Building A Vision For Your Life

At almost forty years old, with a family, mortgage, car payments, and credit card bills, my time was up, and I needed to find new work.
I loved my job, and I loved the organization for which I worked. I was successful at what I did. I had good friendships in the organization. Sure, the last couple of years had been rough: change was brewing, but I believed the organization would see the value of keeping someone with my experience, wisdom, and success. I was deceiving myself. I had seen other senior staff pushed out and I would be no different. This was a young man’s game, and I wasn’t getting any younger.
I had told myself that eventually this would happen to me. I knew the odds were against being one of the few who would retire from this organization, yet emotionally, I didn’t want to believe that I would be rejected. I didn’t want to believe it could happen to me.
As I processed the coming transition, I resolved to learn from my mistakes and do things differently the next time around. I knew there would be plenty of time later for evaluating the previous thirteen years, but, at that moment, I needed to figure out what I was going to do next. For the first time in a long time, I was looking for a job.
I didn’t even know where to begin. I needed a job, but I didn’t need just any job—I needed the right job. I needed the job that would be right for me, for who I am. I was too old to make a mistake with what would be the rest of my career. I found myself asking questions I hadn’t asked for a long time, questions that seemed more appropriate for late-night fraternity house discussions, but which were as real now (maybe more so) as they had been during those late-night college bull sessions.
I began trying to figure out who I was and what I should be doing with my life.
I realized that the biggest threats I faced were emotional, and I knew I couldn’t let myself slide into depression. I wasn’t only losing a job—after more than twenty years of being involved with the organization—I was losing a family, too. The people in the organization, those on the team, had become like family to me. One of the first lessons I learned was that my attachment to the organization was unhealthy. I had found my identity in belonging to the organization and had lost the essence of who I was; I no longer knew the real me. I knew I had to rediscover who I was if I was ever going to be healthy again.
But other questions loomed:
1) If I don’t find my significance, value, and worth in this or any other job, then where will I find them?
2) How will I go about finding out what is the right work for me?
3) If I can’t trust a good organization like this, then whom can I trust?
4) How will I discover who I am?
The first principle I learned was that to build a new vision for my life, or to create for the first time a vision for my life, I needed to look at something more meaningful than the next great job. I needed to look beyond the salary, the benefits, and the retirement plan. I needed to build my life on a more solid foundation—the foundation of who I am and who I have been created to be. This first principle is the key to creating a Vision for Your Life and the beginning of the process.
This book is about what I discovered in the process of working through these dramatic changes in my life. It is about plotting a Vision for Your Life and doing the work that is the right work for you—the unique individual that is you.
The first and perhaps the most important concept in this work is this: I do not begin with the premise that something is wrong with you that needs to be fixed. I am not going to tell you that if you change X or do ‘this’ better or ‘that’ more efficiently, you will have a successful life. That is the “Know who you aren’t and fix it” paradigm and I reject that.
The concepts discussed in the Vision for Your Life process are powerful because they begin and end with the premise that God made every human being uniquely and wonderfully. The philosophy here is not, “Know who you aren’t and fix it,” but rather, “Know who you are and be it.”