I still believe a future target is the first step to building momentum. Helping someone assess where they are and chart a path to where they want to be — that is the work. Over time I noticed the language that once carried the conversation was carrying less and less of it. Even for me.

It makes me chuckle, thinking through all the goal-setting approaches that have moved through the leadership world — and how many of them I used in some form. Drucker’s Management by Objectives. The one-year, five-year, and ten-year plan. SMART goals. Big Hairy Audacious Goals. OKRs. The 4 Disciplines of Execution. PACT. WOOP. The 12 Week Year. Finding your WHY — which had its moment until people realized that demanding clarity on life’s purpose before you can decide what to do Tuesday morning is its own kind of paralysis. Vision boards went out of fashion for so long they’ve come back around again. Further convincing me that everything old becomes new again.

Each one had its moment. Each one solved something real. And each one, somewhere along the way, stopped doing the work it was supposed to do.

Then came the tipping point most of these frameworks weren’t built for.

Covid pulled a meaningful share of the workforce into survival mode and kept them there. Five years on, many of the leaders I work with are still operating from that posture without naming it. The nervous system adapted to a world where the next quarter wasn’t predictable, where plans collapsed mid-execution, where the right answer was to stay light on your feet and react well. That adaptation served people through the disruption. It does not serve the creation of future targets well.

In my experience, you cannot set a meaningful goal for the future from inside survival mode. Survival mode is wired for the next ninety minutes, not the next ninety days. It treats forward thinking as a luxury. It treats commitment as exposure. Ask someone in that state where they want to be in three years and they will give you a polite answer that means nothing — because the part of them that could answer honestly has been turned down low for a long time.

This is what most goal-setting frameworks miss in the present moment. They assume a leader with the bandwidth to plan. Many do not have that bandwidth, and they cannot get it back by selecting a more sophisticated framework. They get it back by working within a structure nimble enough to use when capacity is still rebuilding and the future is ever shifting.

That is the framework I started using with most of my clients now. It is the one that consistently makes the most difference and the one I get the most questions about.

Three time horizons. Each one answers a different question. Together they give you a direction without locking you to a destination.

Now. Near. Horizon.

Now

The current season — roughly the next ninety days to twelve months.

The question Now answers is: what am I building?

Not what am I producing. Producing is output. Building is something else. Building is what you’re putting into the account that accumulates over time. Skills. Relationships. Reputation. Knowledge. Visibility. Trust.

A useful test. If you stripped away the next twelve months of output entirely — every meeting, every report, every project — what would you have built that’s still with you? What’s accumulating that doesn’t disappear when the project closes?

For some people, the answer is sobering. They’re producing constantly and building almost nothing. The output is impressive on paper, and they’re getting paid for it, and they’re still arriving at year-end with nothing more than they had at year-start. No new capability. No new relationships. No new positioning.

That’s the Now question doing its work. It separates the season’s output from the season’s accumulation. It tells you whether the present is actually building anything for the future, or whether it’s just running on a treadmill.

Near

The next eighteen to twenty-four months.

The question Near answers is: are my options expanding or contracting?

This one tends to clarify quickly. People feel it before they can articulate it.

Expanding options look like — more rooms you’re invited into, more conversations you’re consulted in, more decisions you’re trusted with, more types of work you can take on, more people who would hire you or partner with you or send work your way.

Contracting options look like — the same room year over year, the same scope, the same handful of people who know what you do, fewer external relationships, less visibility, the slow narrowing that happens when someone has been excellent at one thing for too long.

Neither is inherently good or bad. The question is whether the trajectory matches what you actually want. If you want to consolidate and deepen, contraction in the right direction is healthy. If you want to expand into something larger, contraction is a warning. The trajectory provides important data.

The Near question forces you to look at the trajectory honestly. Not the brand of where you are. The trajectory.

Horizon

The direction without the destination.

The question Horizon answers is: what kind of contribution do I want to be capable of making?

I’m careful with the language here. Most career frameworks ask where you want to see yourself or what’s your purpose. Those questions don’t survive contact with the actual world. The world moves faster than ever. People change. New options appear that weren’t visible before. A specific destination locked in today is mostly a fiction by year three.

What does survive contact with the world is direction. Not the port — the bearing.

A horizon is something you move toward. It recedes as you approach it. That’s not a flaw. That’s the honest geometry of how meaningful work actually evolves. You don’t arrive at the horizon. You become someone capable of seeing the next one.

The Horizon question is about the kind of person you’re trying to become. The kind of contribution you want to be capable of. The kind of life you want to have the capacity to live.

It is not specific. It is not measurable. It is, however, directional. And direction is what guides the smaller decisions when the field gets noisy.

•          •          •

The three horizons together form a working framework. Now is current. Near is positioning. Horizon is direction.

When they’re aligned, your present feels purposeful, your near-term feels energizing, and your direction feels clear.

When they’re misaligned, you feel stuck. Or busy. Or successful in ways that don’t matter to you. The framework helps you see which of the three is breaking down. It’s almost never all three at once. Usually it’s one — and the others are getting blamed for it.

A leader whose Now is full of high-output, low-build work. They’re producing constantly and accumulating nothing. The Near looks the same as the present — same room, same scope, same shape of work. The Horizon they describe doesn’t connect to anything they’re doing now. The fix isn’t more discipline. The fix is restructuring Now so it builds something other than output.

A leader whose Now and Near are both strong — they’re building, they’re positioning — but they have no Horizon. They’ve optimized for advancement without naming what they’re advancing toward. The work feels productive and increasingly hollow. The fix isn’t to slow down. The fix is to name the direction so the building has somewhere to point.

A leader whose Horizon is clear, but whose Now and Near don’t reflect it. They know exactly where they’re going. They’re working on something else entirely. That gap is the most expensive one. The fix is honesty about whether the current work serves the direction, or whether it’s a default pattern that needs to change.

•          •          •

The language changes. The frameworks for arriving at a future vision changes. The structure underneath — what makes real change happen — does not.

Every approach to building a life or a business rests on the same four pieces. You need a sense of where you want to go — that is goal setting. You need a sense of how you’ll get there — that is pathway. You need the willingness to try something different when the first thing fails — that is grit. And you need to believe you are capable of making it happen — that is agency. Take any one of them out and forward momentum stops.

What changes — and what has to change — is the language that carries those four pieces into a room. The multi-year plan reached people in a stable economy in a way it does not reach them in this one. When the language stops landing, it is not the fault of the structure underneath. It just needs a different vehicle to arrive at clarity.

Now. Near. Horizon. is the vehicle that has been doing the work for me and for my clients — because the language for defining what people want meets them where they are now. Capacity rebuilding, horizon uncertain, the next ninety days more real than the next nine years.

You need to know what you’re building this season. Whether your options are expanding or contracting. And what direction you’re actually pointed in when you stop pretending you don’t know.

Now. Near. Horizon.

That’s the working framework.

If it raises questions for you about your own — those are the right questions to be in.

If you’re looking for a guide as you do this work, start the conversation with me.

— Cheryl