Where are you going? What’s your vision for your creative future? What’s your personal Mount Everest? Can you taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it when you close your eyes? What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind? If you want to create a powerful future, it starts today. Here’s how to design a vision for your creative future.
So, imagine you’ve lived a long life and have died peacefully. Someone gets up to read your eulogy. What do they say? What are your biggest personal and professional achievements? More importantly, how will you be remembered by those around you?
As a coach, this is one of the first questions I ask my clients, because it always gets to the heart of not just what they want to do in their life, but how they want it to feel. Both are important components of a life well lived.
If we don’t know where we’re going, and how we want to feel along the way, it’s very hard to get anywhere. Our minds are hard-wired for focused attention — a powerful tool that we often don’t use to our advantage. The universe is aching to yield to us that which we desire most, but it’s like a GPS system. If you just drive without entering your destination, it will just tell you where you are. But, when you enter a destination, it will show you how to get there. Too often, creative types are resistant to goal setting and time schedules because we feel like we’re interfering with the Divine order of things or that it leaves out room for flexibility and flow. None of this is true. In fact, designing your vision is the thing that allows you flexibility and flow. Once you know what your outcomes are, you can decide based on where you are going how best to shift and change along the way.
It’s important to remember in the design of your future that one of your desired outcomes should be to enjoy the process along with way. It’s where most of your time will be spent on the way to your outcome. For most creative types, if we don’t enjoy the journey we’ll never reach where we’re going. If you make enjoying the process a goal as well, your intuition will aid you in showing you the yellow flags that might hinder this experience along the way. Then you can either change them or avoid those that will lead to red flags.
Here are some great questions you can ask yourself in order to help build your Visionary Legacy:
Who do I most want to give to? What about my success would I like to share? When people think of me, what word would I want to jump to everyone’s lips? What’s the most important thing I plan to contribute to the world? When I think of myself in the future, what does that future self say about fear, doubt or hesitation? If my future self could give me a gift today, what would it be?
Write down your answers. Keep this list running as you go on. Come back and refine it. The clearer the picture you can create, the better.
Create a Vision and Feeling Board
I know, I know — you’re over the vision board right? I’ve heard this complaint from clients, but I still make them do it. However, you don’t have to go cutting and pasting magazine covers anymore. Also, this isn’t just a placeholder for all the stuff you want, it’s a visual representation of how you want your life to FEEL. I have an all electronic one that I created on Power Point from Google Images that has several pages for different areas of focus. One page is for my personal life, two for my relationships (they’re important), one for my career and a final page for the “stuff” — walk in closets and the like.
I’m also adding a page simply dedicated to my love of the process — on that’s got snapshots of blog posts, computers, laptops, writing in the zone, and even a flight of steps to remind me to love every single one of them.
It’s very important to not just focus on the literal part of what you want, though that is also important. A lot of time, the things we want when success is achieved can seem so far away that staring at pictures of them doesn’t serve necessarily because it makes you feel more removed from them and that defeats the purpose. When you add the feeling part, it all becomes much closer. I have lots of people laughing on my vision board, so I know whenever I do that, I’m making parts of my board come alive.
You know have a powerful vision of where you want to go. Hold it close, revise as necessary and keep somewhere you can see every day. You’re well on the way. The next step is to create and follow rituals to your creative success!
What’s on your vision board? What word do you most want people to say about you? Let us know!
In service of your Visionary Legacy…
