Once you have established where you are standing, the next step is to begin by looking ahead by looking inward for some answers.
You have the answers in your heart and in your mind. The questions outlined below are intended to blow through the constant mental chatter that we all tell ourselves everyday.
The mental busy ness that clouds what it is that we already know, if we slow down enough to listen to it speak.
A couple of points to consider as you move into this next phase:
- Time – Understand it will take time. If you’ve never sat down and thought about the realized future you deserve – this is going to be a process. Time is a key ingredient to uncovering your vision and blue print for the future you.
- Inexact – You will likely fumble your way through this part of things, and there are many people that don’t even attempt to get this far. Enjoy the fact that you’ve started, and that the first few attempts at answering these questions will be roughly right in some cases.
- Openness – Be open to a surprise or two, even if you think you’ve already landed on your vision statement and you have a blueprint already. For many, the ideas you bring to this were jammed into your brain and heart by some other force – could be your family, your religion, your culture, or your lack of critical self examination in a decade or two.
So How Do You Find Your Vision?
There are books and entire websites dedicated to this topic. There are online courses aimed at solving for this question, and a slew of coaches that promise to solve this for you. Those that make this promise are full of ish… The best resources I’ve uncovered are those that essentially point the conversation right back at you.
This is yours to define, such is the power of the word that we each possess as a gift.
No website, no online course, no coach, no close friend, no book, and certainly not this blog will pronounce for you what your unique future self is to be.
What I can offer is a few definitions of the concepts, a few leading questions to consider, and some examples to help jump start your thinking. However, you must own this process and the outcome you are expecting to become.
Vision
Your vision is self defined, and it is a version of yourself that you will become.
It is not a statement of doing, it is a statement of being.
It is a definition of wavelength, of mindset, of vibrations (to quote my father), of energy – truly a definition of your truth to be realized.
There may be a time dimension involved, possibly involving a freshness date for revisions when you know the current vision you have is still not totally locked in.
Your vision is broader than your DOLs – it is encompasses your dimensions of life – and is a statement aimed at being a truer version of yourself.
Your vision needs to be specifically stated, ideally with 2-3 key characteristics that dominate all dimensions of life, all roles you play, and these are things that are immutable truths for yourself.
Your vision is the answer to the why for you.
It is not the where, when, what, or how of your envisioned being.
There may be a what tossed into the statement support the why, but the how of the vision is truly your operating principles to be tackled in a future post.
In terms of timing – I strongly recommend considering a vision for yourself that is 5-10 years out there.
This time horizon will help relax the limiting beliefs and feelings you have about yourself – likely resulting in a more compelling statement.
Blueprint For Your Soul
This is the part where you get to dream and engage in some truly energizing thinking and feeling.
These blueprint statements for your soul can and likely will be taken down as future goals depending upon your priority DOLs which we will discuss in a subsequent focus.
These are bucket list worthy items that are demanding you to recognize them, and to begin setting things in motion either outwardly or inwardly to realize them into your life.
For now, here are the questions for your consideration:
- What do I want to experience out of life?
- How do I want to grow?
- How do I want to contribute to the planet?
For example – a couple of answers that I’ve landed upon are:
- What do I want to experience out of life?
- Travel to all of the continents across the world: I love to travel. I love traveling within the US, and I love to travel internationally. I’ve been to North America, Asia (India and China), and to Europe. I imagine getting to South America and Africa as the next stops with Antartica being something that would be just nuts. This is one of a dozen or so things in this category.
- How do I want to grow?
- Learn to actually sing: I am so self conscious when it comes to singing, which is strange because I absolutely love to listen to good music. Karaoke bars – I’ll cheer you on, thanks. Someday – I’ll be up there crushing some lame 80’s hair band ballad. And when it happens, and it will – I’ll realize how silly I was to have waited so long to let loose. This is the sort of thing that gets me smiling just thinking about it.
- How do I want to contribute to the planet?
- Help my sons become strong men: There is a lot in this statement, and it is among the most important things I have to do. Every day this is a bell that is ringing in my ears, and it makes me happy knowing that I’ve got three guys that will likely be role models for their own families down the line. The world needs them to be.
Now that you have the leading questions along with a few examples – let’s discuss how you can play and interact with them to get some useful insight.
For some, answering these questions leads towards the Vision Statement. For me, it was an interactive process developed over the course of a few months where I bounced between the answers to these questions and a few revisions of the Vision.
I recommend taking 5 minutes to answer each question with at least a 15 minute break in between. This helps to keep the pressure to deliver loose, while also forcing you to just get your thoughts on paper without a lot of opportunity to edit. There will be time for that later.
We are looking for purity here, not completeness.
Dreams
What are the 3-5 key points you’d want in your ideal version of your life? For some, this is a starting point that leads into the three blueprint questions which can then be parlayed into the Vision Statement.
For example – one of my dreams is ‘To have joy and peace in every endeavor I pursue and spend my time on’ I’m currently sitting at 4 dreams whereas a couple years ago I had vague ideas of what I wanted – in some ways those were even more dreamlike dreams.
Okay so now what?
You should have a draft of a few blueprint answers, a couple dreams, and 3-5 sentences aiming at a future being that you will become. This step took me months to reach a point of true clarity. Prior to that, I landed upon a swag’d answer or two that served as a vision to get me moving forward – knowing that it was the truest thing I had ever written down about myself while also trusting that it was incomplete.
What is most important is that you have a set of truths about yourself that you have written down, and on some level – they are good enough. Once you feel that you’ve reached a point of ‘good enough’ with your vision statement, you can move onto the next step. Your blueprint statements and dreams may or may not be ready – that’s okay too.
You really do need to have a vision, a simple 3-5 sentences, statement that you ‘just know’ before you move into the next step of the Energy and Action Framework.
The next step is looking at the how – your core operating principles aimed at realizing your vision.
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