Man, if I’m being real with you — most of the young people I work with know how to set goals. They’ve been taught it. SMART goals. Action steps. Deadlines. Teachers have run them through the drill. Parents have encouraged them. And some of them are good at it.
But ask them what they’re building toward. Ask them what their life is supposed to look like ten years from now. Ask them what kind of person they’re trying to become — not what job they want, but who they are when they get there.
Watch what happens.
Most of them go quiet.
And that quiet isn’t emptiness. That’s the sound of a young person who has been taught to perform tasks without being taught to understand their direction. There’s a difference between goals and vision, and we do a disservice to young people every time we treat them like the same thing.
Let me get into this.
Goals Are Tasks. Vision Is a Direction.
A goal is something you can check off. “I want to make the honor roll.” “I want to get into college.” “I want to save $500 by the end of the year.” Those are real and worth having. I’m not dismissing them.
But a goal only works if you know what you’re building. A vision gives you the direction that makes your goals make sense.
Think about it like this. A goal is a step. Vision is knowing where the staircase leads. You can climb steps all day. If you don’t know where they’re going, you might be building something real — or you might be building someone else’s life without realizing it.
That’s what happens to a lot of young people. They hit goals. They stay busy. But busy isn’t the same as purposeful. You can be on the move in the wrong direction your whole life and not know it until you’ve already spent the years.
I’m gonna say that again because I know somebody heard it but you missed it.
You can be on the move in the wrong direction your whole life and not know it until you’ve already spent the years.
Why Young People Struggle With Vision
The reality is, we don’t ask young people the right questions early enough. We ask “What do you want to be?” — which is really a question about a job title, not a self. We ask “What are your grades?” — which is a question about performance, not purpose. We don’t ask, “What do you care about so much that you’d do the work even when it’s hard?” We don’t ask, “What kind of presence do you want to have in the world?”
Those questions feel big. But they’re not unanswerable. They just take more than a class period. They take real conversation, real reflection, and someone in the room who actually cares what the answer is.
That’s where mentorship enters. Not to hand young people a vision — that would miss the whole point — but to sit with them long enough that they can start to hear themselves think.
I’ll be honest. I’ve sat across from young people who had everything: the drive, the intelligence, the work ethic. And they were building lives they hadn’t chosen because no one had ever asked them who they actually wanted to become. They were executing someone else’s plan for them. And they were doing it well, which made it harder to stop.
What the 6 Circles Actually Does
The 6 Circles to Purpose Leadership Training doesn’t hand you a vision. It does something harder. It creates the conditions for you to find one.
The work moves through self-awareness first, then values, then vision, then skills, then community, then action. In that order. For a reason.
You can’t build a real vision until you know what you actually care about. And you can’t know what you care about until you’ve slowed down enough to hear yourself. That’s not a soft idea — it’s a structural truth. Skip self-awareness and move straight to goal-setting, and you’re just loading up a GPS without knowing your destination. The car will move. It might move fast. But you’re not going where you actually need to go.
What changes when young people go through this process is not that they suddenly have their whole life figured out. That’s not what vision means at this stage. What changes is that they start to make decisions from the inside out instead of the outside in. They stop reacting to what the world is offering and start choosing based on what they understand about themselves.
That is leadership. Not title, not performance, not a resume. The capacity to make direction-setting choices from a grounded sense of who you are.
What Mentors and Parents Can Do Right Now
If you’re working with young people, here’s something real you can start today. Stop asking about goals for a minute. Ask about vision.
Ask them what a good life feels like — not looks like, feels like. Ask them what they want their relationships to be like. Ask them what kind of work makes them feel like themselves. Ask them what they’d regret not doing.
Don’t rush to the plan. Let them sit in the question. The discomfort of not having an immediate answer is actually useful. That’s where reflection starts. And when discomfort shows up, lean into it — because that’s often where the most growth happens.
Your job as a mentor, as a parent, as an educator, is not to fill the silence. It’s to hold the space until they can fill it themselves.
That’s special, when you see it happen. And it does happen. I’ve watched it happen. A young person who walked in with a list of goals they’d been handed walks out starting to understand the difference between a task and a direction. That shift is real. And it doesn’t go away.
This Is the Work
Vision doesn’t come from a worksheet. It comes from honest reflection, quality questions, and someone who believes the young person is worth the investment of real conversation.
The 6 Circles to Purpose Leadership Training exists because that kind of guided, structured journey doesn’t happen by accident. It takes an intentional process, a community to support it, and adults who are willing to walk alongside — not in front of — the young people doing the work.
If you’re a youth leader, an educator, a parent, or a community partner who wants to give young people more than a list of goals — I want to invite you into this.
Explore the 6 Circles to Purpose Leadership Training and bring it to your school or organization. This is work worth doing. The young people in your life are worth it.
JustINSPIRE Mentoring is a mentoring-based organization focused on helping youth, emerging leaders, and communities grow with clarity, confidence, discipline, purpose, and expression. Learn more at justinspirementoring.online