Why creating a vision is more important than goal setting

When people face a daunting task, it often feels like the most important thing to do is act and act quickly.

Michael Hyatt, a best-selling leadership coach, says it is often best to create the vision before worrying about strategies and goals. Although closely linked, a vision helps to define what is trying to be accomplished rather than how.

If a person cannot identify what it is they are trying to achieve, the goals and strategy will always be shifting because they will have to hit a moving target. Crystallizing the vision causes the target to stay still and allows for the rest to fall into place more quickly.

An exercise in vision creation
When Michael Hyatt was presented with a challenging situation, his first instinct was to hit the ground running and not to have high expectations for the outcome of himself and his team. Unfortunately, this strategy wouldn’t have inspired anyone and it certainly wouldn’t have meant great success because it is in itself self-limiting.

Instead, he took the time necessary to step back from the situation and determine the ideal outcome that he was looking to obtain. This meant looking past the current reality and imagining what could be possible under ideal circumstances. Once he wrote down a list of those ideal outcomes and gave himself a realistic timeline, it became much easier to determine how to reach them and to break them down into more manageable goals for his team.

Goals are still important
With all of the talk around creating a vision, don’t underestimate the importance of goals in the overall strategy. The crucial step is that the vision comes first in order to create a better way of determining the right goals and how to go about achieving them.

All of these pieces work together to provide a blueprint for finding the ideal outcome in the future.

What’s your vision?