3. Vision
If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. But why would anyone want to follow you?
Having a vision for who and what you want to be in your life isn’t about the effects of magic mushrooms or mystical experiences, though these things do sometimes make a contribution!
Your vision is the picture you have in your mind’s eye that shows you the future: who you’re going to be, what you’re going to be doing, what you’ll be achieving, what impact you’ll be making in the world.
If you’re thinking that sounds very grand, it is. Your vision needs to be ambitious, challenging and full of meaning and purpose. It needs to excite you, to motivate you to get out there and take action to achieve it.
That’s your personal vision for yourself, and it’s another parallel with personal development. It’s the second of life’s hardest questions: “what do you want?”
As an aspirational leader, part of your vision will include leading other people. You can achieve much more when you’re leading a group of people, each of whom contributes something to achieving a common objective. Perhaps obviously, people will want to follow you if you show them an ambitious, challenging, meaningful vision that excites them and that they can adopt as part of their own personal vision. When your followers can see your vision as clearly as you see it yourself, and when they want it as much as you do, they’ll follow you through hell and high water to make it a reality.