Defining Your Vision

I didn’t really elaborate how to define your Life Vision in the earlier post on Creating A Powerful Life Plan. It was already such a long post with so many different concepts that I felt it was better to break it down into smaller, more digestible sections.

If you’re having trouble making your Life Vision as clear as you want it to be, cheer up. I’m going to share how to do it in a systematic, step-by-step manner in this post.

What Is A Life Vision?

A Life Vision is the mental creation of your life in your mind where you engage all your senses even before it becomes a physical, tangible reality around you. The mental creation is similar to a 3 dimensional movie that is filled with:

• Movement
• Emotions
• People
• Places and
• Color

where it involves your senses of Sight, Sound, Taste, Touch and Smell.

A vision is something that you have every intention, purpose and desire to make real in your life. If you don’t, then it’s not a vision. It’s a day dream.

So how clear should your Vision be?

It has to be clear enough that if I plucked your vision out of your head right now and manifested it into reality, all that is needed to make the picture complete is for you to step into it.

However, such clarity of your vision doesn’t usually come immediately. It’s better to think of it as a continual process where you are steadily refining and recreating it as you move along in your life.

The clearer and more engaged you are in your Life Vision, the simpler and faster it is to take the necessary action to create it into reality around you.

How To Define Your Vision

Just imagine this, a raw diamond that comes out of the mines isn’t yet that beautiful piece of refractive stone that glitters under the light. It’s rough, uncut, and looks like some raw chunk of broken glass. It has to be measured, cut and polished until it catches the light just right so that it sparkles with brilliance.

It’s the same with your Vision. The first time you come up with a Vision, it’s going to be rough, uncut and raw. You need to cut it down to a certain size, whittle away the parts you don’t want, keep the parts that you do want and polish it till it shines.

The tools that you can use to further define your vision are questions using the following six words. They are just a guide to help clarify your mental picture. The six words are:

1. Who
2. What
3. When
4. Where
5. Why
6. How

The way to define your vision is through the process of asking questions in the RIGHT way. The answers to your questions have to be in the positive, not the negative. What do I mean?

Positive: I want to be financially free.
Negative: I don’t want to be poor.

Let’s use an example, and I’ll bring you through it step-by-step so you have a better understanding.

Example of a Raw Vision: I Want A Life of Financial Freedom

Now that’s a goal that I think almost everyone can resonate with. But remember, what I’m sharing is the process which you can then apply to your own vision to make it clearer.

There are two categories of questions, each with a specific purpose. They are:

1. Defining Questions ~ To Create Specifics and Details
2. Feeling Questions ~ To Check if You Really Want It

Using Defining Questions

Defining questions are questions that you use to clarify your mental picture. You use the six tools to create specific details in your mental picture. Questions like:

• If I were financially free, what would my life be like?
• What does being financially free mean to me?
• If I were already financially free, what would I be doing now?
• What clothes would I be wearing?
• What house would I be staying in?
• What car would I be driving?
• What would I be doing in my life of financial freedom?
• How would I spend my free time?
• Would I be working?
  (OK, so technically it’s not one of the six. But it does help clarify your life vision.)
• If yes, what would I be working as? If not, what would I be doing?
• Where do I go for my vacations?
• Who would I be socializing with?
• What time (when) do I wake up in the morning?
• What time (when) do I sleep at night?
• And other similar type questions

The use of such questions is to create detail and cut away the fluff in your mind, until you are left with a clear, definite picture of what you want for your life.

Using Feeling Questions

As you sharpen your vision and focus in on your mental picture, check your feelings. Your feelings will help guide you to check if the picture is really what you want. If it isn’t, then continue tweaking and refining your picture until you feel that it’s just right for you.

• How do you feel in the picture that you created?
• Do you like it?
• If it’s not exactly right, what would you change in order for it to feel right?

It’s a simple, two-step process of:

1. Creating what you want through defining questions, and then
2. Checking your feelings to see if that’s what you really want.

All of us will come up with something different, even if it’s only slightly. That’s because all of us have a different definition of the same basic idea, and all of us like different material things. Some want a Ferarri, others want a BMW, and others still want to drive a Mercedes Sports. No one wants exactly the same thing, so if your life of financial freedom is different from someone else, it’s normal and to be expected.

What Your Mind Can Conceive, You Can Achieve.

As you refine your Life Vision, you might want to test out multiple scenarios in your mind and imagine as if you were already living them. You have the power of imagination, so use it. The more you practice your ability to create mental pictures, the more you practice your ability to create out of thoughts.

If you’re having difficulty, and don’t really have a mental scenario that you really, really like yet, relax. It just means that your exposure isn’t wide enough to find what resonates with you.

The simple solution would be to go to the nearest bookstore, and check out vacation magazines, car magazines, houses, etc. Find pictures of a possible house, or location that you might want to enjoy.

If you want to be doing specific work, go find out how people who are already doing your type of work live. You’re basically looking for existing materials to help you in defining your vision.

You can just take what you find wholesale, or tweak them until you feel a certain resonance with it. You should start to feel good as you imagine yourself living it, almost as if you’ve finally reached your real home.

Tools You Can Use To Remind Yourself

Once you have created that picture, you can use certain tools to help you remember it. These are just tools, and if you feel good about using them, then use them. If you don’t, you don’t have to. There is no hard and fast rule here.

1. Vision Statement

A vision statement is a short paragraph that describes your mental picture. When you read it, it triggers off the picture in your head and its associated feelings. You can write it on a card, in your diary, planner, PDA or whatever it is that you use. You then carry this around with you during the day, and continue working on refining it during your spare time.

2. Vision Board

A Vision Board is a notice board where you pin up pictures of the things that you want in your life. They serve as visual reminders in pictorial form to further reinforce that picture in your mind.

It just has to be somewhere in your working area, or somewhere in your house where you’ll at least see it once a day. Over time, your conscious awareness of it will diminish, but your sub-conscious will be aware of it each time you are near it, triggering off that mental picture and associated feelings below the surface of your consciousness.

What to Expect

You’ll find that over time, you will start tweaking that mental picture as you have new experiences. The core theme and vision will remain the same, but some of the details will change as you move along your journey in life. Your vision is something that helps give your life direction, so just as life changes, your vision will change along with you.

During your spare time, continue to contemplate and develop your mental picture of your life as you want it to be. As your life vision starts to become clearer, you’ll find that you can do certain things that make part of your vision real. Once you know what actions you can take, take them if they bring you closer to the realization of your vision.

The closer you move towards your vision, the clearer it becomes. The clearer it becomes, the simpler it is to take congruent action to make your vision real. As you focus on your vision, you’ll start to notice opportunity, people and events around you almost conspiring to help you create your vision into reality.

They may have always been there, or they may just entered into your field of awareness as if attracted to you. Whatever it is you choose to believe, when you see the opportunity and you feel that it’s the right thing to do, take action.

Remember, your life vision is the end result of what you want your life to be. Don’t concern yourself with the “How”. Not yet. When you know what you want, then it makes sense to find out the how.

But if you don’t know what you want, knowing all the different “How’s” in the world won’t make a darn difference to your life. You’ll have no idea of what to use them for. So concentrate of clarifying what it is that you want first, create that mental picture in your mind, and then once you know what you want, start looking around for the “How“.