind. What's your BHAG. Abbey had to be making a certain salary by a certain date or paying off all of your debt. It could be publishing a book or launching a business of your own. A friend of mine had a bag of doing a TED talk and she did it last year. How could you add a BHAG to your vision to keep you focused and inspired? Or how could you use it with your team at work or with other people in other parts of your life?
I hope you've gotten lots of useful ideas of how to access and clarify your own vision for your life and career. From today's episode, I hope you've gotten a sense of how powerful it can be, especially if you make it an ongoing practice. This one concept has exponentially increased my happiness, well-being and sense of fulfillment, and most of all, my sense that I'm on the right path for me. And whenever I start to feel off track, because that happens, I can always return to my visioning practice and it guides me back again. A vision is your joyful expression of what's possible in life and work. It's your Northstar. It's your roadmap. And your vision will guide you and keep you going through anything that the world throws at you.
Oh, thank you for listening to this episode of Leap Like Me. If you're enjoying the show and getting lots of value from it, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any new episodes and leave us a five star review. Also, do you know anyone who's considering a career change who might appreciate the ideas and inspiration from this show? Please let them know about it. We want as many people as possible to benefit from these shows and know that if you do share it, you can always tag me at Lisa Hiroshi on Instagram or LinkedIn. By the way, if you haven't already connected with me in those two places, I'm also sharing tons of good stuff there. Speaking of sharing, I want you to know about my new free change planner. This planner is for you if you'd like to make a significant change in life or work, but you're feeling kind of stuck. My change planner will help you get the clarity you need to take your next steps inside us, show you how to understand what you really want and why it's important, how to face your fears constructively so they don't hold you back. And this planner also has a scenario cruncher. I help you get all possible scenarios out of your head so you can find the right one for you. It's my favorite part, and having used it with many clients, I've seen how powerful it is. I know you're going to get many great insights out of this free planner, so head on over to LeapLikeMe.com to get your copy. That's a wrap for this episode. Thanks for listening, for sharing the show and being part of this journey with me. Take good care.
