How to be a visionary in your life and in your relationships
Episode 9
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Seeing Your Relationship Through New Eyes: a free resource for podcast listeners
The story of Goethe and the Strasbourg Cathedral comes from the book Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman.
Australian fantasy novelist C.S. Pacat originally coined the term narrative traction
Study of the impact of sense of meaning and purpose on healthy aging
Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life by Donald Miller. (He adapted the idea of narrative traction as a vital aspect of being engaged in our own life stories.)
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home by Bayo Akomolafe
The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work by Eli J. Finkel
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (one of our favorite books of all time).
In 1647, the Strasbourg Cathedral in France became the tallest building in the world at 466 feet. It held that title for the next 227 years. Even today, it remains the highest structure still standing that was built entirely in the Middle Ages.
When Goethe, the brilliant and beloved 18th century German poet, novelist, and naturalist, encountered the Strasbourg cathedral for the first time in 1770, he called it a “sublimely towering, wide-spreading tree of God.”
He spent a lot of time at the cathedral while studying law in Strasbourg. He climbed its highest tower and would sit high above the ground, both in an attempt to cure his vertigo and also to make sketches of the cathedral. And in spending time getting to know the cathedral so intimately, he came to realize something unusual. He understood that the architecture of the tower was not quite right.
He saw that the tower should have been taller and different than it actually was. Goethe made sketches of what he imagined the cathedral’s tower ought to look like and eventually his sketches came to the attention of an architect who knew what the original design of the Strasbourg cathedral had been … who confirmed that in fact, Goethe’s sketches matched the original design of the cathedral tower. But since the original plans for the tower weren’t public knowledge, Goethe was asked to explain how he’d known this information.
Goethe replied that the cathedral itself had told him. Explaining how he came to realize what the cathedral tower ought to have looked like, he said, “I observed it for so long and so attentively … and I bestowed upon it so much affection that it decided at the end to reveal to me its manifest secret.”
Goethe’s gifts of attention extended beyond the architecture of Strasbourg Cathedral. He used this same combination of affection, attention, and imagination to enter into the natural world as well, making discoveries that Darwin would later use to develop his own theory of evolution several decades later.
Goethe was a visionary. What we mean by that is he combined his vision (his ability to see) with his imagination (his ability to see beyond). He had the ability to connect to the world at a deep level, to combine imagination and vision, to envision what was possible that went beyond what he could see with his eyes.
So what would it mean for you to be a visionary? What if you could access the power of the imagination to see what’s possible for your own life? And what’s possible for your relationships? To imagine how things could be, to be able to see possibilities and potential … and to move in the direction of that as-yet-unfulfilled potential?
In this post, we’re going to be exploring the question of what it means to be a visionary — to envision possibilities for your own life and your relationships. We start by talking why it matters to have a guiding vision for your life.
So what does it mean to have a vision for your life? And how do you know if you have one? And if you don’t have one, well … then … how do you get one?
The way we see it, having a vision for your life allows you to orient your life in a direction you want to go. Your vision for your life is like your own personal North Star, that can guide you along your way. Or it’s like your compass, which tells you when you’re heading in the right direction … and if you’ve maybe lost your way a bit or gotten off course. It’s particularly invaluable in helping you to guide you through the inevitable challenges we all encounter on our path through life.
In Change vs. growth: how to create relationships that thrives long term, we talked about how we have milestones as we begin growing up. These milestones provide us with a clear-cut map that takes us from kindergarten through high school graduation and on to college, launching a career, getting set up in our own home, maybe getting married, maybe having a child … and then it’s kind of like we’ve lived ourselves off the map. There are no more life milestones until retirement.
Once we’re off the map, the best case scenario is that life becomes pure potentiality — it can be whatever we want it to be — if we have a vision, if we know what we want in life.
But because most of us spend the first 18 to 23 years of life doing what we’re supposed to do, we don’t end up spending much time, if any, really asking ourselves what makes us happy. We don’t think nearly enough about what we want to do, because life gets framed as doing what you’re supposed to do …or doing what you need to do to get by.
Australian fantasy writer C.S. Pacat coined the term “narrative traction” to describe an essential feature of a novel that engages a reader’s attention. Narrative traction is the promise that something interesting will happen if we keep reading.
We have to feel like the story is moving forward in order to be engaged in the story itself. We need to be curious about what’s going to happen. A story that doesn’t manage to capture the reader’s attention and immerse the reader in the world of the story is a story that lacks narrative traction. Stories that lack traction don’t interest us because they don’t go anywhere.
So what about the story of our own lives? What happens when we find ourselves off the map because we’ve passed every one of the few milestones that are set out for adult life? What happens for many of us is that we lose narrative traction.
We get up in the morning, go to work, do our job, come home, have a few hours of leisure time or maybe spend time with those we love, and then wake up the next day to do it all over again. We’ve slipped into the routines of life and we’ve lost any sense of direction, any sense of moving forward in a meaningful way.
For some this looks like keeping your head down, or your nose to the grindstone, saving for retirement and that time off in the distance when you’ll finally get around to thinking about what you really want. When we lose a sense of narrative traction in our own lives, we’re disengaged, we go through the motions, as though every day is a slight variation on the day before.
When we become bored with our own lives, it’s easy to do things like kill time or find ourselves just waiting for something better to come along. Going through the motions, playing the parts others choose for you, can result in feeling adrift in life. Making what we call “The Heroic Leap of Just Being Yourself,” which we describe in Episode 8, reconnects you with your own life story again … it helps you find the thread of your life that can lead you back to a sense that your life is going somewhere interesting.
In order to be fully alive, we have to be completely engaged in our life. We need narrative traction. We need to be interested and curious about where things are going in our life.
And this is where having a vision for your life can be so helpful. And in order to have a truly compelling vision for your life, you need to know what you want, what brings you joy and satisfaction, and also, what gives you a sense of meaning and purpose.
What this meaning and purpose is depends on the individual. It’s unique to each of us. Whether you believe your purpose in life is written into the starts at the moment of your birth or whether you experience your purpose as something you grow in to as you age, the fundamental idea is that your life has meaning. You belong here.
Interestingly, studies on aging and wellbeing find that having a sense of meaning and purpose is essential for us to maintain our emotional health as well as our physical health as we age. In one study of people in their 70s that tracked their health for several years, researchers found that people who had a strong sense of purpose in life had half the mortality rate of people who said they had little sense of purpose in their lives.
Creating a vision for your life involves a marriage that unites desire, meaning, and imagination. To create a guiding vision for your life depends on you knowing yourself: knowing what you enjoy, what gives you pleasure, and what provides you with a sense of meaning and satisfaction.
When you blend your understanding of what you want—what you desire in life—with an understanding of what gives you a sense of meaning and purpose in life, your vision starts to clarify. The final element in creating a vision for your life is imagination. It’s your ability to imagine what could be possible.
This is where finding yourself ‘off the map’ of adulthood can be both a challenge and an opportunity, depending on how you approach it. The risk, of course, is that you might lose narrative traction in your life.
Having achieved every milestone that’s been laid out for adult life, you might lose a sense of direction, a sense for what’s next. Donald Miller describes this in his book Hero on a Mission as “living inside a narrative void,” which happens when people “[surrender] their personal agency to outside forces rather than determining their own story.” The gift of finding yourself off the map is that you have the opportunity to become a visionary of your own life—and, in Miller’s terms, the author of your own story.
When you become a visionary, you leave behind the map that was given to you in order to pursue the path you have chosen. The map we’re given when we’re young provides the initial chance to experience life and to get a sense for who we are and what we enjoy. Becoming a visionary means courageously choosing to live according to your inner compass.
Magic happens in our lives when we’re able to bring that quality of affectionate attention, the attention Goethe talked about as the key that unlocked the secrets of the Strasbourg Cathedral, to our own lives. When we’re able to pay attention to our lives, to see what’s there and to also see beyond what’s immediately visible to the possibilities of what we could create in our lives, we gain information about where we are and a possible next step forward.
This is the power of imagination: it allows you to dream up whatever it is that would serve as an inspiring vision for your life, that would allow you to be more deeply engaged in your own life story, and create a richer experience of meaning and joy.
Now it’s at this point, once we allow ourselves to really dream about life’s possibilities …it’s here that most of us run into the inevitable constraints. Often, the first thing we perceive when we lift our heads to see what’s next is what appears to be an obstacle. If we turn away at this first sign of difficulty, we prevent ourselves from actually being able to head in the direction of our visionary dreams.
In her book, Big Magic: Creating Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert describes a long list of the objections our minds offer up as soon as we actually consider following our creative dreams. We’re too old for that now. We’re too young. We don’t have the right kind of job to afford us the luxury of following dreams. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the right character … we’ve failed in the past or we lack the discipline. We’re afraid of disappointing families or looking foolish or naive in front of friends or colleagues.
The list goes on and on. The real point is that our minds generate fears and objections that can feel very convincing. But the alternative to following your own vision for your life, finding your unique sense of meaning and purpose, knowing that you are here for a reason isn’t actually taking a different path. The alternative is getting stuck and going nowhere. Without a guiding vision, you’ll inevitably experience the loss of narrative traction and an absence of any sense of meaning and purpose to your life beyond doing what you’re supposed to do, what society tells you that your role is as a responsible adult. You can always choose not to face your fears and worries, but the price of doing so is depriving yourself of the life that would bring a sense of fulfillment.
We don’t deny that it can be hard to imagine having the freedom to be a visionary. Most of the messages that society gives us are messages of being constrained by factors that are outside our control. As adults, though, we get to sort through all these beliefs we’ve inherited … the ones that others say are “givens” about reality, and decide which ones we actually want to keep, and which ones we want to test … to see if we actually have more freedom than we thought.
When it comes to having the courage to live life from a place of meaning, we’re both deeply inspired by the work of psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl. Frankl, who survived three years in concentration camps and lost nearly all his closest family members in the Holocaust, was a deep believer in the power of meaning to help one retain a sense of freedom, even in the worst circumstances imaginable.
Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, focuses on how his experience of living in concentration camps impacted his understanding of meaning and the importance of meeting life’s difficulties with courage. For Frankl, freedom ultimately means the ability to choose how we respond to life. “Between stimulus and response there is a space,” Frankl wrote. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
We cannot control our circumstances or the facts of the past … including our family, where we grew up, what opportunities we have or haven’t had in life. Our freedom comes in using our imagination to expand the space of what’s possible for the future …and for our present moment.
An imaginative vision expands this space of freedom, making our lives more fully ours. that way we don’t feel determined by social expectations for what life ought to look like, what we ought to value, but rather we are free to create a life that reflects our chosen values and what’s meaningful and important to us.
That’s going to look different for each of us. Choosing a vision that’s grounded in an understanding of who you are, and what seems important, beautiful, and meaningful to you personally, allows your life to be guided by your unique vision.
So, what about having a vision for your relationships? We’re going to talk first about having a personal vision for your relationships and then about creating a shared vision within an intimate relationship with a partner.
The feedback we often get from those we work with is how challenging it is to put new ideas and strategies into practice in their relationships … because it’s one thing to talk about making a change and how you might do that. It’s another thing entirely to figure out how to actually do that in real time, when you’re in the midst of re-enacting a familiar pattern in your relationship.
As our clients have explained many times, “Everything happens so fast.” And we get it: we have the same experience in our own relationship. It can be hard to keep up with what’s happening, even without trying to integrate a new way of relating.
You might imagine that the value of having a vision for your relationship comes in being able to just orient yourself toward that vision, to interact in ways that are in line with your vision for your relationship. But from our perspective, the true power of having a vision comes in being able to re-orient yourself, once you’ve ended up going off in another direction, one that doesn’t lead you where you’d like to go.
Here’s what we mean by this. Imagine that you’ve discovered that one thing you would like in your relationship—a part of your new vision for your relationship—is that you’d like to speak up for yourself. You’d like to share authentically from the heart about what you’re thinking, or feeling, or what really matters to you. So that’s your vision.
Now imagine that you’re having a conversation with your partner and you have an impulse to speak up for yourself. And you know in that moment that speaking up for yourself would be a way of taking a step in the direction of your vision. But you don’t speak up. You feel anxious about how your partner might respond and it doesn’t seem like the right time. You want to speak up but it’s hard to figure out exactly what to say, so you don’t say anything. The moment passes and you stay quiet and it seems like you’ve missed your opportunity.
This sort of thing happens all the time. And when it happens, it can feel like you failed, like you missed your chance and now you’re going to have to wait until another opportunity comes your way when hopefully you’ll be able to figure out how to do the thing you were just unable to do.
But—the way we see it is that, instead of this being a missed opportunity, it’s actually the perfect opportunity to re-orient yourself toward your vision. You haven’t missed your opportunity at all because we actually have the power to create our own opportunities.
So what does it actually look like to create our own opportunities? Well, in this case, it looks like taking some time to consider what it is that you want to say, and why it feels important to speak up for yourself about the topic at hand, and then approaching your partner to have a new conversation, a conversation in which you re-orient toward your vision for your relationship.
The truth is that with every choice we make in relationships, we always have the power to re-orient in the direction of our vision. We don’t have to get it right the first time.
Relationships offer us countless opportunities for practice, countless opportunities to make choices about how we want to relate to each other. You don’t have to get it right the first time. Having a vision for your life—and your relationships—doesn’t demand that you always make choices that are in line with your vision. That’s perfectionism, which is a one-way ticket to discouragement, self-blame, and the belief that change in impossible.
Instead, the power of having a vision is that when you make a choice that’s not in line with your vision, you feel it. Something feels off, something that signals you to pay attention to what’s happening.
When you listen to this feeling, it allows you to recognize that you’ve gotten a little off-track. And once you recognize that, then you have an opportunity. You have the option of making your next step a step in the right direction, a step that helps you turn toward your vision again.
Each time you re-orient toward your vision, you re-affirm your belief in your vision, you re-affirm that it matters to you. Or, if your vision no longer feels quite right, you now have the chance to recognize that it’s time for you to revisit your vision, to change it and adapt it so that it suits you better as you move forward in life. The process of considering your vision—and either reaffirming or revisiting it—strengthens your relationship to your vision. It makes it more real. It opens a door to having a deeper sense of agency and influence over who you are.
So now that we’ve talked about what it means to have a vision for your life and why it matters, let’s talk about the idea of created a shared vision in an intimate relationship, a vision that helps you navigate together in a relationship.
The value of having a shared vision includes everything we’ve talked about already … it provides you with a sense of direction in your relationship and a shared understanding of goals and the values that help guide your choices in the relationship.
But there’s an additional benefit to having a shared vision in a relationship and the best way to explain this is to talk about the physical mechanics of human vision.
As you know, we humans have two eyes, which creates binocular vision. What’s interesting about this is that what you see when you look at something with only one eye and then the other eye is mostly the same, 75% the same, to be exact. But each eye can see 25% that the other eye doesn’t have access to … that’s the part in our peripheral vision.
When you apply this to relationships, of course, the idea is that each person has the ability to see important aspects of the relationship that the other person doesn’t necessarily have access to.
Which means that when we blend this vision, we have a more complete picture of the relationship as a whole. But it gets even better than that.
Because binocular vision isn’t limited to just having a broader perspective on what’s in front of us. It actually creates our experience of the third dimension of depth … our depth perception is created in the space where what the left eye sees and what the right eye sees overlaps.
When you create a shared vision in a relationship, it provides you with an experience of depth in the relationship, where your individual vision for the relationship overlaps and is informed by your partner’s vision for the relationship.
Each of you brings a particular view of the relationship that can be largely similar, but because you each have your own individual perspectives, you’re each able to see something different. And when you combine your two visions of the relationship, you end up with something richer than either of you could create alone.
One way in which we can work on creating a deeper, richer perspective on our relationship is to intentionally try to see things in the relationship from another perspective, from another angle.
In the book The All-or-Nothing Marriage, psychologist Eli Finkel describes a technique he developed called re-appraisal which he tested with couples participating in a research study on how marital satisfaction changes over time. He asked research participants to write about a recent conflict they’d had in their relationship — and here’s the key detail — they had to write about what happened from the perspective of a neutral third party, one who wanted the best for both people involved.
After they’d written a description of what happened from this neutral third-party perspective, he then asked them to write about what made it difficult for them to take this kind of neutral perspective on conflicts in their relationship. And then he asked them to write about how they might successfully learn to take a neutral perspective on conflicts in their relationship and to consider how they might practice this skill over the next few months.
What his research found was that couples who practiced this technique of re-appraisal, of making an effort to consider their marital conflicts from a neutral perspective actually stopped the downward trajectory of marital satisfaction. This decline is typical for couples over time and was happening for the couples studied prior to practicing reappraising conflicts. If you’d like to give this a try in your own relationship, click HERE to download our guide for how to practice accessing a fresh perspective on your relationship.
Here’s one more thing we wanted to mention on the topic of imagination before we bring this episode to a close. For many of us, the word imagination is synonymous with fantasy. To imagine is seen as equivalent to fantasizing, to leave reality behind in favor of make-believe.
But when we use the word imagination, we’re actually talking about a deeper engagement with reality … an engagement with the reality that goes beyond the surface level of what’s apparent in the everyday world
Imagination is the experience of seeing beyond, seeing beyond just what is present to also incorporate what’s possible … even when it’s not yet visible.
Another way to describe the power of imagination as a way of seeing ourselves, our partners, and the world is to borrow the words of the Little Prince, who said, “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
What’s your relationship archetype?
about angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon
We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection. It’s been known for a long time that painful childhood experiences, including trauma, affect adults at many levels, from physical and mental health to emotional well-being to relationships. While the impact of early trauma on adult relationships is frequently noted by trauma experts, there’s been very little in terms of practical, useful advice or programs that adults with childhood trauma can use to improve their own relationships.
Our programs are designed to fill that gap—to help you understand how your own past experiences influence your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
