Apr 30, 2017
Having a purpose is the reason to get out of bed each day. Having a vision, allows you to complete a picture of your ideal life. When combined together, these will be the measure of what ‘success’ means to you!
A vision is an ideal picture of how you want your life to look. It is what you want the future to hold for you. But you have to make it happen!
Your vision should show you where you want to head and provide some motivation and focus to help achieve this. Life happens, there will always be setbacks but the best way of overcoming setbacks is keeping your long-term vision in mind and working towards this.
To expand on this a little further, imagine that you are about to go on a road trip. You start your journey and have your destination in mind. There may be speedbumps along the road, maybe some potholes as well, but if you really want to reach your destination you will keep driving.
So how do you build your vision?
Last episode we did some lists to work out a purpose statement, this week it is no different. Again, you have to know what you want to be able to achieve it so the first step is to make three lists, broken in to three headings at the top of the page again.
- What I want: This list is for the material things you wish to have in your life. From houses, cars, even owning a business.
- What I want to be: This list is for the type of person you want to be, from happy and positive to being a leader in your field.
- What I want to achieve before I die: This list is practically a bucket list where you can think about the things that you want to achieve in life.
Under each heading, you need to list 20 things for each one so once
you are done you should have 60 in total. It may be hard to come up
with 20 things for each, so listing small things or expanding on
larger ‘wants’ can help. So instead of just saying ‘I want to be
successful’, list out individual items which mean success to
you.
Once you have a list of 60 things, it is time to move to the next step. This first exercise is to get the brain juices flowing and to clarify the ideal vision of your life! The next step involves sorting through your lists and placing each in to seven areas of your life.
This covers off 7 areas in total. For each one you need to have a clear picture of what each area should look like!
- Work/career – What are you doing for your career? Is it something that you enjoy? Is it something you can have freedom? Can you make a lot of money from it?
- Finances – What does your financial situation look like? Are you out of debts? Do you have a portfolio of investments, paying you an income? This is the key to financial independence after all. You need to have enough in finances to give you all the free time in the world to focus on everything else.
- Free time/Recreation – What do you do in your free time? Do you r .Are you going on holidays each year?
- Health/Fitness – What is your ideal fitness? Are you 80 still in great physical and mental health?
- Relationships – Marriages, kids, parents, everyone etc.
- Contribution to the world – Do you give back to society?
- Personal goals – What do you want to do before you die? Travel to every country on earth? Swim with Great White Sharks? I may be projecting some personal goals here but you get the point.
You will most likely find that after doing your list of 60 things, these all fit nicely in to one of the key areas of a personal vision. If you find that these don’t fit in to any of the above categories then have a think about how you want this area to look like.
Remember, that your personal vision is where you want to be – so you need a clear picture on what it looks like, what it feels like, you should almost be able to taste it!
Once you have your vision in place, you need to hone your Inner GPS – this is your internal navigation system which will allow you to plot a course and follow the road map to get you there! This is what you can build your goals and actions around which we will cover in the next episode.
To help this, you can start taking a personal inventory of where you are at in each of the areas. This will help to fill in the gaps and reverse engineer some steps to build your ideal life. All of this will be covered in the next episode.
But in summary, before you start working on your ideal life you need to get your vision in place! The best way to expand on this is to create a vision board. This is where you place pictures or statements of what your ideal life looks like!
I have my own vision boards, one for each of the main areas in life. There are pictures and statements on each while provide me motivation and focus for me to work towards obtaining these.
Lifestyle: Property in country with lots of rescue dogs. So, I built a goal around this. What the time period was, what the property looked like, even down to the number of dogs. This allowed me to figure out what passive income I would need to achieve this, what the approximate cost of the property would be, really everything.
Finances: I have printed out doctored banks and financial statements for myself with how I want my finances to look. What my share portfolios are, what my investments portfolios are, completely out of debt.
Free time/recreation: Here I have pictures of other countries and snowboarding. My dream is to go to travelling and snowboarding somewhere in the world each year.
Hopefully this helps you to complete each section of your ideal life and set some goals around this. The more you focus on these, the greater your chances of reaching them!