Repositioning & Revisioning: Moving Beyond New Year’s Resolutions
Adapted from the Repositioning & Revisioning for 2026 Webinar with Leslie Dashew & Jonathan Magidovitch
Building Purpose, Vision & Intentional Plans for Individuals & Family Businesses
Every December, there is a familiar ritual: the making of lists. New Year’s resolutions and goals pile up. They can be vague, quickly forgotten, and often, rarely actualized. Many of us have been there. And yet, as the calendar turns, so does the opportunity. The question is not whether to plan, but how to plan in ways that truly move us forward as individuals, as families, and as family businesses.
What if there was something richer and more structured than a resolution list? Individuals and family enterprises can use a set of tools to design a framework tochart meaningful direction, align around shared values, and build the kind of plans that come to life.
Being Proactive: The Power of Planning
There is a well-known saying from Lewis Carroll:
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
It is a deceptively simple idea, but one that sits at the heart of this work. Without a destination in mind, we tend to react rather than direct. We respond to what happens around us rather than shaping what happens next.
An important concept here is locus of control – the degree to which we believe we can influence the world around us. Research on people who live effective, impactful lives suggests that those with an internal locus of control, those who believe they can make a difference, tend to be more proactive and goal oriented. Those with an external locus of control feel subject to the forces around them and struggle to set or pursue their own goals.
For family business members in particular, this distinction carries real weight. It is easy, in the context of a family enterprise, to feel that one’s role is defined by default rather than by design; to respond to what the business or the family needs rather than to actively shape one’s own path within it. Developing an internal locus of control, and with it the confidence to set goals, articulate dreams, and claim a seat at the table, is a prerequisite for meaningful planning.
Another concept woven through this work is neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change and adapt. There is growing evidence that the act of planning itself strengthens neural pathways. The more we make plans, the more we create the cognitive architecture that makes those plans real. Writing things down, envisioning outcomes, and returning to our goals over time is not just good organizational hygiene. It is brain science. A plan is not a rigid contract with the future; it is a direction, a strategy, and a living document that can flex as circumstances evolve.
Begin with Yourself
Effective repositioning unfolds across three interconnected dimensions: the individual, the interpersonal, and the family business. These are not separate tracks; they inform and shape one another. To plan well for a family business, owners and leaders first need clarity about who they are and what they want. To participate meaningfully in interpersonal and family dialogue, each person must understand their own purpose and values. The work begins with the self.
Starting with Purpose
One of the most powerful tools in this framework is the personal statement of purpose. Unlike a goal which describes a specific outcome, a purpose statement captures the deeper why behind what we do. It tends to be remarkably stable across time, even as our visions for the future shift and evolve.
To develop a Personal Statement of Purpose, the exercise asks us to step into the perspectives of four different people in our lives: a family member, a friend, a colleague, and someone from our community. What would each of them say we have taught them? How have we inspired them? What do they see when they see us at our best? Writing these reflections down, and then distilling them into a single sentence, typically reveals something genuine and clarifying about one’s core orientation in the world.
A statement of purpose is a consistent thread that runs through every aspect of one’s life, regardless of context. When we have clarity of purpose, we have a shorthand way of knowing where to put our energy and where to say no. Dashew’s purpose is “to bring people together to learn, grow, heal, and assist each other on our journeys.” Magidovitch’s is “bringing to reality the values, mission, and vision of myself and others.” In both cases, the statement is not a job title or a role, it’s a way of living and being.
Clarifying Values
Purpose tells us what we want to accomplish. Values tell us how we want to get there and what matters most to us along the way. The Values Unfolding Exercise, adapted from Ann Dapice, is designed to help individuals move past surface-level responses and reach their true core.
Values, like purpose, tend to be stable across a lifetime though they are not entirely fixed. Some values are shaped by absence or deprivation. Someone who grew up without financial security may carry financial stability as a core value throughout their life; once that security is achieved, time or freedom or energy may rise in its place. Understanding where our values come from helps us hold them with greater self-awareness. And sharing our values with the people we live and work with, particularly in a family business, can be one of the most enriching and alignment-building exercises a family can do together.
Setting Goals with Perspective
With purpose and values in hand, the next step is goal setting. This Goal Setting Exercise offers a particularly illuminating approach. The exercise involves three lists, each written without censorship or editing, allowing thoughts to flow freely, as you think about your life’s goals from three perspectives: everything you want to accomplish in your lifetime; everything you want to accomplish in the next two to three years; what you would want to accomplish if you knew you only had 12 months to live.
The power of this exercise lies in comparing the three lists. The lifetime list tends toward the grand and aspirational: travel, legacy, big creative projects. The two-to-three-year list gets more concrete, more practical. And the one-year list, for most people, turns decisively toward relationships: the people we love, the time we want to spend with them, the conversations we want to have.
These lists taken alongside your values and purpose create the raw material for answering the fundamental planning question:
What do I want to spend my resources on? My time, my energy, my money — and what is most important to do now?
Dashew reflected that her own planning shifted when she recognized that certain kinds of travel, for example hiking in India, adventuring through Africa, require a degree of physical capacity that changes over time. This awareness shaped her near-term priorities, adding muscle strength and flexibility training to her action steps. Planning, in this sense, is not merely aspirational; it is also honest about what is possible and what is urgent.
Creating a Shared Vision for the Family Business
Individual clarity is essential, but in a family business it is not sufficient. The owners, family members, and leaders who are navigating the enterprise together need a shared vision: an agreed-upon picture of where the family and the business are heading. Research and experience both suggest that shared vision is one of the most critical success factors in family enterprise. When everyone feels heard, when voices have been genuinely considered, a shared destination becomes both a compass and a source of cohesion.
A tool for developing this shared vision is the “Letter to Self”, an exercise long used in Aspen Family Business Group work. Each family member writes a letter to themselves, set a few years in the future, describing what has happened in three domains: the family, the business, and their own life. The letter is written in the present tense of that future date, as though that future moment has already arrived.
These letters are then shared. Themes are identified. What did multiple people say? What kept appearing? From this common ground, a draft vision statement is assembled, tested against individual responses (“Do I buy into this? Am I willing to put my resources behind it?”), refined, and eventually agreed upon. The result is a vision that did not come from the top down, but from the inside out.
When we articulate a vision, write it down, and return to it, we literally train ourselves to see and pursue what aligns with that vision. Dashew describes building her own adobe home in Arizona this way. She collected images in a notebook for years before she even understood the architectural term for what she wanted, then presented that notebook to architects who could give her dream a name and a blueprint. The image preceded the plan, but the image was essential.
Accountability, Capacity & the Long Game
A vision without accountability is still just a wish. One of the most practical dimensions of this repositioning work is the emphasis on building structures of accountability not as a form of external pressure, but as a form of care and support.
For family businesses, accountability for the shared vision is ideally held by multiple parties: a CEO or chair for the business side, and a chief emotional officer for the family side. A board of directors, particularly one with independent directors, can hold the business and its owners accountable in ways that are more objective and less personally fraught than family members holding each other accountable in isolation.
Equally important is the concept of capacity. A plan that exceeds the capacity of the people who need to implement it is not a plan, it is a burden. Families and family businesses differ in how much they can reasonably take on. Some may have the bandwidth for one transformative goal each year; others may have the infrastructure for several. The art lies in matching ambition to capacity with honesty. Thirty goals will overwhelm; one or two, pursued with focus and intention, can genuinely move the needle.
Resilience is a critical ingredient; organizations and individuals must build the capacity to absorb and adapt to the inevitable disruptions that plans will encounter, . Exercise, meditation, learning new skills, and investing in relationships all contribute to the kind of resilience that makes sustained planning possible. The universe will always throw curves. Our goal is to remain standing when it does.
The Benefits of Repetition
Perhaps the most important insight in this work is the simplest: do it again. These exercises are not one-time events. They are practices. A values exercise or a letter-to-self may feel awkward or inconclusive the first time through. That is part of the process. Insights do not always arrive immediately; they circulate, noodle around, and emerge in time. And each time the exercise is repeated, it is done with greater wisdom, greater self-knowledge, and greater capacity to translate reflection into action.
There is an old proverb:
If you want to go fast, do it yourself. If you want to go far, do it with others.
For family businesses in particular, the repositioning and revisioning work is most powerful when it is done together. Enlisting others (family, trusted advisors, board members, colleagues) into the planning process is not a slowdown; it is an investment in continuity. The more people understand the shared vision and feel ownership of it, the more likely that vision is to survive any one leader, any one generation, any one moment in time.
We often see the world through the lens of what we already know, want, and believe. These exercises can bring the inner lens into focus so that we can look outward with greater clarity, greater intention, and greater hope for what is possible.
Clarity Emerges from Challenging Introspection
The work of repositioning and revisioning is not glamorous. It requires sitting with questions that do not have easy answers, returning to exercises that feel incomplete, and building plans with the full knowledge that circumstances will change. But it is among the most important work that individuals and families in business together can do.
When we know our purpose, we know where to direct our energy. When we understand our values, we make decisions with less internal conflict and more integrity. When we share a vision with the people, we build our lives and our businesses alongside, we discover that alignment is one of the most powerful resources available to us. We can solve almost any problem, if we all want the same thing.
