Unstuck: The Key to Unlocking Your Bold Long-Term Vision

What’s your company’s 10-year target or your 3-year picture? Spend any time in the EOS space, and eventually, someone will ask you this about your business. Work on any personal development, and visionary questions like this will pop up there as well. Thinking long-term is essential to getting where you want to go… but questions like these can be daunting to ponder, and often, they trip people up.

The simpler questions to answer are: What is your one-year plan for your business? Or, personally, where do you want to be a year from now? Those questions are a lot easier to answer. Frankly, they’re less scary, and it’s easier to articulate where we want to be in a year.

Why is this? How can we look out a year from now with a level of comfort and certainty, but we get so thrown off when imagining a future that is three, five, or ten years away?

An interesting answer came up in a conversation this week while a friend was discussing their personal 3-year vision…

“Looking ahead a year, I can see what’s coming. I can see it from where I’m standing. It’s closer and feels more realistic. Looking out three years and beyond, everything gets a little more hazy. When I look out further, I paint the picture of what’s possible and realistic based on my past experiences… specifically, my past failures, challenges, and where my success has topped out in the past. My past shapes my future more when I start to imagine life looking at it through these longer-term windows. How will the next three years shape up? The easiest place to look is how the last three years shaped up.”

Is your professional and personal vision for the future shaped by your past?

For most of us, the answer is yes.

It’s one of the reasons why developing our long-term vision can be so challenging. When we allow our past to dictate what’s possible in our future, and what we’ve done before, it can be easy to start closing the door on opportunities. Instead of tapping into our wild imaginations, we hide in our grown-up safe zones.

Remember being six or eight, when your imagination was still free? The younger version of yourself still believed that anything and everything was possible, and you didn’t have this long list of successes and failures telling you what you could accomplish and what you couldn’t. Instead of sitting at the top of the sledding hill worrying about how many bones you could possibly break on the way down, you pushed off and went for it.

Fear didn’t lead you, and you weren’t stuck in the past because it hadn’t been written yet.

Now, stand on top of that same hill as an adult. For many of us, we get stuck in fear, thinking about those bones we might break, the tree we might run into, and the concussion we may bring home. Past experiences creep in, and it’s much easier to stand at the top of the hill and watch rather than lay down on the sled and go for it.

It’s that eight-year-old version of ourselves that we need to reconnect with when we set long-term vision for ourselves and our businesses. It’s that kid who is unafraid and uninformed by life’s challenges, failures, and past disappointments. The version that still believes in what is possible and is unafraid to set a lofty vision for where we want to be in three years or even ten. The version that flies down the hill with some reckless abandon.

Why share this? It’s a call to action for all of us as we start thinking ahead to 2025… Take this concept and be bold with your vision for next year and the years to come beyond that. Then, find some great people to surround yourself with who think like this as well, and commit to supporting one another as we make these big visions, even the ones that feel reckless, a reality.

Call-to-Action

Apply some imagination and bold thinking to your next vision session. As a company or an individual, what would the eight-year-old version of yourself tell you to go after? The kid deep inside who isn’t jaded or stuck in what’s safe or “realistic” – what would they tell you to imagine?

Resist the urge to think small, and go big with your long-term vision.