To be authentic you have to start with your own vision.
Vision & Systems by Guðbjörg Eggertsdóttir
Start with a vision for your life
Creating a vision involves connecting deeply with your values, purpose, and the future you want to bring to life. It’s both reflective and imaginative.
Here’s a simple process to craft a meaningful vision:
- Pause and reflect
Take time to quiet your mind — through mindfulness, journaling, or Qi Gong — and connect with what truly matters to you. - Clarify your values
Identify the principles that guide your life or leadership (e.g., compassion, balance, growth, authenticity). - Imagine your ideal future
Picture yourself, your team, or your community in 5–10 years. What does it look and feel like when things are aligned and thriving? - Describe it vividly
Write in the present tense, as if it’s already happening. Use sensory and emotional language — what do you see, hear, and feel? - Keep it inspiring and concise
A strong vision is easy to remember and emotionally resonant. It should energize you and others. - Align actions with it
Let your daily choices, goals, and relationships reflect your vision.
˚Lead with vision shaped by system thinking˚
A simple structure to write it:
A vision for your company
A company vision expresses the long-term purpose and desired future state of the organization — it’s the “why” behind everything the company does.
Examples of how to shape one:
- Start with purpose: Why does your company exist beyond making profit?
- Imagine the future: What positive change will your company create in the world or in people’s lives?
- Keep it inspiring and timeless: It should guide decisions for years to come.
Sample company vision statements:
- To empower people to live and work with creativity, balance, and compassion.
- To create a world where innovation and wellbeing thrive together.
- To inspire mindful leadership that transforms organizations and communities.
- To design solutions that bring harmony between people, planet, and progress.
A strong vision feels both aspirational and authentic — something your team can believe in and work toward every day.
To make a company vision realistic, it needs to be both inspiring and grounded in what’s achievable through your values, resources, and actions.
Here’s how to do that:
- Connect it to your core strengths
Build your vision around what your company already does well — your unique skills, culture, and capabilities. - Align it with real-world needs
Make sure your vision responds to genuine challenges or opportunities in your field or community. - Break it into milestones
Translate the big vision into smaller, measurable goals that show progress over time. - Engage your team
Involve people across the company in shaping and refining the vision. When everyone sees their role in it, it becomes more tangible. - Stay flexible
A realistic vision evolves. Revisit it regularly to ensure it still fits your direction and the world around you. - Live it daily
Embed the vision into decisions, communication, and company culture — not just as words on a wall, but as a shared way of working and being.
Excellent tool for your strategy
Systems thinking is a way of understanding how things are connected and influence one another within a whole. Instead of looking at parts in isolation, it focuses on the relationships, patterns, and dynamics that shape outcomes.
Key ideas in systems thinking:
- Interconnectedness – Everything is part of a larger system. A change in one area affects others, sometimes in unexpected ways.
- Feedback loops – Actions create reactions that can either reinforce (positive feedback) or balance (negative feedback) the system.
- Patterns over time – Systems thinking looks for trends and recurring behaviors rather than one-time events.
- Multiple perspectives – It values seeing issues from different viewpoints to understand the whole picture.
- Leverage points – Small, well-placed actions can create big, lasting change when applied at the right spot in the system.
In leadership or wellbeing, systems thinking helps you see how mind, body, and heart interact — and how changes in one area ripple through the others. It encourages holistic, compassionate decision-making rather than quick fixes.
Idiom and systems thinking are quite different concepts, but they can connect in interesting ways when exploring how language and thought shape understanding.
Idiom
An idiom is a phrase or expression whose meaning isn’t literal but culturally understood. For example, “the tip of the iceberg” means only a small part of a much larger issue. Idioms often reflect collective experience and shared mental models within a culture.
Systems Thinking
Systems thinking is a holistic approach to understanding how parts of a system interact and influence one another. Instead of focusing on isolated events, it looks at patterns, feedback loops, and relationships that create the system’s behavior over time.
Connection Between the Two
Idioms can serve as powerful metaphors for systems thinking. For instance:
- “The tip of the iceberg” illustrates how visible problems are often symptoms of deeper, hidden structures.
- “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link” reflects interdependence within a system.
- “You can’t see the forest for the trees” warns against losing sight of the whole system by focusing too narrowly on parts.
In essence, idioms can act as linguistic shortcuts to express systems thinking principles — complexity, interconnection, and the importance of perspective.
Idiom and Systems Thinking — A Deeper Exploration
1. Idioms as Cultural Systems
Idioms are not just linguistic curiosities; they are micro-systems of meaning. Each idiom emerges from a network of shared experiences, values, and metaphors within a culture. When someone says “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” they are invoking a system of risk management, resource distribution, and foresight — all embedded in a simple phrase.
From a systems thinking perspective, idioms are nodes in a cultural feedback loop. They reinforce certain ways of perceiving the world and, in turn, shape behavior. For example, a culture rich in idioms about control (“take the bull by the horns”) may emphasize agency and mastery, while one with idioms about flow (“go with the flow”) may value adaptability and harmony.
2. Systems Thinking as a Language of Relationships
Systems thinking itself can be seen as a kind of language — one that describes relationships, feedback, and emergence. It shifts focus from linear cause-and-effect to circular causality. In this sense, idioms are like linguistic feedback loops: they compress complex relational insights into memorable, repeatable forms.
For instance, “what goes around comes around” is a folk expression of feedback — the same principle that underlies systems concepts like balancing loops and karma-like dynamics.
3. Idioms as Mental Models
Every idiom carries an implicit mental model — a way of framing how the world works. Systems thinking invites us to surface and examine these models.
- “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” assumes attention and resources flow toward visible problems — a reinforcing loop that can distort priorities.
- “Don’t rock the boat” implies stability is preferable to change — a balancing loop that resists transformation.
By analyzing idioms through a systems lens, we can uncover the assumptions that guide collective behavior and decision-making.
4. The Feedback Between Language and Thought
Language doesn’t just describe systems; it shapes them. When idioms become habitual, they influence how people perceive complexity. A society that often uses idioms of competition (“dog-eat-dog world”) may unconsciously reinforce adversarial systems, while one that uses idioms of interdependence (“we’re all in the same boat”) may foster collaboration.
This interplay between idiom and system is recursive: idioms arise from lived systems, and those idioms then reinforce or challenge the very systems that produced them.
5. Applying Systems Thinking to Idioms
To apply systems thinking to idioms, one might:
- Map the system behind an idiom — what relationships, feedback loops, or power dynamics it reflects.
- Identify leverage points — how changing the idiom (or the story it tells) could shift collective behavior.
- Create new idioms that express regenerative, interconnected, or compassionate worldviews. For example, replacing “time is money” with “time is energy” reframes productivity as vitality rather than extraction.
6. Toward a Regenerative Language
If idioms are cultural DNA, then evolving them consciously can transform systems. By crafting idioms that reflect balance, interdependence, and compassion, we can seed new mental models that support wellbeing — for individuals, organizations, and societies.
In essence, idioms are the linguistic fingerprints of systems thinking in everyday life — compact expressions of how humans perceive and navigate complexity. When we examine and evolve them consciously, we begin to reshape the systems that shape us.
Presentation – Vision and Systems by Guðbjörg Eggertsdóttir
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