3 Essential Ingredients for Creating a Vision for the New Year

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-images the world.

Malcom Gladwell

We’re days away from the New Year and a clean sheet of paper.  How will you re-image your world?

The week between Christmas and New Year’s always feels like sacred time to me.  It’s a time to reflect on the year coming to a close and dream for the year ahead.  There is so much hope and possibility in the year to come.  So many goals waiting to be accomplished.  So many plans to pursue.

As a leader, one of your primary responsibilities is to cast vision for the future.  And in order to cast a vision, you must have a vision to cast.

Dreaming, planning, creating goals and making resolutions are all elements of your vision for the new year.  And in order for that vision to be strong, your vision needs these three elements.

HOPE

Hope is the anchor of a strong vision. Hope steadies a team. Hope redeems doubt. Andy Andrews says it this way in his book The Final Summit : “Hope is the captain of courage and the author of success. For the person whose hope remains unshaken has within them the power to do miracles. Hope sees what’s invisible, feels what is intangible, and achieves what most consider impossible.”

When we as leaders are following a vision directed by God, Hebrews 6:19 reminds us that we can be secure in God’s promise and that our hope in God’s fulfillment of that promise is “an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.” Conversely, Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” When vision is lacking and hope is lost, we lose heart.

POSSIBILITY

A strong vision helps us see possibility and potential. Great leaders use their influence and power to help calm nerves and change people’s perceptions by alleviating fears and providing hope. They reframe reality in a way that makes it palatable.

Visionary leaders understand how to be a bridge from reality to possibility. We’re all inclined to naturally be either dreamers or doers. Dreamers live in ideas whereas doers live in reality. As a leader you must learn to be the bridge between both. Followers can’t follow a dream that seems disconnected from reality, but they also will not be motivated to follow a leader without a plan. Strength of leadership is found in the ability to make connections to possibility.

POTENTIAL

A strong vision allows everyone involved to rise to their potential.  A great vision stretches and pulls us further than we’ve been before.  Because we’ve anchored it in hope and bridged the dream to reality, those we lead (including ourselves) begin to see the extraordinary potential before us and within us.

That clean sheet of paper before you has so much hope, possibility and potential.

2016 has so much hope, possibility and potential.

YOU have so much hope, possibility and potential.

May you create a vision for the year to come that truly re-images your world!