One of the essentials in becoming a better communicator is understanding and embracing the characteristics of your specific voice. As a VISIONARY, you have three distinct strengths you must lean into for the greatest impact. You also have a significant weakness that, left unchecked, can undermine your strengths and limit your ability to connect and communicate with others.

The strengths of a visionary are inspiration, articulation, and mobilization. Let’s look at each in greater detail:

INSPIRATION

You are able to lead your audience to rekindle their belief and hope. You easily translate and share your positive outlook on the world in a way that makes the audience believe the same. Inspiration is all about moving people from a mindset of “I can’t” to a mindset of “I can.”

ARTICULATION

You are exceptional at explaining a problem that needs to be solved. You can break a problem down into small, manageable pieces that can be tackled in a systematic fashion in order to produce progress. The challenge here is to make sure that you develop that system as you breakdown the problem; you’ll need a plan in order to achieve your true goal.

MOBILIZATION

Once you’ve identified and explained the problem facing the audience thoroughly, you are able to convince them that they can solve it. Here is where your plan comes into play—once people are excited and ready to take next steps, you must have next steps for them to take. You don’t have to have everything mapped out, but you must at least have a solid first step for the audience and then confidently encourage them to take it.

The weakness of the visionary is often a lack of CLARITY. Since visions are compelling pictures of an as-yet unfulfilled future, It can be difficult for the visionary to see exactly how the vision can become a reality. They may have strong instincts on the matter, but they will lack the specific details that the best plans require. Instincts alone may inspire someone to want to take action, but instincts will not answer the questions an audience will ask in order to understand how to mobilize and take action on the vision.

While you don’t have to have all the details, you must have something more than mere certainty that things will work out for the best. Without some sort of initial next steps, a visionary can sound like a politician without a plan: it’s not inspiring, it’s just rhetoric. Visionaries must make the leap from being optimistic, simply believing that things will get better, to being hopeful—believing things will get better because you have a plan for making it so.

Even a broadly sketched plan that has plenty of gaps at least invites highly motivated people into a conversation on how best to fill those gaps, and that’s all a good vision needs to get rolling in the right direction.

EXAMPLE OF A VISIONARY

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The future that Dr. King has yet to be achieved, but the progress over the past 60 years has yielded some fruit. Dr. King’s ability to highlight the most difficult and depraved problem facing America, while providing a pathway towards hope for a better future that people follow to this day, sets him apart as one of the greatest visionaries to ever live.