Triton Mindset Blog

Creating a Career and Life Vision that Lasts

Submitted by: Hassan Akmal - Executive Director of the UC San Diego Career Center

Date: 1/24/2024

Key Take-Aways: 

• Create a pact with yourself
• Build a career and life vision
• Calibrate your lenses on your journey
• Establish a holistic view
• Focus on clarity

Now more than ever, people are voluntarily leaving scripted lives in search of more meaning. Whether you are career transitioning to a new organization or industry, advancing within the same company, or taking a risk and trying something brand new, it takes courage and conviction. However, creating a career and life vision is no easy task. Drafting a career and life bucket list may help you get the ball rolling, but it demands focus and clarity, not to mention alignment with who you are and who you want to become. In this blog, I present a framework to help you with effective collimation towards clarity and helps you reassess the dividing line between work and the rest of your life so that they may become happily blurred.

The pandemic has accelerated career disruption. Many of us don’t know what to do next and find ourselves searching for a career and life design space where we can dismantle our limiting beliefs. But, what if I were to tell you that you can create this sanctuary of self-reflection within yourself?

One fantastic way to invest in yourself is by building a Career and Life Vision. The clarity of this vision is what will ultimately translate to its impact. However, many do not know where to start. My former client once asked me, “I don’t have a clear vision for the future, can you help me?” I asked him in response, “What are the situations that bring out the best in you?” For over a decade I have been coaching individuals to see from the heart and then strive towards their purpose and it has taught me one critical thing, your vision is a pact with yourself, nobody else.

Create a Pact with Yourself

“Personal” in personal and professional development comes first because it begins with the “person.” Begin with an honest conversation with yourself. I refer  to this as “innerviewing,” not interviewing. Start with a career and life bucket list. One might argue the process is a pact to fulfill a list of goals from the moment you write the list until your last day in this world. For some, a bucket list is synonymous with identity. It gives people purpose and direction.

Most people think of a bucket list in casual terms, as if a life bucket list and career bucket list are two separate things. Combining these lists instead of looking at them side-by-side is ultimately how you will be successful, rather than looking at them distinctly. This enables you to have a more holistic view of your life and helps you map out where you are going.

But before you do this, you need to find a quiet place where you can hear your thoughts. Perhaps it’s the highest place in your city with a view or a place where you go to think, meditate or dream. Only you can identify this “go-to” spot, nobody else. How do you know it’s the right spot? It will always inspire you when you go there.

Pick Up a Pair of Binoculars

Almost everything is perspective. Once you find yourself in a place of comfort, without any distractions, pick up a pair of binoculars and look into the distance. Think of binoculars: they seem like simple technology. Many people pick up a pair without much thought aside from focusing their vision. However, they are much more complicated. Within are prisms that extend the light path from the objective lens to the front lens that you look into and that captures the light, and the eyepiece. Lengthening the prism increases the magnification without having to change the length of the binoculars.

There are all kinds of binoculars for different purposes, from astronomy to bird-watching. Each set must be appropriate for what you are trying to accomplish. These career and life prisms also exist in our lives and help determine our perspectives. It’s difficult to forecast your future or to imagine it. Most of us have clouded thoughts when trying to picture yourself in 10 or 20 years, this is perfectly normal. However, seeing your future self and who you desire to become is central to building an effective career and life vision. But sometimes what your heart desires and what your mind tells you don’t align. How do you get past this?

Collimation

Calibrating your career and life vision is like calibrating binoculars. Collimation is a process that refers to bringing something into line or to become parallel. For binoculars, it’s a process that refers to the optical alignment of the prisms. You also use this process for career and life alignment. Imagine one of the prisms representing your life and the other representing your career. They must be aligned correctly for the binoculars to work correctly. In other words, for you to see clearly. Your brain and heart must also pair up in harmony — facing each other than in conflict.

Lenses come in all shapes and sizes. Some are used to concentrate light into a parallel beam so you can see it at a great distance. The lenses of binoculars, however, do the opposite. They focus light rays from far away so you can see distant things more clearly. These are the lenses we are referring to, the ones that help us see our career and life vision more clearly. The way light bends when it travels from air to water or glass is called refraction. Refraction is the key to how lenses work—and lenses are essential to binoculars as they for us to see what’s far away in our future, closer and more clearly.

Your Career and Life Prisms

Because prisms are heavy, binoculars are heavy. Our life prisms are full of limiting beliefs, and our career prisms are full of extrinsic motivators. These weigh us down and sometimes get misaligned, making our vision blurry. Prisms are larger wedges of glass that rotate images. Without them, light rays that pass
through a convex lens from a distance look like they’re upside-down. Prisms rectify this issue and help us see correctly—not only in binoculars but in our own sometimes blurred perspectives.

Knowing that we have these prisms, we must also understand that our life and career prisms are in constant conflict with each other, against time. For example, our work/life balance can be very challenging. The harder and longer you work, the less time you have for yourself or your family, friends, significant others, or pets. On the contrary, the more time you spend on vacation or at home, the less productive you are. Our career and life visions are competing against each other. But should they be?

Focusing on What’s Important to You

Now, to conclude your understanding I would like you to create a career and life bucket list, but one where they go hand in hand and don’t compete against each other, or with time. They should both, simultaneously, be focused on you and what’s important to you.

The diopter adjustment is a control knob on your binoculars. It is designed to let you compensate for differences between your own two eyes. Once you set the diopter, then the two barrels should stay in proper relation. From then on you can focus, just by turning the central focusing knob.

But, when applied to your life, what does the diopter truly represent?

Your Heart is the Diopter to Your Vision

Your heart can see and feel things the brain cannot. So, lead with it. To calibrate the diopter, you must bring the binoculars up to your eyes, open both eyes and place your right hand on the diopter. When this concept is applied to you as a Career and Life Designer, the diopter is your “pause” or reset button (it is normally set to zero); it’s time to adjust. If you turn it prematurely, it makes the binoculars ineffective, as the two eyes can never focus at the same distance, at the same time. You use the binocular’s central focusing knob to focus both barrels at the same time. It’s tricky, but the point is that your heart should be in alignment with your vision. The brain will tell it what’s practical and eventually, they will reach an agreement. This makes your pact unstoppable.

Then, to adjust for differences between your eyes, you use the diopter adjustment one time to fine-tune the focus for the right barrel only. Like with binoculars, you just focus on your career and get caught up in your job, or just on your personal life; you don’t close one eye and squint. When the eye is squeezed closed, the pressure on your eyeball temporarily changes its shape and makes it focus differently. That can throw your adjustment completely off. Keep both eyes open, as you should be aware of your career and life vision (together), both short-term (nearby) and long-term (far away).

From then on, the two sides will stay focused together, whether you’re looking at objects near or far. This applies to your career and life vision, as they need to be assessed collectively and together, to ensure they are always balanced. Your heart will keep them together, think of this concept as the eclipse of the heart.

Calibration

Calibrating the right lens—the life lens:

1. Close your eyes, clear your mind.
2. Imagine your life in the far future, as clearly as you would visualize the restof your day today or the week ahead. How much time would you have after work for yourself or your family?
3. Create your life bucket list.
4. Now open your eyes.

Calibrating the left lens — the career lens:

1. Close your eyes, clear your mind.
2. Create a career bucket list in your imagination, what would it look like if time or money wasn’t an issue?
3. Where would you be working?
4. What would you be doing and why?
5. Now open your eyes.
   
   

A Holistic View

Now it’s time to combine these visions into one. Before you do this, make sure you:

• Close your eyes.
• Turn off your racing thoughts.
• Take a deep breath.
• Reset your mind.
  
  

Career and Life Bucket List

Prioritize the items from 1 to 15 on both lists. When listing your careers, some should come before others, as remember, some careers are the greatest assets for the subsequent ones. Some are “bridge” jobs that help you land a more senior role. Look at them side by side and determine what you would change if
this was only one list.

Then look at the reality of life. Consider which life bucket items won’t fit with the career ones, and which items mesh well together, then re-adjust your list. Remove items that no longer belong and create one list only, a set of ten career and life bucket list goals.

I lived in New York for ten years. As it’s cutthroat and you work long hours, it’s not unusual to get home after 9 pm some days. Although my career was demanding at the time, it was also rewarding. I reminded myself that I would not let my career interfere with my life bucket list. On my list was to publish my first book. But when did I have the time to write? I knew I was most inspired in the night and began focusing my energy on writing after dinner. I also decided I could use my commute time to ideate and for my dream time while awake. On weekends I could edit. I made it work, instead of feeling overwhelmed and so can you.

Re-Focus

To help you focus or get completely back into focus, do the following:

• Focus on a middle-ground object, using the central focusing ring.
• Focus on your life vision or the point in your future where you want to be, before connecting to the next.
• Change the lens cap so that you can see through your right eye.
• Look again, focusing now, on just your career vision.
• With both eyes open, and staying in the same position, focus on the same object by using the diopter adjustment on the central column.
• Focus on your vision or the point in your future where you want to be, before connecting to the next.
• Remove the lens cap and enjoy the matching view through both eyes at once.
• Now, see and visualize your new career and life vision into the future.
• Take it all in.

Turn to Clear Vision

Now, turn the clear vision knob and open your eyes.

In a solar eclipse, the light from the sun in obscured by the moon. However, with career and life vision, it’s completely the opposite, an eclipse of the heart opens the light pathways, and your internal prisms right size the image using collimation. From there, your diopter and lenses provide the focus to bring you clarity of vision. The ability to see your future clearly depends on your career and life vision.

Where focus goes, energy flows. The ability to reverse-engineer from a compelling vision is a game-changer. It’s the entre-pre-NEW reality, and it begins with the future—you.

Hassan Akmal, MBA, MPH
Executive Director, Career and Professional Development, UC San Diego, Author, Professor, Future of Work Expert, Career and Life Mastery Consultant, and TEDx Speaker

Follow me on LinkedIn