“It’s not what the vision is, its what the vision does.” Peter Senge

The imagination is an amazing thing. It allows us to see the future and reconstruct the past. It helps us to understand what we can not directly experience while creating the folly of misunderstanding or miscommunication. It can give us pleasure and create fear and stress. As Philip James Bailey said in Festus, our “imagination is the air of mind.” It is the medium in which our thoughts appear like the clouds in the sky. It allows the dew of our emotions to fall into the inner reaches of ourselves. Our imagination is a bridge between our conscious and unconscious selves and is an essential tool in the business we select as our own.

From The Quotable Walt Disney, “Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.” Just like our willpower, intelligence and memory, our imagination is something to exercise.  Active imagination is excellent for exploring emotions, ideas, symbols and sexuality. We can also use our imagination to see ourselves in the future within a week, a year, a decade or at the end of our lives. We have the opportunity in this life to create a vision of who and what we want to be. This vision can be created whether we are young or old.

The vision we create for ourselves gives us focus. It gives value to our actions and thus a center of gravity, so to speak, about which we can organize and manage our assets. This vision can act like a schwerpunkt in our planning. Schwerpunkt is German for “main focus, focal point, center of gravity” from schwer (“hard, weight, sweet”) and punk (“point”). This term was first used back in World War I and again in WWII with regard to Germany’s blitzkrieg operations. For the sake of the business of you it is what gives any concept its focus and direction even in ambiguous situations. Relative to our grand strategic directions in our life taken as a whole, our vision is the schwerpunkt of our intent.

So what’s your vision?  Have you developed a strategy to bring about your vision?