How to Create a Powerful Personal Life Vision
Creating a powerful personal life vision has many benefits. It offers you guidance in charting the way forward. It also drives the actions, decisions and behavior that you undertake. Where it is lived into, it basically sums up who you are, your life story and the meaning you have created.
Some people don’t bother with making a personal life vision. Well, not having one can leave you like a boat without a rudder; subject to the currents of life. You are more likely to paddle along (which makes your progress slow) or go around in circles. However, if you hope to lead a life that is more than mediocre and one that can potentially allow you to be happier, you will need to take charge.
“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.” – Woodrow Wilson
The Wright brothers had the vision of powered human flight in 1903. Many modern day conveniences that we enjoy today had roots in the vision of Thomas Edison. Touched by God’s profound love, Mother Theresa had the vision of bringing light to the poor in the “dark holes” of Calcutta. Walt Disney had the vision of “making people happy” with theme parks and movies.
Visioning does not have to be an exercise reserved for big corporations. Anyone can come up with a personal life vision. It involves some thought. Here are some tips that you can keep in mind:
– Inspires you to be your highest potential;
– Connect with passion;
– Invoke imagination;
– Remove fear
– Align with higher purpose;
– Inspires action.
Inspires You to be Your Highest Potential
“A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.”
– Rosabeth Moss Kanter
A vision is big-picture. It offers a long term perspective. It inspires you to be the best of who you can be.
A vision does not necessarily offer you guidelines on how to reach the desired goal or destination. It just gives you the final snapshot. Yet, if you are able to hold focused attention and put energy behind a powerful personal life vision, the steps to take will reveal themselves.
Connect with Passion
“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Passion is among the most powerful of human emotions, and it must form the basis of any life vision. In fact, it also plays a part in making your life seamless for passion comes in when you love the work that you do. And so, work does not feel like work but becomes very much part of who you are.
Put simply, passion is something that makes you excitedly jump out of bed in the morning or what you would love to do on a Friday night. Most definitely, it has to connect with your heart. A desire based on whim and fancy does not last because it is fleeting. Your enthusiasm fizzles out after a while.
If you are not able to connect with passion, then your vision will fall short. This is because without strong heartfelt desire, anything you do will be like swimming upstream. On the other hand, passion will make the effort involved a downstream one. Obviously, swimming with the current is a lot easier than going against it.
Invoke Imagination
“All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.”
– Napolean Hill
To create a powerful life vision, you must invoke imagination. Through imagination, you paint an ideal mental picture of what you would like to see in the future. You introduce possibility. Imagination provides the fertile ground for creative seeds to take root.
Your consciousness also becomes expansive because you are no longer limited to seeing what-is. Your subconscious is now actively activated by what-ifs. You dare to dream the impossible, and if you focus on your vision without a waiver of energy and attention, it eventually turns to reality.
Remove Fear
“If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.”
— Robert Fritz
To envision yourself in your highest potential, you must be able to remove fear. Doubt, which is a form of fear, can cause you to limit your life vision. You hold yourself back. You cave in because you start to believe what your skeptical friends say.
You would not want to shortchange yourself because of doubt. Psychological fear, which is really False Evidence Appearing Real, can be addressed. Hence, do not be afraid to set a big vision. As Napoleon Hill of the best-selling classic Think and Grow Rich said, “whatever the mind can think and conceive, it can achieve.”
Align with Higher Purpose
“The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose.”
– Richard Leider
You discover an inner strength that you have not known before when your life vision is aligned with the higher purpose of serving the community. Your desire to serve arises from the unconditional love in your heart. The vibrational state of your being rises accordingly. It is also how you activate the Law of Attraction to work in your favor.
An aligned life vision naturally receives support from the universe. You will receive a wealth of spiritual resources, unsolicited help and unexpected connections. Others who know about the benefit that you are intending to bring will want to render their assistance. A vision based on collective energy is bound to succeed.
Inspires Action
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
If any life vision is going to bear results, action is needed. It does not matter how well laid the plans are, or intention, or even have a desire so strong it could light a camp fire. Without taking action, nothing will happen.
Perhaps the greatest pitfall where it comes to taking action is many people simply cannot figure out where to begin. But this is where having a vision that inspires action comes in handy. You do not have to worry excessively about the how to bring it about, though.
If you know the exact goal, start by visualizing the end result. With that end result in mind, simple start going backward from it, and the actions to take will reveal themselves. Of course, there will be times that things do not easily fall into place. That is fine, it is more important to get started. Once you have taken some actions towards your vision, later steps will become known.
Examples of Personal Life Vision
Your vision statement can be made up of single power words or one or two sentences for intention setting. Most importantly, it has to be authentic. This means that you must feel a connection with it. It cannot be what someone else say it “should” be. Rather, it must matter to you.
The following is an example of a personal life vision that I had previously set…
My vision is to assist others with loving themselves in mind-body-spirit, so that they can become empowered to live their best life yet.
We can also adapt from the visions of well-known leaders and founders of big corporations in order to create personal ones for ourselves. Here is the one by McDonald’s founder…
“McDonald’s vision is to be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile.”
The end goal of making others smile is certainly a great vision to have 🙂
Share Your Personal Life Vision
Do you have a personal life vision? What are you working towards? Please share in the comments below.
Love and Abundance always,
Evelyn Lim
Abundance Alchemy Coach
Evelyn Reply:
January 26th, 2012 at 9:19 am
Hi Andrew,
It’s so nice to see you here again. It is great that you have realized the benefits of having one. Even having a short term vision is better than none. A life vision is one when you have a picture of what happens at the end of your life. A life vision is usually “broad”, and so should stand the currents (or dynamism) of life.
Wishing you success in the new year and beyond,
Evelyn
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