It’s the beginning of a new year! This is the perfect time to write a vision for what you would love in 2022.  A written vision is one of the most powerful ways to bring your dream to life. It’s more powerful than just thinking about your vision, a vision board, or New Year’s resolutions.

We know everything that is created begins with thinking, but our thoughts come and go very quickly. Therefore, thinking about our vision isn’t enough. To manifest our vision, we need reminders to help us stay on track.

A vision board can be a great reminder of what we want to achieve; but vision boards rarely invoke the same feeling we get when we read our vision. Being in alignment with our vision each day—feeling as though we’ve already accomplished it—allows us to bring our vision into reality.

Similarly, New Year’s resolutions also fail to bring us in alignment with our vision. Resolutions remind us of what we already have and what we want to change, but they don’t put us in alignment with the end result we desire.

When a Vision Statement is written in a highly calibrated way, it is powerful and effective.

Here are a few ways that a written vision helps us:

1. It helps us know where we want to end up. Most people are living life by default and not by design. Highly successful people start with the end in mind. They are clear on what they want to create—they live by design.
2. A written vision keeps us focused on the “right stuff.” The “Reticular Activating System” is an area of our brain that is responsible for bringing into our awareness the things we are actively seeking or are focused on and filtering out everything else. Most of us have learned to focus on problems rather than solutions—why we can’t achieve our goals, all that could go wrong, or what is missing in our lives. If we want to change our results, we must start by changing our focus. A written vision helps us focus our attention on the results we want.
3. A written vision is also a blueprint for the life we want to live. Our old habits and patterns of thinking created our current results. If we want to change anything in our lives, we need to give ourselves a new pattern or template. Our vision is our new template. Since our unconscious doesn’t know if something is real or imagined, we want to tell our unconscious a new story, laying down a new pattern.

I have read that 94 percent of our unconscious mind is directing our conscious mind. Since our unconscious mind only picks up what we repeatedly emotionalize and vividly imagine. Often the very things we don’t want to bring into our lives are the things we most often focus on in detail and with emotion. We emotionalize and dwell on our worries and what we are afraid might happen, instead of what we would love.

Henry Ford once said, “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.”

When we are relating to our vision rather than our current results or circumstances, new ideas will come to us. We will recognize different opportunities—even though they may have been there all along. These new ideas and opportunities will help bring our vision into reality.

A client of mine, an engineer for a well-known car company, had a dream of designing a new recreational device. He worked on his idea from home for years and had a 10-year plan of how he would bring his invention to market. I asked him what he would really love. Would he love to bring it to market sooner? I reminded him that his plan was only one way to achieve the result he wanted.

When he got crystal clear on the result he wanted, rather than focusing on how he would achieve it, different ideas came to him. One idea was to partner with an investor. In the next moment, he knew who a possible investor might be—a highly successful friend who had shown an interest in his invention from the beginning. When my client was focused on his initial plan, only ideas in alignment with it taking 10 years would come to him.  But once he got in alignment with bringing his device to market quickly, new ideas came to him and he was able to see different opportunities.

After he spoke with his friend, who decided to invest, I remember my client saying to me, “Holy crap, this is really happening!”

There is such power in having a written Vision Statement that you are reading and relating to on a daily basis.

So, how do you write a highly calibrated and effective vision?

You start by noticing your longings and discontents. Our longings are when we are desiring something we haven’t yet created. Our discontents are when the current circumstances of our lives are something we don’t prefer. Discontents might be something you would like less of in your life, or perhaps something you wish to get rid of altogether. Your longings and discontents are your catalysts for change.

Reverend Dr. Michael Beckwith, the founder of the Agape Church, has a great quote in which he says, “We are often pushed by pain until we are pulled by a vision.” It is more powerful and fun to be pulled by a vision!

Once you are clear on what you want to change in your life, ask yourself, “What would I love?” Don’t ask, “What do I think I can do or what would others want me to do?” When you are considering your dream life, suspend the “how.” This is not the time to consider how you will create this new life.

I believe there is a life force in each of us that is wanting us to grow. This force is what gives us our dreams and our desire to achieve them.  Our dreams are life saying, “Go this way—grow this way.”

To truly live life is to be living a full-spectrum life—to love all the areas in your life. Financial or business success shouldn’t cost us our health, our relationships, or our fun. And we may have wonderful lives in the areas of health and relationships, but wouldn’t those be better if we also had the financial freedom we would love? In creating our vision, we get to “dream up” our life until we love all the parts of it.

Your Vision Statement is the launchpad to creating your wonderful vision-driven life. I believe it is possible for each of us to live a life we love.

If you would like an opportunity to create a crystal-clear vision for your life, to understand what holds you back, and to learn the three simple but essential steps to living your dream life, please join me for my Vision Workshop on January 22 via Zoom. Learn more here.