This is the third in a series of the blog posts on vision.  First on discovering your deeper vision in times of transition.  Second, on being a servant leader.  And third, on inspiring vision in others.

In my last blog, we saw how great leaders follow an inspiring vision. However, the people following you don’t necessarily see the vision as clearly as you do. How do we evoke our vision for others?

Here are the three vital ingredients: headline, numbers, and feeling.

First what is the clearest statement of your purpose and direction? Can people rally behind it? For example, Google’s Mission Statement is “To organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.” As a coach, mine is “To restore human experience to wholeness by my uninhibited connection with you.” The best headlines create in the reader an idea of an inspiring future and the path to get there.

Visionaries often find numbers hard! But if you don’t make your vision specific and measurable, it is little more than a dream. When you vision is manifesting successfully, what will it look like? What accomplishments will show that you and your team are on track?

Finally, we want to call up movement in the listener’s senses: a picture they can see, sound they can hear, a feeling they can feel on their skin. We see and feel Martin Luther King’s vision when we hear: “One day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream…”  Like a poet we use pictures and metaphor to activate the senses. When people feel your vision in their bodies, that is when they know what they are following.

For what you serve,

• What is your headline?
• What are the numbers?
• How can you evoke the feeling of it?

When you articulate something that doesn’t yet exist in these three modes, you make it almost impossible for it not to come true. And you can always refine how skillfully you are communicating the future that is being created because of you. Take a step today and, if you would like to, send me your latest expression of this. I will be glad to give my reflections.