When my taxi from the airport arrived at the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, I was feeling uncharacteristically apprehensive. The purpose of my first visit to the Miami Lighthouse was to officially kick off a major consulting project. In a few minutes I would be meeting Virginia, who had been the Miami Lighthouse’s first blind president and CEO since June 2005, after serving in an interim, pro bono capacity for the prior four months.

Visioning – painting a picture of the life you aspire to lead over the long run – is one of the most powerful tools for growing and enriching your life professionally and personally.  However, experience has taught me that you shouldn’t think of visioning as a straightforward planning exercise.  I’ve never come across a person who regularly updated a formal, personal vision statement, and I can’t imagine formally updating my own vision on a regular basis as part of some sort of personal strategic planning process.

When Scrooge’s former partner, Jacob Marley, informs Scrooge on that eventful Christmas Eve that he’ll be visited by three spirits – the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future – Scrooge, of course, demurs.  “Thanks but no thanks” was his understandable response to his former partner’s unsettling revelation.  What normal person is looking to add discomfort and potential pain to his or her life?  Scrooge was comfortably living in a box of his own making with really thick – seemingly impenetrable – walls:  a pretty grim box – focused on accumulating money and devoid of human intimacy –

After six weeks, I earned the privilege of being relocated from the ICU to a standard hospital room. It was pleasing to know that the medical experts no longer considered me on the verge of death. I was now on the miraculous road to recovery.

This past weekend, I found myself in one of those “woe is me” moods, which, fortunately, don’t hit me too often.  The amount of consulting work that needed to be done by Monday seemed overwhelming, I’d fallen pretty badly behind on writing my new book on leading “out-of-the-box” change, and on top of that I was struggling with a cold that wouldn’t go away.  Some TLC would’ve pepped me up, but, alas, my wife Barbara was in North Carolina on a buying trip for her interior design business, so I was stuck with my morose self.