How to Create an Expansive and Achievable Vision

A vision is one of the foundational building blocks for planning anything: whether your year ahead, a project, a trip, a workout, or your day.

Before you think about goals, before you map your route, and before you start taking action, you need a vision.

Read: 5 Reasons Why Having a Vision is Important

3 Essential Components of a Vision

A vision answers three essential questions:

• Where do you want to go?
• How do you want to get there?
• What do you want the experience to be like?

Knowing you want to go from New York to California sets a destination, but is only one piece of the story.

You can fly, drive, take the train — even walk, run, or bike. If you choose to fly, you can fly first class or economy. Or you can fly private and skip the commercial airline experience.

You can travel alone or with friends.

You get to decide if you want to take the most direct and fastest route, or if you want to stop along the way at various points across the country to explore. And if you do explore, what places do you want to explore? What experiences do you want to have?

Along the way, you might have experiences that lead you to change your perspective. You might decide that California isn’t for you and you prefer Colorado or Utah. You might set out on a solo expedition and realize that you’re lonely and you really want adventures with friends.

Your vision isn’t static. You have agency to create a new vision at any time.

The Limits of Vision

As important as having a vision is to the foundation of any long-term accomplishment, vision also has its limits.

(1) Too Constrained

The first limit is that our vision is typically constrained by what we’ve seen or experienced. This can cause us to short-change ourselves when it comes to creating a vision.

Many people have trouble creating a vision around something that isn’t in the realm of their knowledge and experience.

If you’ve never flown first class or on a private jet, you might not consider those experiences when creating your vision. Likewise, if you don’t know anyone who walked from New York to California, you might not consider that this would be possible.

Even if you are aware that people have done it, you may not even realize it’s in your capacity to do it.

(2) Too Far Fetched

At the opposite extreme, we may tap into our imaginal realms too much, creating a vision that is disconnected from reality and the resources we have available to us.

Maybe you have a vision of walking across the country, but current life circumstances give you only a week for the trip. That’s a vision that requires more capacity than you have in the moment.

When you have a vision that is bigger than what you can realistically implement with your given resources, the eventual disappointment can create disillusionment. As a result, you might hesitate to create a new vision in the future.

(3) You Can’t See Your Own Blind Spots

It’s possible that your vision can be both too constrained in parts and too disconnected from reality in other parts.

It’s axiomatic that we cannot see our own blind spots.

You might not see where you’re limiting yourself because you lack perspective of what’s possible, or underestimate your own capacity, on one hand, and where you’re too disconnected from reality on the other.

We can only see from our own frame of reference, which is, by nature, skewed.

The only way to gain a full perspective that helps us form a complete and realistic vision is through reflection from others.

Not just any “others.” Close friends and family are wonderful, but the people who come from our world and know us best have blind spots when it comes to both our capacity and what’s possible. They likely share our own frame of reference.

How to Expand Your Vision

To create a vision that is bigger than your current frame of reference, you need a coach.

A coach has a different perspective on life and what’s possible. Most crucially, a great coach will see your capacity better than you do, and know what you are capable of handling.

That type of coach can help you create a vision that is both grounded in reality and expansive, that gives you a direction, a destination, and a path that factors in your capacity while also giving you a way to grow.