Page 51 - Free Yourself From

34 It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor

A Vision Builds Resilience and Enables Comebacks

You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about your values and priorities—
now you’ll see why it was time well spent. A clear sense of values pro-
vides a guiding force and filtering mechanism. It helps you to draw
what you want, need, and deserve, and it helps you listen to that gut
instinct that tells you when a seemingly perfect opportunity isn’t (like
Sue in our previous example).
Moreover, with the groundwork laid, you’re ready for the big-
picture stuff—setting a vision for yourself.
A vision can be a hard thing to get your arms around. But most
simply put, it is a force that can sustain what you desire or need to
get done. It’s less the nuts and bolts of what you want to accom-
plish (i.e., getting an executive-level job by a certain time) and more
the big picture of what you want your life to be (a particular mix
of intellectual, family, and spiritual pursuits, for example).
When I ask clients about their vision for themselves, I often get
back a “deer-in-the-headlights” look. They don’t have the faintest idea
what I am talking about. I explain that having a vision for yourself is
another way of having an important goal for yourself. Without a vision,
we look at the past rather than to our aspirations to guide our lives.
Without exception, I have observed over the years that the peo-
ple who turn out to be “thought leaders,” who are respected by many
and have a lasting legacy of ideas, are those who have experienced
difficult times. In some cases, they lost power at some stage of their
career due to changing conditions that were beyond their control.
Yet they survived things like giving up the corner office, or losing an
impressive title for their business card. But they eventually re-
emerged as great leaders. One main reason is because they had a
vision for themselves.
For example, Hillary Clinton was a woman behind the scenes for
eight years while her husband was in the White House. Her first