SL022 When Your Vision No Longer Fits
Letting Go Before Moving Forward
There are moments when a vision that guided you for many years begins to lose its power. You may have achieved what you once wanted. Goals that used to motivate you may no longer create much energy. Or the old vision may still be possible, but you no longer feel drawn to it.
Welcome to a new episode of Self-Leadership with Dr. Bensmann. My name is Burkhard Bensmann. I work as a consultant and executive coach, mainly with leaders in situations of change.
This is the third episode of my four-part series on professional transitions. In the first episode, I looked at changing leadership roles. In the second, I described three signals that may indicate that your own professional passage has already begun. In this episode, I want to focus on personal vision.
“Vision and Mission” is the title of the first field in my model of the Seven Fields of Self-Leadership, and I have worked with this topic for many years. Much of this work is about developing a strong personal vision.
Today, I want to look at the opposite situation: the moment when an old vision has completed its task.
1. A vision can expire
A good personal vision gives direction. It helps you decide where to invest time and energy, and it can carry you through difficult phases. But a vision is not valid forever. The future picture you created ten years ago was created by the person you were ten years ago. Since then, things may have changed. You have changed. Your family situation may have changed. Your financial position may have changed. Your professional experience certainly has. And sometimes you simply achieve what you wanted.
I have worked with entrepreneurs and executives who reached many of their major goals. They built the company, gained financial independence or reached the position they had wanted. And then they discovered an unexpected problem. The old destination had been reached. But no new one had appeared.
2. Success can trigger a transition
We often associate professional transitions with failure, but that is only one version. Success can create a passage too. You sell your company. You hand responsibility to the next generation. You reach the top position. Or you simply notice that you no longer need to prove what once seemed so important. At that point, the inner focus changes.
For many years, the central issue may have been whether you could achieve a certain goal. Later, the more relevant issue becomes whether you still want it. I have seen successful people become irritated by their own answer. From the outside, very little appears to be wrong. The position is good. The income is good. There is recognition and influence. But internally, the old goals have lost their pull.
One common reaction is to continue within the same logic: work harder, improve the existing system, choose the next target. Sometimes that is right. Sometimes you are simply extending a phase that is already finished.
3. A personal experience
I know this situation from my own professional life. I have been working as a consultant and coach for more than thirty years. Over such a period, professional priorities change. Formats that suited me very well at one point did not always continue to do so. Topics became more or less relevant, and certain roles gradually lost their attraction.
What I found interesting was that there was no crisis. Nothing had failed. Some things had simply completed their task.
When that happened, I learned not to define the next big goal immediately. I found it more useful to create some distance first and to observe what still felt relevant.
That meant looking at the parts of my work I wanted to continue, at routines that had lost some of their meaning, at subjects that were becoming more important and at parts of my professional identity that perhaps belonged more to my past than to my future.
This is one reason I regularly use personal planning days. And it is also one reason why changing my physical environment helps me when I work on larger questions. Distance changes perspective.
Sometimes the first result is not a new vision. Sometimes the first useful sentence is simply: This part is complete.
4. To “un-vision”
Some years ago, I started using a slightly unusual English term: To un-vision. I am not sure whether an English teacher would approve, but I still find the idea useful. Before you develop a new vision, you may need to release an old one consciously.
That does not mean that the old vision was wrong. It may have been exactly right. It gave you direction, helped you make decisions and perhaps led to major achievements. You can appreciate all of that and still recognize that this picture may no longer belong to your future. For me, that is the central point. And there is a practical question connected to this idea: How can you examine your current professional life without immediately trying to design a new one?
One instrument I use for this purpose is called The Fourfold Table.
5. The Fourfold Table – What to Do, What to Stop
I describe this tool in my book Self-Leadership: The Key to Being Productive. You will find it in the section on practical tools, under the title “The Fourfold Table – What To Do, What To Stop.” The idea is quite simple. You divide a large sheet of paper into four fields. Each field represents a different decision about your current activities, responsibilities or projects.
The four categories are: Keep Doing. Do Differently. Do New. Stop Doing.
I have used this approach in coaching sessions, personal planning days and workshops with leadership teams. It helps people move from general reflections to concrete decisions. Let me briefly explain the four categories.
First: Keep Doing.
Here, you identify what still works well and deserves to remain part of your life. In a professional transition, this might include relationships you value, activities that give you energy, responsibilities you enjoy or parts of your current work that still make sense. Not everything has to change simply because you are entering a new phase.
Second: Do Differently.
This category is particularly interesting when your professional vision is changing. You may still enjoy your professional field, but no longer want to work in the same role. You may want to reduce operational responsibilities, change your working rhythm or concentrate on a smaller number of clients or projects.
The activity itself may still be relevant. What needs to change is the way you approach it. For example, an experienced executive might decide to remain connected to the company, but move from operational management to an advisory role.
Third: Do New.
Here, you collect ideas for activities that are not yet part of your professional life. Perhaps you want to explore a subject that has interested you for years. Perhaps you want to develop a new service, learn something completely different or experiment with a new form of work. At this stage, I would not immediately turn every idea into a project. In a professional passage, the value of this category often lies in identifying possibilities that have not yet received enough attention.
And fourth: Stop Doing.
This is often the most difficult category. And sometimes the most valuable one. We tend to accumulate activities, commitments and responsibilities over time. Some remain because they are genuinely important. Others continue because we have become used to them. The Fourfold Table invites you to question these routines.
Which responsibilities no longer make sense? Which projects are taking up energy without creating sufficient value? Which activities belong to a professional role you may already have started to leave? I sometimes encourage my clients to be quite radical here.
Look again at what you placed under Do Differently. Perhaps some of those activities should actually move to Stop Doing.
In my book, I compare this process with decluttering. We clear out things we no longer need to make better use of the space available. The same principle can apply to our professional lives.
And this is where the Fourfold Table connects directly with the idea of un-visioning. Before you create a new picture of your future, you may need to decide what no longer deserves a place in it. If you want to explore this tool in more detail, including practical examples and suggestions for using it individually or with a team, you can find them in my book Self-Leadership: The Key to Being Productive.
6. Create distance
If you want to renew your personal vision, I recommend changing perspective deliberately. I do this myself. Travel helps me. Walking helps me. A personal planning day outside the normal working environment helps me. Writing helps. Sometimes meditation. The particular method matters less than the distance it creates.
If your whole week is filled with the structures of your current life, it is difficult to imagine a different one. Your calendar confirms your current role. Your meetings confirm your current role. Your inbox confirms your current role. For a while, you need to reduce those signals. Not forever. Just long enough to hear some other possibilities again. I also find it useful to separate the process of reflection from the process of decision-making.
When you are still exploring your situation, you do not need to decide immediately which new professional role you want to take on. You can first examine what is already there, what still feels relevant and what may have lost its meaning. The Fourfold Table can help you structure that examination. But the questions behind it deserve time and attention.
7. Do not design the new vision too quickly
Executives are good at solving problems. So when the old orientation disappears, there is an understandable impulse to create a new one immediately. A new plan. A new target. A new five-year vision. I would resist that impulse for a while. A passage can include a period in which the future picture remains unclear. That does not mean that nothing is happening.
You can observe and collect ideas. You can talk to people and experiment with small projects. You can read outside your professional field, meet people you would normally not meet and notice where energy appears. A new vision sometimes arrives as a clear idea. More often, in my experience, it develops gradually. You recognize one element, then another. And after some time, you can see the outline. There is also a difference between creating an attractive future picture and simply replacing one set of goals with another.
If you immediately fill the space you have just created with new obligations, you may find yourself repeating the same patterns. This is why I consider the Stop Doing category so valuable. Sometimes you need to experience what becomes possible when you no longer do certain things.
8. Vision in the Bensmann Passage
Vision and Mission are important topics in my Bensmann Passage methodology.
But I do not begin every transition by asking for a new five-year vision. That may be premature. First, I want to understand what has ended, what deserves to remain and what needs to be released. It is also useful to examine the expectations that still influence decisions and to distinguish between future images that are truly your own and those that mainly come from somewhere else. This is especially relevant for senior executives because expectations can come from shareholders, colleagues, family, professional peers or an earlier version of yourself. Self-leadership means examining these expectations and deciding which ones still deserve authority over your future.
In my coaching work, I am particularly interested in helping people recognize where they still have room to make their own decisions. Sometimes that means changing direction. Sometimes it means redefining an existing role. And sometimes it means deliberately ending a professional commitment that has served its purpose. The aim is not necessarily a completely new career or a dramatic change. It is to develop a professional future that fits the person you are today and the contribution you want to make.
9. Your exercise: Use the Fourfold Table
I would like to invite you to try the Fourfold Table for yourself. Take a large sheet of paper and divide it into four sections. Write the four headings:
Keep Doing.
Do Differently.
Do New.
Stop Doing.
Now look at your current professional life. Which activities, responsibilities, projects and relationships belong in each category? Give yourself fifteen minutes for a first round. Write down your thoughts without trying to make everything perfect. You can use sticky notes, as I recommend in my book. They make it easier to move ideas from one category to another.
Then spend a little more time with Stop Doing. Look for responsibilities, routines, projects or roles that may have completed their task. Ask yourself whether you are continuing certain activities because you still want them or simply because they have become part of your professional identity.
And then add one final reflection: Which part of my old vision deserves appreciation, but no longer needs to determine my future?
Keep the Fourfold Table and look at it again a few days later. You may notice that some ideas have changed their position. Perhaps something you initially wanted to do differently should actually be stopped. Or perhaps an idea under Do New turns out to be much more important than you first thought. There is no need to finish this exercise in one sitting. You can return to it during your next personal planning day.
Closing
A personal vision should give you orientation. It should also remain open to revision. A vision that was powerful during one phase can become restrictive in the next. Recognizing this early requires self-awareness.
Sometimes the difficult part of a professional transition is not setting the next goal. It is tolerating the period before that goal becomes clear.
The Fourfold Table offers a practical way to begin this process. You can identify what deserves to remain, what needs to change, what you want to explore and what you are ready to leave behind. And perhaps you will discover that you do not need a completely new vision just yet. Perhaps the first step is to make some room.
In the fourth and final episode of this short series, I will focus on contribution: how your experience, your abilities and your interests can create relevant value in the next phase.
Until then, you may want to consider whether one part of your current vision has already completed its task.
I wish you an effective time.
