We start our lives with a will to breathe. We end it with an inability to.
Between those first and final breaths, your time will be short, and your help will be needed. Our world is on fire right now, literally and metaphorically, and we all need to lead. To do so, we must develop our visions for a better world.
Your vision will not just appear. It comes through a commitment to clarify it, from first breath to last.
To intentionally achieve anything, we need a vision to guide us on how we spend our days and our decades. We need compelling visions to inspire teams to achieve ambitious goals, especially in difficult times.
"If you do not aspire to change something and you don't have a good reason for changing it, you cannot and should not lead," argued leadership experts Brad Jackson and the late Ken Parry.
A clear vision also helps us spend our lives contributing to societal well-being. As opposed to inadvertently supporting patriarchal, racist, and capitalist institutions that are taking away breath through choke-holds and carbon emissions.
Aspiration, can also mean “to breathe.”
Why this is Hard
At first it's not even clear we’re supposed to have a vision. Parents, teachers, and institutions work so hard to have us follow their paths that we require an epiphany to break free.
To articulate a vision and then achieve it, we have to rewire our brains. Through decades of trying to avoid failure, we forge automatic responses. For example, “Any time I aspire to something, I should stop before embarrassing myself.” Such limiting responses are devastating. But with mindfulness, we can overcome them.
One of the most established ways to develop mindfulness, is through breathing meditation. When we practice applying a kind, curious attention to our breath, we learn to bring this quality of attention to all of our thoughts. We can also use meditation to cultivate self-compassion, which has been shown to reduce fear of failure, including a fear that your vision isn’t achievable, and shouldn’t be articulated1.
How Vision Develops
From our first breath, we begin setting and achieving new goals. Under an explosion of neurons in an infant’s brain, ancient fight or flight tendencies interact with our early worlds to give rise to life-long aspirations. "Every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes,” wrote Barack Obama. As a friend and mentor of mine has said - our gift to the world is bringing about that which we felt a scarcity of as children.
We must develop awareness of how these early experiences influence us. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” Yung famously said.
Again, breathing meditation helps. Trying to focus on our breath in meditation, makes us more aware of our thoughts. This helps us identify how a situation or team make us feel so we can decide whether we want to continue to experience it. It also calms our amygdala, so we react more purposefully, as opposed to out of fear.
{Try it. Pause. Close your eyes. Take a few breaths while paying attention to the air passing through the tips of your nose. If you notice your mind wandering, be grateful you noticed it, and gently bring it back to the breath. If you want to spend 15 minutes talking through your meditation practice, connect here}. Or check out this post to learn more on how to start a practice.
How Vision is Clarified
Most of us have a sense of what we want, but are so intimidated to achieve it, that we dismiss our desires. This is the genius of “The Disney Method,” a creativity strategy that requires us to play the role of “dreamer” before we can be “realizers” or “critics.”
Life also provides flashes of insight. An intensely frustrating experience can clarify what we feel the world is missing. Inspiration from adjacent realms offers insight on our own needs. When you feel such clarity, make time to write it out. Don’t however, expect to feel satisfied on your first attempt. In my experience, perfect clarity never seems to emerge.
When we are most confused, we can do what countless others have done in this situation - head for the solitude of wilderness. When I am unsure of a decision, I head for a hike that requires me to be present to my feet and the elements, and to stop paying attention to the spinning of my mind. As we move through the wilderness, nature provides metaphors about risk, about pushing yourself, about what you need, and about how to find it. As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
If you’re overcome with indecision, or more difficult yet, feeling hopelessness, seek help. Good friends, mentors, and counsellors can ask simple questions to help you find your voice, and to realize it matters.
{If I can help, book a call any time here}
How We Spend our Breath
After all this work, sometimes we form our vision, only to change it. Perhaps we choose to change it. Or perhaps that choice is made for us - we set out to tackle a mountain, only to be bested by it. We must then find inspiration to summit a new peak, or recommit to climbing the first. These transitions can be painful, as we spend time in the valley looking up.
In the end, all we can control is our breath until - we can’t.
In that moment, you will ask, what have I done with my breath?
Thanks for spending time with me today. These pieces are hard won. If you enjoy, please let me know by choosing one of the below:
Very insightful Luke