Visioning for Relationships: Gaining clarity & improving dynamics
What is a Vision for relationships?
A Vision for your relationships is a picture of what a successful relationship looks like to you at a specific point in the future. It can include all types of relationships like friends, family and coworkers too, not just a partner. How you treat yourself and your partner is the basis for how you grow your closest ties with the people you care about, so creating a Vision that helps guide you to be the partner you want to be, will help you attract the partner you want and deserve.
It might be as simple as, “I have left myself open to finding someone who loves me for me, and lets me be who I am.”
It might be as detailed as a whole page of narrative about how that person makes you feel. Specific stories about how you spend your time and improve your bond.
Get clarity on yourself first
Remember that your Vision is really holistic. Oftentimes people will ask, “is this a personal Vision or a professional Vision? Is this for my relationships? Or is it about my finances, right?”
It's all one Vision. Like chapters of a book or like facets of a diamond. All those different pieces make up the one true Vision, a unified whole.
Relationships impact every part of your life and it's a fascinating exercise to see how developing the different facets of your vision also help you gain more clarity about what you want for your relationships.
And figuring out what you want for relationships is going to help you gain more clarity on other parts of your life. It’s all tied together.
Relational clarity applies to all your relationships
The relational part of your Vision is about not just your partner, whether you have one or you might have one or you may not even want one, whatever that looks like for you.
It’s also about your family, your friends, your mentors, your coworkers. Zoom out and think about all the relationships in your life. Are you expecting your partner to be all things to you at all times? Because that is not healthy and you wouldn’t want to be “everything” to someone else. If you’re putting too many different expectations on that person, it's not going to get you where you want to go and you’re more likely to set them up to fail.
My married clients go straight there. And I always remind them, hey, there’s so much more to your relationships. Set your other relationships up for success and you’ll end up taking pressure off of your partner.
You can’t Vision for your partner
Your partner is a separate person who has agency and can make their own decisions. A common mistake is to write a Vision and it turns out sounding like a dream fantasy of what you want everything to look like. And then what if they don’t do that thing? What does that mean?
We can avoid pressuring someone into an unrealistic fantasy by eliminating Vision Creep in the refining round. Just like scope creep on a project, Vision Creep is very very normal in the first draft.
The first draft is the point to get all that fantasy out because you would love those things to happen of course! And it’s nice to think about. But is it strategically sound and realistic? Probably not.
In the refining phase, we pull back and recognize okay, this is not actually for me, that's outside the scope of my vision. That's their vision.
What if instead you asked, what would be the evidence that I'm really nurturing and building the relationships that I want? How do I want to show up for the people I care about?
Avoid: My kids are having a blast on the soccer field. They're excelling. They've gotten accepted to 15 schools. My partner is healthier than they've ever been. They're going to the gym five times a week.
Reality: Your kids might hate soccer. They might be doing really bad in school, they might not want to go to college, your partner may be in a phase where they're eating cookies every day because that's just what they need to do right now. And so you can be frustrated by those things continuously, because you can’t control them, or you can recognize that's outside of the scope of mine.
Try instead: My kids know, they can always come to me.
Now, that doesn't mean the kids actually come to you. They might never come to you. But if you can read that statement and have it be true, then that's evidence that you are showing up in a way that at least shows your kids that you are there, you're there to listen, you're not going to be judgmental.
Shift the perspective
For a parent who wants the best for everyone, for their kids, for their family, it can be uncomfortable to really take a step back and recognize we don't have control over any of that!
Even if your kids hate soccer, your Vision can come true.
No one can take your vision away from you.
But in order for that to be the case. you can’t go outside the scope of your own vision.
What do we really care about? Is it really that our kid loves soccer or that we feel like we're nurturing their passions? Is it really about getting into school or is that they know they have the resources to do whatever they want for their education and feel supported by their parents. Look past those surface level dreams and fantasies and aspirations.
Do you put their name in the Vision or a generic word like “partner”?
If you are with the partner who you know is your partner for life, put their name absolutely. If you're dating and you're not quite sure if they’re in it for the long haul, then call it whatever word feels right for you.
Will a Vision for my relationships make me too picky when dating?
Distill down, what the nonnegotiables are for your partner.
Remember the True North Visioning principle, We want to move towards what we do want not away from what we don't want.
So if a lot of your criteria are for your partner are based on things like… Well, I don’t want them to be shorter than me and I don't want them to have bad finances and I don’t want them to listen to country music; you're moving away from what you don't want, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be moving towards what you actually do want.
It’s so natural to think about things we don’t want, because oftentimes it’s something we don't want to repeat from a past relationship. It’s useful to bring this up during the exercise, but then we really challenge and encourage you to then flip it to the other side.
Because if you're just focused on the criteria of what you don't want, then you're going to be scanning every crowd in every room and kind of looking for them to fail.
But if you peel back the layers and really get down to the core three non negotiables for you and a partner, then it really allows people who are so different than what you ever expected to show up in your life and you’ll be open to entertaining the idea that this might be the person in your Vision!
Whereas if you create it in a way that is more about the external factors, and what you don't want, then again, you're giving all the reasons why no one will be able to measure up. But if you're thinking more about fundamental core values, at the guiding principle level, you will be more successful at finding this in your relationship.
My three nonnegotiables for my relationship are supportive, inspirational and trustworthy.
It goes both ways. I want a partner I can inspire as much as a partner who inspires me.
Why only three?
Got 18 things on the list? Great, write the list. But then let's distill it down even further, because the right word can hold so much in it.
“Inspiration” can be in the way they interact with other people, what they're excited about pursuing, the hobby they’re passionate about.
Using extremely specific, intentionally vague, rich words, means you don’t have to hold them to a look or a specific income or job, but you can say, “financial stability is a nonnegotiable for me.” That could look like a lot of things!
They are the person in your Vision until they’re not
Let's say you are single when you're going through the Visioning process and you write about your partner. And then you start dating, and meet someone pretty cool!
And then you think, oh my gosh, this is the person in my Vision? But later, you break up. Sometimes Visionaries will feel like oh, well, my vision is null and void because I met the person and they didn’t work out.
What I want you to keep in your heart and your soul is that the person that you are with is the person your vision until they're not.
And it doesn't mean that you are off track or it doesn't mean that you were deluding yourself. You found things in them that really did align with your Vision! It’s not binary.
When you get to that point, where either you or your partner aren’t aligned with your Vision, then you revisit the nonnegotiables.It might be a hard decision, but every time you do use your Vision to make a decision that aligns with your heart and soul, you’re gaining more and more clarity in your relational goals.
Sharing your Vision with your partner
Almost every guy I dated in the past 10 years, I’ve read my Vision to them within three dates. I’d deadpan read it to them, and matter of factly tell them, this is where I’m headed, If this sounds good to you, awesome. But if this isn’t your thing, that’s okay too.
And when it ended, I shed all the tears and it was still hard, but it felt like leaving that relationship is evidence that I am continuing to make my Vision a reality. I'm continuing to live it into existence because I'm taking this intentional, proactive step in my life. Trusting that you’re making the right choice can soften the blow.
Do you put their name in the Vision or a generic word like “partner”?
If you are with the partner who you know is your partner for life, put their name absolutely. If you're dating and you're not quite sure if they’re in it for the long haul, then call it whatever word feels right for you.
You don’t have the wait for them to start
What’s so wonderful about Visioning is that you don't have to wait until the end of the 3 or 5 year span to feel successful in your relationships. You can start to feel the way immediately, even if in incremental ways.
I was working with one woman who knew from a young age that she wanted to have a family, but she was single. She wrote about how romantic her relationship was in her Vision and when she was done I said to her Okay, great. So how do we start?
And she says, I don't know I'm not dating anyone.
Uhh what? I'm pretty sure you have a super romantic dress in your closet. So yeah, how about you put that on tomorrow, get the candles out, and take yourself out for a drink?
You can start feeling romantic now.
And when you do that, you put that energy out into the world and become a magnet for reciprocation.
Just know that you never never never have to wait for this person to show up in your life to start feeling the way that you wrote about your vision.
Your at the end of your Vision and he hasn’t shown up
When I wrote my current five year vision, I talked about my partner because I just knew at my core in my heart of hearts that I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but I truly felt like it was going to. I knew I could get there even if I didn't know how.
To protect myself from a failure hangover in my Vision, I wrote it in such a way where we could have just met that day, or we could have been married for two years already, or we could be dating and engaged or any other kind of dynamic that didn’t lock me in. I knew that if I did, then I would feel that pressure. I would feel pushed instead of feeling pulled.
Shift the language: Over the past five years, I'm so proud that I've opened myself up to be in a relationship with somebody new.
Because this is intentionally vague, you could be single or happily married, but it still reflects your core values and nonnegotiables.
Visioning as a couple
A lot of couples I work with, also work together or are in business together. Oftentimes they don’t, but just want a stronger shared Vision.
Couples in the True North program do the Visioning process for themselves alone in parallel, because it's critically important that they each feel like they have their own vision and they're able to really define what success means to them, without even subconscious pressure.
The realizations that come to the surface are so incredible, they learn so much more about each other, offering thoughts to each other and reflections like “I’ve never heard you say that before”.
We then coalesce a shared Vision. Along the way, they're gaining that clarity, insight, and self awareness for themselves at the same time. It helps remind us that we all have our own internal compasses, even if we are part of any kind of unit. We deserve to have our own individual view of our future.
Be prepared to take action
All the things that are left unsaid, all things that get tiptoed around, these tend to come up in the process. If you know in your heart of hearts, that this person or situation isn’t aligned to your Vision, then you may have to have a challenging conversation.
You try to make it work, to accept the parts of them you cannot change, maybe you even think it’s you! And better communication could fix it, right? It’s totally natural to talk ourselves through these loopholes because facing it necessitates action which is not comfortable.
But the Vision is documented. It's in black and white. You can go back to it and say, I just can't look at this and pretend that my reality reflects my Vision.
Would you sit down and write about the future this way?
“It's January 1, 2026. And I feel completely disconnected. I don't feel like I'm showing up as a partner I want to be because I don't. I’m not sure if this is what I really want or where I’m going.”
Of course not. So let’s create a different future.