Your Vision
It’s time to take the first step in the Happiful program by creating your Vision of your ideal future life. Take a moment now to block out an hour in your calendar for this life-changing step. Do NOT skip this – the entire Happiful program is designed to help you achieve your Vision; without the Vision, you are missing most of the benefit of the program. Continuing the analogy of turning you into a jet pilot, there’s no point in you piloting your jet if you don’t have a destination.
As author Robin Sharma wrote in ‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’, “Everything is created twice, first in the mind, and then in reality.” Now is the time to create your desired life in your mind, so that you can then create it in reality.
In crafting your Vision, let go of limits! As author Napoleon Hill wrote in his classic ‘Think and Grow Rich’, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” If you can imagine it, you can make it happen. So, if you could have anything, do anything, and be anything, what would you have, do, and be?
Ask yourself: what would you do if you absolutely knew you could not fail? If an all-powerful being told you that whatever you attempt, you will be successful? That should inform who and what you really want to be, without fear of failure holding you back. This is your chance to create an inspiring Vision, so go big!
When crafting your ideal future life, we use a 5-Year timeframe because it allows you to achieve almost anything you can imagine without being so far off that you don’t have to get started.
To write your 5-Year Vision, think of it as a movie script of your ideal life in the future, with yourself as the star. See yourself in your house, driving your car, on vacation, and looking at yourself in the mirror. Who are you with? Where are you? What are you doing? Take the time to consider each of the 8 key parts of your life: Business/Career, Relationships, Health and Fitness, Financial, Environment/Home, Recreation/Fun, Personal Development, and Service/Contributions. For each of them, start with jotting down words or phrases that would represent the best you could possibly imagine for that part of your life. Then, expand on those to add vivid details for each area to add clarity and to generate powerful emotions.
If you’re having trouble coming up with your Vision, a fun preliminary step is to create a Bucket List of all the experiences and accomplishments you want before you die; this can help inspire your Vision.
If you’re married or in a relationship, many people choose to work on it together with their partner, while some people prefer to craft their Vision by themselves and then share with their partner.
The first Action Steps are simple:
Decide if you will craft your Vision on your own or with your partner.
Schedule an hour in your calendar to write your first draft.
This fun and simple Vision-setting exercise is remarkably powerful. Once you complete your Vision, you’ll be amazed at how it gives you clarity and motivation and helps you to make decisions.
As Craig Ballantyne says in ‘The Perfect Day Formula’, “Crafting your vision requires writing as if you were living in the future, three to five years from now, and have already achieved your goals. Knowing the end of the story will allow you to write the chapters that get you there. Create a big, bold, clear, concise, and specific vision. Start by identifying what you really want…this exercise will give you tremendous clarity and optimism. It will give you a blueprint for success and it will right your sinking ship if you are struggling. This is the treasure map you’ve been looking for, and it was inside of you all along.”
To make your Vision tangible, you must put it in writing, with specific details. But it doesn’t have to be perfect: there’s no wrong way to do this, and you’ll be revising it over time anyway. No one is grading or judging you, so you don’t need perfect language or grammar and it doesn’t have to cover all the parts of your life. Just sit down and start writing as ideas come to you. You should start by considering each of the key parts of your life: Business/Career, Relationships, Health and Fitness, Financial, Environment/Home, Recreation/Fun, Personal Development, and Service/Contributions. You can start with just words and phrases. You can start with just words and phrases. Don’t stop until you have at least the beginning of your Vision in writing. You can handwrite it or create a document on your computer.
Then keep the written or printed Vision visible where you will review it every day. Over time, you’ll undoubtedly make changes and additions, which is great. But don’t just write it once and file it away or it won’t help. Daily visualization is important because it will program your subconscious mind to help you achieve your Vision, and it also gives you daily motivation and drives your decisions and prioritization.
So, to recap:
Schedule an hour in your calendar to start on your Vision. (Do this now!)
In that scheduled time, write a first partial draft of your Vision.
Don’t stop until you have something down in writing.
If typed, print it out.
Put the written Vision where it will be easy to review it every day.
Review it daily, trying to visualize in your mind what you have written.
Update with changes and additions, each time printing out the new version.