Creating a Personal Vision is a way to think about where you want to be and what you want to do now, next year, in five years or ten years. It is a method of setting goals for ourselves.
Sit down in a quiet spot and take a few deep breaths, relaxing as you exhale. Once you feel relaxed, begin brainstorming what you want to learn and what you want to know. Write these thoughts down. Once you run out of ideas, look at your list and give a rating of 1 to 3 for each item on your list (1 is most important to you; 3 is least important). For each of the 1’s, you will more than likely see a theme emerge. Focus on this theme and determine what it is that you want to learn or what you want to know. Here are some questions you may want to ask yourself to create your personal vision.

• Vision: What do you want to create? Draw a picture of what you want.

• Mission: Why do you want to do? What is the purpose?

• Strategy: How do you propose to do what’s important?

• Objectives/Goals: What are the specific actions that you need to do to achieve?

To give you an example of how to develop your Personal Vision, here is my life experience of my Personal Vision. I wanted to teach. I brainstormed why I wanted to teach and what I would teach. My vision of what I hoped to gain from teaching was to teach others my knowledge and give students the skills to manage more effectively and efficiently after taking my class. My mission was to enhance the workplace and work environment so that people would feel more balanced in their lives and feel valued. The strategy I used was to teach Peter Senge’s Concepts of the Learning Organization that focused on Systems Thinking (closing silos and open dialogue and communication), Personal Mastery (knowing yourself), Mental Models (understanding our biases, assumptions and filters), Team Learning (understanding how we learn from each other) and Shared Vision (integrating our personal vision and organization’s shared vision); McKinsey Model 7S to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats with the purpose of enhancing organizational effectiveness of Systems (evaluating procedures, information systems, performance measures, rewards, budget, controls), Strategies (understanding how your business rates against competition), Structure (identifying specialization and integration), Skills (defining the competencies of the personnel), Staffing (identifying the resources for the work needs), Style (identifying what is done, not what is said) and Shared Values (understanding the level of trust, integrity, morale, motivation and culture); Motivational Grid, History of Management Theory and Myers Briggs Type Indicator to provide a personality inventory based on the theories of Carl Jung. My Objectives and goals were to teach using three methods – visual (show you), hearing (tell you) and doing (let you experience and experiment).
Take a moment and write down on a piece of paper your personal vision. From there, write down how do you plan on achieving that vision. Next, write down what steps you must take to get there. You now have a footprint of where you want to be.