The new year has just begun. Traditionally, this is a time for setting goals and making plans. Leadership and coaching, within the transactional paradigm, revolve around achieving results, setting interim milestones, and devising an action plan to reach those (sub)goals. This approach can work quite well within certain contexts.

However, in situations involving complexity and rapid changes in reality, this approach tends to fall short. Once you reach steps 2 or 3 of your action plan, you realize that the environment has changed so significantly that the plan is no longer applicable. You can choose to adjust your plan, but then there's a risk of getting stuck in constant plan adjustments, consuming a lot of time.

Another path

Fortunately, there's another path: a transformational approach. Transformational Presence suggests leaving the problem-solving, linear approach and opting for a more organically potential-based method.

The starting point shifts from the problem to the underlying potential. Instead of figuring it out, you sense, from a place of stillness and deceleration, the greater vision that wants to become a reality. This vision provides a sense of direction, defining the journey you need to take. Within the vision lies a potential waiting to emerge, essentially offering a vehicle through which greater potential can manifest. Goals then become steps toward that larger vision.

The whole creates the parts

What makes this approach so appealing and fitting for me is that it reverses the usual notion of parts making up the whole. Instead, the whole creates the parts. This mirrors how nature operates. When an egg and a sperm cell come together, the DNA creates the constituent parts. You could call the DNA the essence or 'vision' of the entire organism. Through multiplication, division, and multiplication again, cells form various organs and tissues that, in perfect coherence, constitute the entire new organism. Each constituent part is inspired and informed by the DNA; in other words, the whole has shaped the parts.

In a transformational paradigm, a goal is not something you decide or choose but rather something you discover by following your vision.

Focusing on setting goals before having clarity about a larger vision can eventually disconnect goals from the essence of who you are. It's like creating a bunch of body parts without a vision of the organism they should serve. The goal may seem valuable, but if it's not informed and inspired by who you are in essence and a vision of who you're called to be and what you feel called to do, it's likely not sustainable.

However, starting with the vision and the underlying potential waiting to unfold, a more potent life force supports your efforts. Once you tap into that tremendous energy and let it show you the goals that can lead to its manifestation, each goal is infused with that greater potential.

So, take some time this week to answer the following questions:

• What is your vision for 2024?
• Who are you called to be?
• What are you called to do? If your vision is a vehicle for a greater potential wanting to emerge, what could that potential be?

Let your vision guide you this year and gradually reveal your path. A path you're probably already walking. Listen and follow your intuition, pick up signals, and connect actions to them without knowing precisely what they will bring you. Stay in motion and trust that you are supported.

Wishing you lots of joyful discoveries!