The EmpowerMAP is designed to guide and document a multi-layered conversation. While it has some elements of a plan, it is intended to centre us in an empowering vision to bring about lives and businesses we can learn from and inhabit at every moment.

First uses of the EmpowerMAP:

• A personal EmpowerMAP renews vision, faith and commitment to a transformed path forward
• Social service professionals, medical staff, consultants and counsellors of all stripes use the EmpowerMAP as a baseline intake assessment and a vehicle for transformative work
• Combining the individual EmpowerMAPs of a workgroup reveals shared and disparate Aspirations, Scenarios and collaborative Turnings, Ventures and Markers
• EmpowerMAP conversations in the board room reveal the roots of vision driven business models
• For a negotiation, the EmpowerMAP builds collaborative understanding side by side instead of entrenched positions across a table
• The EmpowerMAP enables parents and children of any age to deepen their appreciation of each other's vision, worldview and life path
• EmpowerMAPs provide the meat and bones of tailored, succinct messages for essential audiences

Please use the EmpowerMAP in cycles. For the first cycle, read every topic in the order given. Each topic has two elements: a definition of terms, followed by instructions for using the map, printed in italics. As you read, locate each topic on the map and write the ideas there which come to mind as you go. On completing your first read through, return to the beginning, and follow every instruction thoroughly to complete the map.

On the second cycle, take the topics in any order, following your hunches, testing analytically, comparing elements for consistency, and adding and synthesising ideas. The third and following cycles usually involve other people's contribution as well as simplification, clarification and focus.

After a few cycles, your 'right' purposes, strategies and actions will become clear. Put the EmpowerMAP aside. Start communicating and acting on your initiatives, while keeping careful notes about what occurs. You will be making progress while expanding your information and insight for an eventual return to the EmpowerMAP. Eventually, thinking with the EmpowerMAP, communicating and pursuing initiatives may become one; a seamless, satisfying process for empowered living in complex times.

STEP ONE: Aspiration

Begin by selecting an Aspiration 'horizon', a time slightly beyond that which you usually think of as 'the future'. Make a note of this date in the upper right corner of the map.

Move to the Aspiration horizon and state the year and the location. Invite a conversation about life outcomes, skills mastered, assumptions, values, talents, prowess and beliefs, challenges taken on, physical conditions, activities underway, rewards received, and people, places and things, right down to the clothes worn and technology at hand in this future scene. Include the most satisfying activities you were involved in at that 'earlier' time when you were exploring the EmpowerMAP. Inquire into what each activity has become as it has matured optimally over the years until 'now', the Aspiration horizon.

Continue the conversation through further drafts until the scene is exciting, juicy, compelling, fascinating, and seems truly worth the life efforts required to make it so.

Finally, focus this future into two or three visionary goals: specific, measurable pieces of the future which embrace the most important things you want to come true.

STEP TWO: Hindsight

Look back to your birth, the beginning of the trail of life events up to the present which are prologue to a fully achieved Aspiration. Focus on any theme in the Aspiration to find its storyline.

Use the open area of the entire left half of the map to lay out a chronological history. Write whatever comes up on the Map or other notes as it fits in time over the region of the Hindsight domain. Map out events which:

• Have helped form your Aspiration
• Indicate that you were headed towards your Aspiration
• Indicate that you were headed away from your Aspiration

Repeat the cycle for at least three principle themes in the Aspiration.

Reflect on the memories and events you have noted with an eye for which were high and which were low experiences. Make notes about your qualities, talents, curiosities, passions or the lack of same which play their role in creating moments as highs or lows.

STEP THREE: Scenarios

Assume that the open space on the right half of the map represents a timeline from today until your vision horizon. What does the 'WOW' flow of events look like?

What changes, what stays constant, what creative disruptions occur, and what life milestones would occur along the way? Make your notes on the 'WOW' case along the upper borders of the Scenario domain.

Now tease out the worst possible, yet probable, flow of conditions and write this 'Ohmigawd' case along the bottom border of the Scenario domain.

And finally, take the 'Ho Hum' case right down the middle. This is simply how today's world plays out over time, where no-one and nothing disrupts the status quo.

STEP FOUR: Powers

Have a look at the Hindsight domain, taking a handful of high events and a few lows as exemplars of the existence and non-existence of personal Powers. Map your findings in Powers.

STEP FIVE: Limits

Examine the past events in the Hindsight domain to determine those limitations which have previously diminished your potential. Map your findings in Limits.

STEP SIX: Possibilities

Revisit the Aspiration and look for current trends, conditions, Influences, Powers and changes which could reveal a Possibility to accelerate time and collapse distance to the Aspiration.

Reflect on the future conditions you have mapped under Scenarios. Ask yourself how you might create an opportunity by taking advantage of each. List your ideas in the Possibilities space on the map.

STEP SEVEN: Risks

Think about the potential range of behaviours of influential people on the path, world forces or trends acting directly on us, and seemingly unfavourable conditions now hanging around. Personal factors in family and health are as important as business factors like taxes and competitors and technologies.

Reflect on the future conditions you have mapped under Scenarios. Ask yourself how each may threaten your progress, no matter how 'positive' or 'negative' it might seem. Map your ideas in Risks.

STEP EIGHT: Turnings

From the map, select a single Power, Limit, Risk and Possibility with the most apparent positive or negative impact on the Aspiration. Write each of the selections at one of the four corners of the Turnings domain.

What must you change to:

• More effectively invest the selected Power?
• Reduce the impact of the selected Limit?
• Reduce the effects of the selected Risk?
• More powerfully exploit the selected Possibility?

If a couple of these ideas for change are similar, find a way to say them as one thought. If one precedes or drives another then organise them that way.

Continue playing with the changes until the integration takes shape as a straightforward "we did this to get that" story, and write this story in the middle of the Turnings domain. Repeat this process to get 2 or 3 stories.

One way to integrate the changes into a story is to start by considering how your efforts to reduce your Limit could improve the investment in your Power, and then how dealing with the Risk would enhance taking action on the Possibility. These two initial explorations can then be integrated into a single Turning.

STEP NINE: Influences

Make lists of the following (the same people may appear on more than one list):

• Five people most impacted by your Turnings
• Five most influential people you will encounter along the way
• Five of the most supportive people you spend time with
• Five sceptical or adversarial individuals who could negatively affect the Turnings and eventual Ventures
• Five individuals who can help the Aspiration come true

Now, find a single set of Influences which includes at least one unique name from each original list as well as the names which appear most frequently throughout. If additional talents or knowledge are needed, add one or two others. Map the final six or seven, one to a sphere.

Next, imagine:

• What do each of them want or need from you?
• What will you need from each of these people?
• What messages must each hear and act on if you are to be successful?
• How would each person or group, if faced with the same Aspirations that you are, go about achieving them?

Map your ideas next to the appropriate sphere. Your notes are the basis for communication initiatives with each Influence.

STEP TEN: Ventures

Start with one of the meta-transformations from Turnings. Explore the Influences to find those who must or can assist, and those who might resist. Work up a Venture which reflects the interests of the selected Influences and puts the essential transformation from the Turnings into action.

Rework the Venture to best deliver on the four qualities listed above.

STEP ELEVEN: Markers

Thinking of the 'WOW' Scenario, define three relevant Markers which will provide an immediate sense of how the journey is going. What would give you assurance that you are:

• Making headway on the Ventures?
• On course to the Aspiration?
• Improving relationships with Influences?
• Avoiding repetition of historic, unproductive patterns?
• Maintaining a high quality of life and work?
• Learning throughout the process?

Now look at the 'Ohmigawd' and 'Ho Hum' Scenarios. These offer further scope and richness for your value Markers. Each Scenario is made up of events designed to get us to our Aspiration, no matter what befalls us along the way.

Craft a single integrated set of three Markers which can apply to any event in any case, and write each in one of the three Marker domains on the map.

Download a copy of the map

Download an EmpowerMAP case study

Download the "Developing A Strategy" - EmpowerMAP 'Turnings' Template

Establish boundaries for your coaching conversation up-front – clarify your role and discuss expectations for the conversation.

Don’t give advice – your role as coach is to guide the other person through a process of reflection, questions, challenge and feedback allowing them to gain insight and make choices themselves.

EmpowerMAP can give structure to a series of conversations, rather than needing to be completed in a single conversation – essentials for the first conversation are Aspiration and Hindsight, which create the frame for the rest of the conversation.

EmpowerMAP suggests an order for visiting each domain, but it is designed as an iterative process – if there is no energy in a particular domain just sketch some ideas, move on, and come back to it later.

Key learning points:

• Our Hindsight of the past shows us who we are, our Aspiration shows us who we want to be
• When we are at a Turning point, successful new directions build on our experience from the past and use this as the foundation for the future