Where do you want to be in a year?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a question that many of us stop to think about because it\u2019s hard enough to get through the week or even the day without worrying about a year out.<\/p>\n
But if we never stop to think about where we want to be, we wake up one day and wonder, what have I accomplished? Is it what I actually want to accomplish? Why haven\u2019t I accomplished more?<\/p>\n
Nurses and hospice workers say that one of the biggest regrets that people have on their deathbeds is not living the life they wanted to.<\/p>\n
But it doesn\u2019t need to be this way if you choose to live life intentionally and authentically.<\/p>\n
Think about your last vacation. How much time did you spend planning it? My guess is you spent a total of at least 10-20 hours deciding where to go, how to get there, where to stay, what to eat, where to sightsee, and what activities to do.<\/p>\n
Why? Because you only get so much time off per year and want to make the most of it. And with at least a little planning and research, you\u2019re more likely to have an amazing vacation.<\/p>\n
If you can benefit so much from spending a little extra time planning two weeks of your life, imagine how much more you could benefit by planning the other 50 weeks of your life. You can go from living a life that feels like a hamster wheel to living a life filled with intention and purpose. Whether you think about it often or not, you only have so much time to live on this earth. Why not give yourself the best chance at living a life you\u2019ll love?<\/p>\n
Even if you have a plan for where you\u2019d like to be, you still might not be living that way. It\u2019s not because you\u2019re lazy or not good enough, and it\u2019s also not because it\u2019s too hard or you don\u2019t have enough time. It\u2019s because it isn\u2019t ingrained in your subconscious mind yet.<\/p>\n
Your subconscious mind is responsible for the automated part of your life: habits, automatic processes like breathing, reactions like the fight or flight response, forming memories, interpreting what\u2019s happening around you, and creating beliefs about how we should live and how the world works.\u00a0Up to 95% of what your brain processes happens in the subconscious mind<\/strong>\u00a0so you don\u2019t spend huge amounts of energy processing all the minute details of your day.<\/p>\n So any time you introduce new behaviors or beliefs into your life, it\u2019s going to feel strange. Not only does it take significantly more energy to integrate these into your life, but they also might conflict with previous behaviors or beliefs already ingrained in your subconscious mind. And when that happens, your subconscious mind is actively going to fight against you.<\/p>\n So when you\u2019re planning out where you want to be in a year, you need to figure out what you want to achieve and change and you need to get your subconscious mind to embrace that plan.<\/p>\n That\u2019s where a personal vision statement comes in handy. It acts as your guiding force for who you want to be and what you want to achieve, plus it makes it easier for your subconscious mind to accept your new plan as the status quo.<\/p>\n So how do you create and use a personal vision statement in your life?<\/p>\n 1. What do you want to accomplish in the next year?<\/strong> By narrowing your focus to a year, you\u2019re more likely to be specific about what you want to accomplish (i.e. I want to write and publish two books this year vs I want to be an author), making it easier to break your plans into manageable steps that can be performed over the course of the year. And with specifics, you\u2019ll probably find you can get a lot more done than you thought you could.<\/p>\n So start by making a list of what you\u2019d like to do<\/strong>\u00a0in all areas of your life, including work, family, other relationships, health, and spirituality. Don\u2019t be afraid if the list looks too challenging right now. We\u2019ll come to that.<\/p>\n 2. Write your vision statement<\/strong> So what does it look like when it\u2019s finished? Let me show you with an example.<\/p>\n I am a multi-dimensional mom. I work a full-time job in a field I\u2019m passionate about. Every day I come home at 5pm and put my electronics away so I can focus on my kids until they go to bed. Three days a week I wake up early to fit a workout in so I am on top of my game. Every night I write about my day in my journal to process and release everything that happened so I get the best sleep possible. Twice a month, my husband and I go out by ourselves to deepen our relationship. I model balance, love, and joy for my kids every day so they can grow up and know how to create those attributes in their own lives.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Some of this might be true right now, and some or all of it might not. What’s most important is that this statement uniquely represents your desires for where you want to be in all areas of your life a year from now.<\/p>\n 3. Read your vision statement every day <\/strong> Reading it out loud uses different parts of your brain (like writing by hand) and helps integrate it further into your subconscious. But if it\u2019s difficult to read it out loud, just reading it every day and visualizing it as true is a great start.<\/p>\n Visualization can also be incorporated at the beginning or end of your daily meditation practice because it\u2019s a lot easier to form a new habit by tacking it onto an existing habit. Or you can write your vision statement out again every morning to get those extra motor skills involved. The more you do any of these and visualize your statement as true, the more your subconscious will believe it and the easier it will be to actually become this person.<\/p>\n 4. Find your action steps<\/strong> That\u2019s why you need to list out what you need to do accomplish this year and then integrate those action steps into your days.<\/p>\n Start with a list of all the action steps you think you’ll need to do to make your vision a reality. Things like:<\/p>\n Break down any tasks that require multiple steps so your list reflects how tasks will actually need to be accomplished (i.e. If you\u2019re writing a blog post, you\u2019ll need to create tasks to research, write, edit, and publish).<\/p>\n Then, schedule all recurring tasks into your calendar. For tasks that don\u2019t need to be done at a specific time, schedule them as early in the day as possible to ensure they\u2019ll actually get done. The later you schedule tasks, the more likely something will come up to prevent you from doing them. So you want to make sure that the most important tasks for your vision get done first<\/strong>\u00a0to ensure they get done the day they\u2019re supposed to be done.<\/p>\n Finally, you\u2019ll take everything else from your list and prioritize them from most important to least important. You\u2019ll probably want to keep this list on a program that\u2019s easily updated so you can continue to add to this list or rearrange it as necessary.<\/p>\n 5. Integrate your vision statement into your daily life <\/strong> This includes any recurring tasks you already have scheduled for the day that support your vision.<\/p>\n Three doesn\u2019t seem like much, but when we have more than that it becomes difficult to prioritize and finish everything. When you limit yourself,\u00a0you ensure you\u2019ll be making progress on your most important goals and have a much better chance at completing your most important goals every day<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Once you have those three items, schedule them into your calendar, giving them the appropriate amount of time to complete them. Again, make sure they\u2019re scheduled as early in the day as possible.<\/p>\n Only when those are scheduled do you look at the rest of your day and schedule anything else that you want to get done. But remember, the only three things you\u2019re absolutely committing to are the three items on your to do list. Everything else is just icing on the cake.<\/p>\n 6. Re-evaluate on a regular basis<\/strong> I like to re-evaluate my vision every year on my birthday, but you can use any date that will act as marker to remind you it\u2019s time for a re-evaluation.<\/p>\n You deserve to live a fulfilling life that you love, but you\u2019re the only one that can make it happen. Even though setting up a vision can take some time, and maybe even create a big shift in how you structure your day, I promise it\u2019s worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Where do you want to be in a year? It\u2019s not a question that many of us stop to think about because it\u2019s hard…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116852274,"featured_media":55,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[131],"tags":[35890],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-work","tag-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/freshstart_grapefruitcoffee.jpg?fit=866%2C577&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nXmu-R","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/116852274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feedyouraurablog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The personal vision statement<\/h2>\n
\nOften when we think about what we want to do in our life, we think about something broad that might get done in the next 5 to 10 years. At first, that feels less stressful because we have so much time to get what we want done. But it also makes it harder to make concrete plans because it\u2019s harder to wrap our brains around where to start and what steps we need to take.<\/p>\n
\nWhen you\u2019re writing your vision statement, you\u2019ll want to keep a few things in mind:<\/p>\n\n
\nWriting your vision statement down once doesn\u2019t make it magically come true. Just like a new habit, your vision gets integrated into your subconscious over time, which means you need to make sure that you\u2019re using it every day.<\/p>\n
\nIt\u2019s not uncommon to write a vision statement and then ask yourself, how in the world am I going to do this? If you\u2019re challenging yourself, it probably feels difficult to plan all of this out and get it all done. It might even feel terrifying.<\/p>\n\n
\nAs you read your personal vision statement each morning (or at night if you plan your days the night before),\u00a0choose the 3 most important action steps you\u2019re going to take for the day<\/strong>. For instance:<\/p>\n\n
\nThe beauty of your vision statement is that it\u2019s yours, and just like you it can change. You should re-evaluate your statement every 6-12 months<\/strong>\u00a0to make sure it still aligns with who you are and what you want to accomplish. If not, then feel free to tweak it until it feels right again and use that to guide the next 6-12 months.<\/p>\n