Is Visionary Leadership Rare and Elite? Or Can You Learn the Skills to Go from $300,000 to $5 Million/Year?

Magnetic

Fix your gaze on the black dot on the left side of the image below. But wait! Finish reading this paragraph first. As you gaze at the left dot, try to answer this question: In what direction is the object on the right moving? Is it drifting diagonally, or is it moving up and down?

Remember, focus on the dot on the left.

It appears that the object on the right is moving diagonally, up to the right and then back down to the left. Right? Actually, it’s not.

It’s moving up and down in a straight, vertical line. Focus on the object on the right and see for yourself.

See For Yourself

Your dream is not a dream. It’s your reality waiting for you to catch up. ― C.N. Hamilton

Colorado athletic director Rick George hired?Deion Sanders as the school’s next football coach?but needs more money to pay for his 5-year $29.5 million deal.

So how exactly will George and Colorado make good on the richest contract in the football program’s history?

“We don’t have the money yet, but I know we’ll have it, so I’m not worried about that,”?George said, not making his funding sources public.

Rumor has it some combination of Buff Alums, including Jeremy Bloom, Joel Klatt, and Matt McChesney, were part of the team bringing this vision to fruition.

Vision to Fruition

The visual illusion above confuses our senses. The alternating (some say spinning) black and white object on the right suggests diagonal motion. In a?Stanford Neuroscience article, they use the illusion to teach a lesson about reality.

https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/reality-constructed-your-brain-here-s-what-means-and-why-it-matters        

“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.”

Change-Maker

“It’s funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.” ― Rick Riordan

Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the actual, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences. All of this can bias us. Visual illusions challenge us to ask how do we know what’s real?

As a life coach, this comes up often. Clients have an idea about what they want but don’t trust it. They feel the energy of it, but logistics get in their way. I help them get out of the weeds and back into the visionary role, where they can tap into the magic of intuition and unlimited potential.

We work through design thinking and refinement concepts like “just because you haven’t done it doesn’t mean you can’t” and “you don’t have to hold back if you don’t yet have evidence that it will work.”

Purpose

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. — Warren Bennis

CU’s hire reveals the process of translating vision into reality. It wasn’t just one thing, one idea, one guy, or one checkbook that made this happen. It was a series of steps over time, some deliberate, some organic, a bit of luck, divine timing, shifting perception, and more.

Coach Prime not only won at Jackson State with few resources but reportedly did it without his old University’s support in some cases. He had a vision for where he wanted to take the program, and when they didn’t have the budget to fulfill it, he filled in the gaps, sometimes without repayment. Whether true or folklore, it contributes to the story and amplifies his vision.

And that’s what vision is — seeing it before there’s evidence — believing in it before there’s proof, and executing it without a guarantee — building momentum while staying ahead of where you are so that you can create the change you wish to see.

And there’s so much talk about who does this well, how founders and leaders need to be visionary, and that visionary qualities are rare and elite. But they’re not; visionary leadership is all around us. It’s just that we’ve collectively bought into what it looks like. Ahem, Elon Musk. Brilliant, but damaged.

• In politics, it’s rarely seen in the candidates but more often in the people pulling the strings and running the ground game behind the scenes and in the off-season.
• In sports, it’s sometimes seen in coaches but more frequently in athletes, like the child who hits balls every night for a decade, investing in an outcome only he knows.
• It’s in Deion, Rick George, and everyone who said yes to moving forward without all their ducks (or dollars) in a row.

Visionary leadership is sustainable because your vision pulls you forward, motivates you, makes you resilient, and brings meaning and purpose to your work.

It’s like redecorating your house. It feels good when you get one room done, but you almost always want to keep going. Progress is addictive, and the anticipation of seeing it all take shape becomes irresistible. Will Sanders last five years in Boulder fulfilling his contract? Pundits say no. I think it depends on how much momentum he has. I can’t see him walking away from something spiraling in his favor, but if he can pull this off, who knows what kind of opportunity he’ll be tempted by next?

Balance becomes part of the equation when you allow that inspiration to spill over into your personal life and are equally committed to work and life. We used to think visionary leaders had to focus wholly on their genius. Now we know that being interested in different things and having a multifaceted approach to life is an advantage.

Fulfillment

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”― Frank Herbert

If you aren’t an entrepreneur, founder, business owner, coach, or think of yourself more as a mom, dad, manager, or employee whose job doesn’t require you to be visionary, that doesn’t mean you aren’t. If you still need to identify or develop the skill, and we chatted, you could find examples.

• You probably had to make hard decisions if you faced infertility or an unexpected diagnosis. Visionary, in this case, means balancing the best option with urgent timing, and there’s a measure of faith in the future too. There were no guarantees, yet you moved forward purposefully and recommitted to your desired long-term outcome.
• If you’re a parent or a spouse, you didn’t have children or get married because of some romanticized fairytale, but you could see where it was going, and some glimpses made you willing to invest for the long haul. It’s visionary to make a substantial life decision that requires you to simultaneously accept it will be worth it no matter what comes and demands that you rise to the occasion no matter how hard it will be.
• If you planned a recent event (hello, the school dance for 672 people — that’s a future post), it might have needed more staffing, money, and direction when you submitted the event plan. Still, you knew if you built traction, enrolled others in your vision, and recruited on the fly, it would come together (and it did). That’s visionary too.

As I said, examples are all around you.

Influence

“Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment, but I don’t know who you are, what your name is, where you’re from, what you look like, or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.” ― John Green

Thoughts Become Things

Creating your reality is like the four-minute mile. It wasn’t possible until it was, then it quickly became no big deal.

To be visionary, you must believe in a world full of impossible possibilities and the power of individuals and ideas. If you can do it, it will change your life.

Getting Deion was a coup. Did you watch the press conference? Look at some early implications:

• Many players are rethinking their roles on the team.
• Many fans have different expectations.
• Many donors are no doubt having more urgent conversations.
• Many networks may be reconsidering the mountain time zone.

It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow. — Robert H. Goddard

In the research on visual illusion, scientists tried to nail down where conscious perception diverges from physical sensation. One possibility is that your visual system sees it wrong. Another is that your optical system sees it just fine, but some other part of your brain overrides it.

Why would your brain override it? Is there a benefit to thinking about it differently? The coach in me believes your brain may know things you can’t consciously know, like which dreams are closer than others or why some things are meant to be.

Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else. — George Orwell

Ingenuity

After analysis, the researchers found that while the visual cortex sees it one way, our brains — the higher-level thinking area dedicated to anticipation and decision-making — tell the story. So reality isn’t just real because it’s what happens; it’s real because we create stories that make it true.

If Coach Prime didn’t win, if his players didn’t believe in him, if Rick George didn’t think he could line up the funding, or if Bloom, Klatt, McChesney and others didn’t join forces, the reality is just an idea.

Ideas come to us daily, from impressive lightbulb moments to minor “what if” musings. What’s sneaky about ideas is that they’re easy — figuring out the story behind the idea is the hard part. The story is the reason. It’s the journey of the characters and the core conflict driving them. It’s the theme, the emotional connection, the motivation, and the internal struggle of why.

The story is Sanders did win, the players believed, the funding is happening, Bloom, Klatt, McChesney, et al. collaborated, and that’s the kind of reality leap that allows a guy to go from $300,000/year to $5 million/year.?Pretty cool, huh?

Override Everything Else

Even when you know what’s happening, the trick behind the magic, the reason we fall for the optical illusion, you still see what you see. Sometimes, against all odds, you still see what you want to see. That’s how our brain influences the story.

That’s why we have to buy in when we want something to happen, personally, professionally, or otherwise. It’s not delusional to get excited and believe so strongly that we override everything else; it’s strategic.

The lesson from the Stanford study is that the stories our brains tell us about reality are incredibly compelling, even when they are wrong.

The lesson I’d reinforce is that stories are everything. No matter what you want, you’ll find purpose and meaning if you tell yourself the story that helps you tap into the feeling of achieving it.

Make it tangible, so your anticipation grows, fueling your inspiration, innovation, and stamina. The cycle repeats, convincing our brain, and the stories become self-fulfilling.

That’s another lesson from Sanders: Don’t be afraid to star in your story.

Leader

“When the vision is clear, the results will appear.” ― Germany Kent

And then, if it works out, when it works out, it seems meant to be, but it was you. Your belief. Your follow-through. Your vision. Your story. You were the one creating that. You were Deion Sanders. Yes, you needed others to advocate, magnify, and amplify your ideas, but you were the origin point.

Real for Who?

Speaking of optical illusions, remember that viral post about what color the dress was? Google it. Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist at New York University, made a hypothesis that said it wasn’t that we saw different colors but that we were coming to different judgments about the color based on life experience.

His?study of 13,000 people?found a correlation between being a night owl and seeing the dress as black and blue vs. being an early bird and seeing the dress as white and gold. The lesson, in this case, was when confronted with ambiguity, our brains fill in the gaps with whatever we’re most familiar with.

You need a coach because most of us can't trust ourselves to default to familiarity. Put another way, if what's familiar is scarcity and struggle and limitation, or comfort and mediocrity and conventional, is it any wonder that you aren't visionary? That your brain can't envision a better future?

If we bring our life histories to these perceptions, it’s also no wonder that a guy like Deion sees the climb as a hero’s journey, a chance to prove a theory that he can build something out of nothing.

“People are desperate for inspirational leadership.” ― Shayna Miller

Inspiration

Illusions are “the basis of superstition, the basis of magical thinking,” Martinez-Conde says. “We’re very uncomfortable with uncertainty. The ambiguity is going to be resolved one way or another, and sometimes in a way that does not match reality.”

Just as we can look at an image and see things that aren’t there, we can look out into the world with skewed perceptions of reality. Our brains work hard to bend reality to meet our prior experiences, our emotions, and our discomfort with uncertainty.

If you are a CU fan, you have a motivated perception based on this hire. If you think this is a bold, gutsy move that will put the program on par with the great college football programs, the next five years will reinforce that, even if they win less than you hope.

If you think this hire is a joke, that we overpaid, and it will come back to bite us in the end, the next five years will reinforce that even if they win more than you expected.

Sound familiar? A little like politics? Vindication in action?

The point of the Stanford piece wasn’t to convince you that you can’t believe your eyes, and my point isn’t to say that it’s easy to bend reality to your will. As you consider the link between being a visionary and altering reality, remember that what’s real might only be real for you.

For example, you’re not alone if you find it frustrating to see something you want so badly come so easily to someone else. If you can influence reality, why make it harder than it has to be? That’s not a rhetorical question but further substantiation that our stories matter.

Because you aren’t just choosing at the decision point. You are influencing it up to that moment and beyond. You are writing it even as it unfolds. It’s complicated multi-linear stuff.

That’s why I’m explaining it using football stories, quotes, and research about optical illusions. You’ve got to relate more things, think more broadly, and farther out. Practice being visionary while becoming visionary.

You are Visionary

All that to say, just because no one has called you a visionary doesn’t mean you aren’t. You are, even if you don’t fully understand it. Lean into the energy of your exciting ideas and tell yourself better stories. That’s a strong start.

Bookmark this, reflect on it, and look for examples around you. Because once you get it, then you can alter reality too. You have what it takes to write your future.?Pretty cool, huh?

Go Buffs!