Visioning: What are your Top 3?

In The Accidental Creative, Todd Henry talks about ‘your top three’.  ‘What are your top three priorities right now?’ he asks.  In his context, this refers to alignment: alignment with your employee or alignment with your boss (or client).  It is a way to clarify what you are, or should be, working on, and it is a way to clarify expectations so that we are all on the same page. 

More importantly, however, is the visioning aspect of this.  What are your Top 3, in terms of where you want to go.  What is your vision for your business, your profession, or your life?  How do you align your actions with that vision?  Do you spend time each day, each month and each year creating a vision for yourself or your business?  Do you invest energy into exploring what or where you want to be at the end of the day? Or year? Or lifetime? 

When I was a child, each Sunday after church, my father would drive us all around in the car before heading home.  It was difficult.  There were five of us children crammed into the back seats of the family wagon, after being crammed into a pew for the past hour, driving around in a seemingly aimless tour of the better neighborhoods where we lived.  We would drive through the hoity toity areas, while my father pointed out big houses and nice lawns.  For years afterward, we siblings joked about these Sunday drives.  It did not make sense to me as a five-, or eight-, or ten -year old boy, but this was how my father motivated himself to achieve a better life.  This was his visioning process.  

I was recently involved in a decision to terminate a manager in our company.  It was a difficult, painful decision that I resisted for a long time.  We had worked together for almost seven years.  This manager was a hard worker.  He lived cleanly and had integrity.  I enjoyed his company and his family.   We mountain biked and golfed together.  

But when we talked about his vision for his account, when we talked about his top three, he could not articulate it.  He was unable to look down the road and envision something better for his business in a creative or entrepreneurial sense.  It made him appear disengaged and aloof.  And that is how our client perceived him. 

It also made his decisions and actions appear random and without foundation.  He worked through his day and through his projects without a clear goal or objective fixed in his mind.  He could not ‘see’ where he was going, because he did not invest time into envisioning it.  And not only could he not articulate it to me or our client, he did not articulate it to his staff, and so they too could not see what the objective was.  They felt out of the loop and disconnected, and it impacted their work as well.

Invest in this portion of your work and your life.  Invest time in the visioning process.  Whether it is driving around the rich neighborhoods or touring the sites of your toughest competitors or gleaning ideas from magazines and trade publications or simply sitting quietly and asking the question – what do I want? For my work or for my life.