Part 18 - Building Vision, a Sense of Purpose and Meaning
...continued from last time.
Lower personal resilience means we are not fully prepared for these moments, resulting in activation of the impulsive brain, reducing critical thinking. The outcome is sub-optimal decisions that do not work towards a larger goal. A complex vision statement is not going to help in stressful situations.
Conversely, a short and clear vision can become so ingrained that the brain can recall it at any time. Plus, this acts as a buffer against activation of the impulsive brain. It provides that moment of clarity, so you can put the situation in perspective to focus on what’s important. Ideally, we should keep the vision to one word, maybe three at most.
A clear vision statement like this is not easily generated, but to some extent discovered within yourself. You already have goals, ideals and desires, so a vision statement should connect to those.
In a sense, your vision needs authenticity. Authenticity in this context means a vision that is connected to your past and who you are. While the vision itself is forward-looking, it needs authenticity to be important and meaningful to you. This might come from an event in your past; something that happened to you, something you witnessed, something that made you realise the importance of this vision. Essentially, something that gives meaning to your vision. This could be something like an injustice that you witnessed that was impactful to you. Or something you experienced that felt very empowering. Yet it doesn’t need to be one event—it could be something you experienced over time that taught you an important lesson. The important part is that it has some meaning to you, making you willing to stick to your vision even if things get tough. This helps make it an enduring vision.
Broadness adds to the resilience of your vision. Having a broad vision means that it can be applied in any context, and can’t easily be invalidated by external forces. Such a vision is one that can stand the test of time and can guide you throughout your life. This makes it a truly resilient vision. With all this context in mind, here are a few examples of resilient vision statements:
‘Improve’, ‘Advance’, ‘Solve big problems’, ‘Inspire people’, ‘Make a difference’
You can see right away how these can be brought into any situation. They are simple enough to stick in your brain and refer to in a difficult situation. They also direct effort in definite directions. These example statements go beyond ourselves—as they involve some benefit to the world within which we exist. This is important because it makes the vision motivating to you, as well as inspirational to others, strengthening your ability to lead others.
Hidden within these example vision statements is a subconscious reappraisal of struggle, suffering, and the pain of enduring adversity. Think of it this way—a vision focusing on happiness is an inherent rejection of this type of suffering. Meanwhile, the majority of processes we are involved in every day involves some element of suffering, be it through difficult circumstances, stress, mistakes, or the like. A vision focusing on advancement or improvement carries with it an inherent appreciation of the necessity of suffering to achieve the vision. The act of improving yourself and your surroundings means a difficult path of trial-and-error, mistakes, learning, and overcoming challenges. This aspiration requires resilience to be able to persist.
So, an acceptance of the necessity of suffering and expectations of such results in a constructive attitude to challenges. Therefore, a resilient vision creates a constructive and realistic mindset that is better suited to achieve the vision itself.
Avoid happiness and it will come find you
Contrast this with the vision ‘To be happy’, and you can see how that the latter results in a fragile mindset. Such a mindset is not prepared for the eventual shocks of life. Disruptions and challenges do not contribute to happiness, therefore they are experienced as unwelcome events, often resulting in frustration, anger and depression. This further moves one away from the vision of happiness. It is self-defeating, simply because it grates against our natural experience of life as an ongoing struggle for improvement.
Some philosophical systems focus on the complete elimination of suffering (such as bioethical abolitionism), however this may overlook the virtue of suffering that leads to personal and societal advancement. Most would consider studying for a tough exam to be stressful, but the outcome of this suffering is valuable. There will always be events and disruptions to our lives that we need to learn how to grow from.
Let’s extend the previous metaphor of your vision as the lake on the mountain feeding the rivers down below, keeping the ecosystem of you alive. You will always face storms of adversity. If you are unprepared, those stormwaters will erode the channels and leave you feeling drained. On the other hand, if you build resilience, you can channel the stormwaters back into your vision and to the areas of your life that need it the most, channelling the energy to feeds the ecosystem of your existence. This lets you use adversity as an opportunity to reaffirm your commitment to your vision and fuel your motivation to persist in achieving your ultimate goals. When life is at its hardest, that is when your vision should be most relevant. Through this process, a clear vision produces an incredibly deep sense of resilience.
A clear vision acts as a guide for all other actions in your life. Its existence makes tough decisions easier as you can measure against what has greater potential to contribute to your vision. It also drives personal development by hinting at the personal qualities that you need to achieve your vision. These are the internal attributes that allow you as a person to effect the external change that is your purpose.
Naturally, these attributes vary based on your personal vision. For example, let’s say you have your sights set on solving a big technical problem that spans industries which generally don’t work together well. In this case, perhaps some of the most important attributes you need is to be knowledgeable, flexible, diplomatic, and persuasive. Other goals might require you to be influential, ambitious and competitive. Sometimes the attributes you need for your vision are more personal and less professional, such as being generous, modest, helpful or compassionate.
Revaluing values
What is interesting here is that we have the freedom to consider attributes that are useful, regardless of how socially acceptable they are. Nearly every attribute that is commonly seen as ‘negative’ can be modified slightly into something constructive. If there are some ‘negative’ attributes that come naturally to you, then through some purposeful direction they can be modified into great strengths. For example, stubborn can become diligent. Cynical can become rational. Rebellious can become innovative. Vain can become valuing excellence.
Building from an honest and authentic assessment of yourself is the strongest foundation. Consider an accurate valuation of your current self as a starting point—who are you now is not who you will always be. Instead, it is your vision of who you aim to become that really defines who you are.
With that said, each of us have all attributes to some degree or another. What’s important in this concept is the specific attributes that are most conducive to the achievement of your vision. Most likely, who we are by default is not precisely who we need to be to achieve our goals. This is a logical conclusion, considering that none of us are born in our ultimate state. From birth, life is a constant process of learning and advancing. Learning from the lessons of our parents, from school, from the knocks of life, on to tertiary education, through to on-the-job training, and beyond. This means there is always room to improve as individuals.
As our knowledge of the world improves and our confidence builds through our experiences, our personality slightly shifts over time. You might not notice it yourself, but someone who hasn’t seen you in ten years might comment on how you are now much more outgoing or focused than before, for example. This usually happens as an organic process. Although there is particular power in purposefully developing some attributes within yourself, since it’s not necessarily the case that we will always improve. Purposeful striving towards a vision reduces the need of relying on chance to become the person you need to be.
Note that this contrasts with the all-too-common platitude ‘Be yourself’. While there is generally noble intention when this advice is given, it is rarely helpful and certainly not conducive to personal improvement. Usually when this advice is given, what the recipient actually needs is to be better than themselves. At any given moment, we can decide the level of effort we want to put into the activity we are engaged in, and in which way we want to put our effort in. If you are heading into a meeting, you can choose if you want to be more energetic or more calm, more directive or more cooperative, more rational or more emotive. Quite often, we don’t realise that we have this choice, but we implicitly make these decisions through the expression of our default personality. So, the real question is simple: are you getting the right results? More specifically, are your existing attributes moving you closer to achieving your vision?
Another way to explore personal development is to consider your vision and ask ‘If I was more like this, would I be able to…’? Answers to these questions will help you identify where there is room for purposeful change—essentially, ways you can specifically improve to become the kind of person who is more likely to achieve your purpose.
Back to the previous point, we all possess all attributes to some small or large extent. What this means is that we are identifying which of our existing attributes need to be enhanced. It is about strategically enhancing what you already have. This concept allows us to take the old platitude of ‘Be yourself’, and upgrade it into ‘Become yourself’. You already have the qualities you need, to some extent, so now expand those qualities into that future conception of yourself. Rather than focus on who you are now, focus on becoming that vision of yourself that will achieve your greater ambitions.
This vision of yourself is not a simple copy of someone else, rather it is still you—it is the future you that you are becoming through purposeful development. Let’s explore two important aspects to this concept of becoming yourself.
Become yourself
First, the idea of becoming yourself intuitively focuses your attention on the future. For example, if your motto is to ‘Be yourself’, then when heading into a meeting you might focus on handling the meeting similarly to how you did in the past. In contrast, a future-oriented focus lets you consider how you can handle this meeting differently. Specifically, what small adjustments you can make in your behaviour to get more useful results. The link here to resilience is clear, because you’d place an inherent focus on continual advancement while using experiences/adversity to strategically grow into a stronger version of yourself, someone better able to roll with the punches.
Additionally, focusing on improving specific attributes is something you can pursue regardless of context. This makes the pursuit itself resilient as it is less likely to be invalidated by external circumstances. For example, moving to a different company would not stop your pursuit, but could instead be an opportunity to accelerate your personal development.
Second, the mechanism that enables becoming yourself lies within the neurobiology of the brain. The brain doesn’t change in sudden jumps. Instead, neural pathways build incrementally over time, through practice and repetition. Someone with a short temper doesn’t just wake up calm one day. Instead, it takes effort and repetition to practise remaining calm. It’s the same with other attributes. Taking a classic example, confidence doesn’t come from wishing for it—instead it comes from acting like you are confident. While some might experience this as pretending, it is actually practice. It is through constantly practising in an effortful and purposeful way that neural structures are built in the brain. That’s what makes this practised confidence natural.
Over time, the practised behaviour becomes the default behaviour. There is no such thing as ‘Fake it till you make it’, there is only practice. Therefore, ‘Become yourself’ takes advantage of the mechanism of neural development—to let your brain build the neural structures of your vision of yourself. This is how you physically become yourself.
To reiterate, it’s not simply a mental activity, but instead physical neural structures that you are creating and strengthening. The key concept is to be aware of which attributes would be most useful to achieving your vision, followed by actively practising those attributes every day.
With a vision established that represents your own purpose and the personal attributes you need to achieve it, you can now look towards goals. After all, as a top-down approach to achieving your own definition of success, your vision is the most important part. It guides your goals, as well as your implementation of the domains of resilience.
In business, the company vision and strategy usually receives a great deal of attention. Company strategy drives projects, which must prove value to the strategy. As new input and data is received, the strategy is refined and adjusted. It’s interesting that in the business world, we understand that strategy drives tactical goals to achieve success, though in our personal lives we rarely take such a structured approach. Indeed, as individuals, we generally skip the strategy and jump into starting projects. Though as any business leader knows, not having a clear strategy is a sure path to failure.
David Bowie warned us about this...
The evidence of people skipping on the strategy (read ‘vision’) component is evident—millions of people every day in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, wake up and think ‘What am I doing?’, ‘How did I get here?’, ‘Is this all there is?’ It’s the classic mid-life crisis—that moment of existential angst that eventually hits us. Usually we manage to find something to quickly distract us from this terrible line of thought. Why? Because it is hard and it is scary to think about the purpose of our own lives.
As with the strategy of a company—it is scary to make a decision. Sure, everyone has ideas of what the company strategy should be, but how many have the guts to commit to a course and stick around as leader when the going gets tougher than projected?
The same fear hits us when considering our own purpose, but unlike a business, there’s nothing pushing us to commit to a course. Truth is, we can get through life just fine without ever setting a personal vision. In fact, a great many people do just that. So why bother? What a vision does, quite plainly, is increase the probability of you achieving something great. And that is the true question—do you want to achieve something great?
You will have your own definition of what ‘great’ means to you, though I would venture to suggest that it be something not simply beneficial to yourself, but also improves the world in some way. This adds deeper meaning and longevity to a vision. This sets nihilistic resilience apart from goal-directed resilience—that desire to achieve something, regardless of how tough it gets. Here we see the parallels, where if you are willing to overcome the mental resistance to defining a vision for yourself, then it will make you a stronger leader. If you’re willing to take that leap and commit to a vision, then you secure a personal strategy that can drive your own tactical projects to achieve your vision. These are your goals...
...come back in a week for the next part, or get the book here: https://a.co/3tcEHKx
All the best,
Jurie
RForce.com.au - Scalable Resilience Training, Measurement & Analytics