Charting the path toward a 10-year vision
Humans will generally follow the path of least resistance and will just let life happen to us. I know I was like this and it wasn’t until I attended Kim Lenox’s talk on “Designing your Career with Intention” did I realize it. Life often happens to us but we have the power to change it.
There are dozens of methodologies that you could use to go about setting long-term goals for yourself. Not all methods work for everyone and some might not work all the time, but regardless of the one you choose, the three most important things are that you 1) set challenging targets for yourself, 2) start making headway toward them, and 3) that you reflect and make adjustments along the way. I’ve tried a number of different goal-setting methods and wanted to share the one that was most effective for me (with some modifications). But first…
Why set a long-term vision and goals? 🤔
In general, when we do plan, most of us only look 3–12 months into the future, so we get mired in the constraints of today. Planning using an extremely large scale (5–10+ years) helps to remove constraints (time, money, location, people around you). You can achieve almost anything in 10 years’ time or at least make sizeable headway toward anything.
10-year goals are daunting 😨
Don’t worry, even getting partway through this process will help give you some clarity. Worse comes to worse you’ll get a sense of what you need to go do more thinking about or exploring. Maybe it’ll start a career conversation with your manager or prompt a needed talk with your partner. You won’t know until you start! You can always make it partway and come back again after you’ve done some more thinking.
What if you get it wrong? 😰
News flash: you will. As the old quote goes “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” But having a plan will allow you to test hypotheses about your future and make adjustments. That’s why we spend time reflecting and making changes as we go.
Setting a 10-year vision that’s actionable
The process I first used in 2015 (and again in 2017 and 2018) is based on the Lululemon Vision & Goals method. They’re known for having a very goal-focused culture, which this method has been the cornerstone of for a majority of their team. You can find the original 2015 worksheet here, but I’ll take you through each step and share some of my modifications.
Steps 1: What do you want?
Think about your life now and what you want and don’t want in it. These could be activities you’re doing, feelings you’re having, the type of work you’re doing, who you’re with, relationships…anything! Start writing down on post-its what aspects you want to keep in your life and what you don’t want or want to change.
✳️ Modification #1: Like the typical UX designer that I am, I skipped the pages and just used post-it notes. This makes it easier to transport or put away as well as group later on.
Step 2: Mind map
Now think more specifically about three different domains: career, personal, and health. Ask yourself what is ideal in each aspect? What does each domain mean to you?
✳️ Modification #2: In the worksheet, the first two steps are split up. I found merging them made the whole activity much easier to wrap my mind around.
✳️ Modification #3: Don’t feel constrained to these three domains. If there’s a domain or subdomain you specifically want to think more deeply on, add it. For me in 2015, this meant specifically splitting out relationships from personal.
✳️ Modification #4: Don’t rush through it. Grab a bottle of wine (or a few glasses of bourbon) and make a night of it.
Step 3: Who am I in ten years?
After you’ve ruminated on the above, try your hand at describing your future state using a series of “In 10 years I (feel/contribute/achieved/surrounded by/experienced/etc) ___________” statements. This helps you get the juices going for actually writing your vision.
Step 4: Your 10-year vision
This part will take time and a few tries at it to get it to a place you’re somewhat happy with. Remember anything is possible so articulate your greatest ambitions regardless of what needs to happen in order for you to get there.
✳️ Modification #5: Take your time. Write, rewrite, ruminate on it for 2–4 days, rewrite it again. You’ll get more clarity with every attempt.
Now that you have an attempt at your 10-year vision, now’s the time to make a plan for actually achieving it.
Step 5: Your action plan 🚀
You’ll take your vision and use the 3 (or more) domains from your mind map (career, personal, health) to create a specific and actionable plan to get you to your vision.
Start with one domain and write out what your 10-year goal is based on the vision you wrote. Once you have that down, start thinking about where you will need to be in 5 years in order to get there. Once you have that, what do you need to be doing in 1-year to get to that 5-year goal?
Here’s a simplified example to illustrate:
- In 10 years: I own a waterfront home in North Vancouver, BC where I dock my sailboat.
- In 5 years: I own a 2 bedroom apartment in downtown Vancouver and have bought my first sailboat.
- In 1 year: I put 15% into a new home account every paycheque and have signed up for sailing lessons.
Now do that for the other domains. You’ll probably need to do some other research along the way (like investing house prices) as well as make changes as you go.
✳️ Modification #6: The one to five-year jump was challenging for me so I added in a set of three-year goals.
✳️ Modification #7: Make sure your goals are achievable by writing SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant (I prefer Realistic), and Time-bound.
Step 6: Share it
We often keep our biggest hopes for ourselves close to the chest. I’m a big proponent of sharing your vision and goals with those close to you both at home and at work. Three amazing things happen when you let other people in and share your aspirations with them.
- Your relationship will strengthen because you’ve shown a deeper level of trust with them, which in turn builds more trust. They may even reciprocate their aspirations.
- They might help you achieve your goals by either pointing you to others who can help, sharing resources, or maybe even opening doors for you.
- You are far more likely to achieve your goals because you’ve created some accountability.
You can be as open with this as you feel comfortable. I kept mine posted publically at my desk (back when we weren’t working in home offices) as a reminder but also because as people stopped by they would ask about it.
Step 7: Reflect and reset
Just like any plan, you’ll need to reflect and adjust as you go based on reality. Set aside some time on a specific cadence (yearly?) to reflect on whether your vision and goals still resonate. This could mean repeating the entire process to see if something has changed, but it might be as a simple as a review and gut check to understand if something’s off (maybe you hate that new role or perhaps you finally tried sailing and realized you hate being wet and cold). If that’s the case, don’t just persevere because “it’s the plan.” Adjust as necessary.
Results
This exercise gave me clarity into what I value and what I want and don’t want out of life. I now had a plan for how I might get there which enabled me to make better decisions. I also now knew about the areas that I did not have clarity into and needed to do more thinking and research into.
It also gave me a framework to talk about my goals with my partner (do we have shared goals?), with my boss (am I on the right track? how do I get there?), and with my friends and coworkers.
A tangible result that I’ll share from my 2017 plan was that part of my 1-year career goal was “lead a team of 3 designers by the end of the year,” which I shared with my manager. Within a month it went from a one-to-one discussion to actively transitioning myself and another senior designer into a newly created people leadership role at Clio.
And finally, the second time I tried this process I did it with my partner. It was great bonding experience when we did this and made for a wonderful week of conversations and dreaming. We didn’t align on everything (wouldn’t that be boring) and she didn’t end up getting as far as I did, but the process helped get us talking about this stuff we hadn’t really talked about before.
Happy goal setting!
Photo credit: @ugnehenriko
