So, my last post was about the importance of going in the direction of what you want instead of focusing on what you don’t want. But what do you want? How do you figure that out?
Visioning is a popular practice within the sustainability community to help businesses or organizations create a shared idea of what they want the future to look like. You can then work backward to create more concrete goals and actions. But it’s important to have that grand vision as a sort of “North Star“, as Adam Werbach calls it. Something that is inspirational, emotionally evocative, and that can be used as an easy litmus to help you figure out if a decision is going in the right direction.
This idea is also fairly common in the self-help community. I think the book/documentary The Secret popularized the process of making vision boards a few years ago. I’ll pause to say that you probably either love or hate The Secret or self-help in general. I will say that a lot of self-help concepts are actually supported by psychological research, and many have actually helped me, but I will also say that while making a vision board could be a constructive exercise, it’s not the only thing you have to do to get what you want.
While group visioning is a really important and useful process for sustainability, I think the kind of personal visioning supported by the self-help world is equally important for flourishing. Because it’s important to get clear about what you want. Like really, what do YOU want? It can be difficult to figure this out when there are all kinds of forces influencing your decisions, from advertising, to culture, to norms, to even the way our spaces are structured. And the values and actions promoted by those forces are often not in our best interests or the interests of the planet.
I think that personal visioning should be a private activity. Something that you don’t have the pressure to share with anyone. You need to feel safe to be weird, to be subversive, to question the things even your closest friends and family believe. You need to get clear about what inspires you with as few outside influences as possible. I know there’s research that says that making your goals public will increase your chances of following through, and I’m all for telling people your goals, but your vision is different. It’s personal, and you need to keep it safe from all the nay-sayers.
If you’re feeling stuck trying to come up with a vision, here are a few things that have worked for me.
- Stop judging yourself. Your ideas aren’t stupid or bad (both in terms of quality and more importantly, morality). And even if they are dumb, who cares? Think about all the dumb stuff you love (fart noises, silly dances are a couple that come to mind for me). And if you think something is morally bad, examine that. Is that what you think or what you’ve been taught to think? And remember, no one has to see this.
- Focus on feeling. Even if you can’t articulate or draw what you want, you can probably imagine how you want to feel. Go with that if nothing else.
- Reflect on negative experiences. It can often be much easier to know what we don’t want. So a handy trick is to think back to something you didn’t like and then figure out its opposite. It doesn’t have to be anything super serious. It can be something as simple as getting cut off in traffic. The opposite of that is up to you. It could be a world where people aren’t distracted and are more courteous when driving, or it could be being in a space mentally/emotionally where that doesn’t make you angry, or it could be a world of driverless cars or some other form of transportation so that you don’t even need to worry about traffic or other drivers.
You can create your vision in whatever medium works for you, but I would suggest actually putting it down or recording it somewhere and not just thinking about it. Mental visualization is useful, and it’s important to cultivate how you’d like to feel, but the process of speaking or writing or creating something physical gets your brain thinking in different ways and can help you gain clarity. Even if you’re just scribbling down notes on the back of receipts.
Putting it down also gives you something to reference later. So you can see if a) you’re going in the right direction and b) if that’s still somewhere you want to go. Because your vision is going to change (another reason to not put too much pressure on yourself to get it perfect). And when you reach a point where your vision isn’t feeling inspiring, create a new one. Most likely the old vision helped you to achieve something, or you realized it wasn’t something you really wanted to achieve. Either way it served its purpose.
Flourishing 