In the last post, I wrote about Goals and how they can support you in your life or work reinvention. I also mentioned how goals might not be the most motivating structure for you in certain circumstances.

The bottom line is that a goal can be very motivating when you have a clear outcome with a beginning, an end, and a definable path to get there.

What do you do when you find yourself at a point in your reinvention where the “what” you want is clear, but the “how” isn’t?

Examples:
• I want to become a writer
• I want to create my own business; I’m done working for other people
• I want to change from a city lifestyle to a more rural lifestyle

In these examples, there is something very compelling about the desire, but there isn’t a clear path for achieving it, yet.

A vision will help give sustaining power to your objective, i.e., keep it alive and robust, during the time that it takes you to get the details and the plan flushed out.

In order to define the details of a reinvention like the ones mentioned above, it will take quite a bit of “left-brained” focus and activity, such as research and interviewing people who have travelled a similar path.

I’ve noticed with myself and my clients that when your desire turns into a To Do list, it’s easy to lose the initial excitement that you had for your idea.

A vision will help you keep the energy of your dream alive. A vision can fuel and inspire you during your “defining the How” period.

You will want to create your vision when you can feel the compelling energy of your dream. A vision is an expression of the feeling and power of your dream. It will give you a touchstone to go back to when you temporarily lose touch with the excitement that you had initially about your reinvention.

There are many ways to create a vision, but a couple of them work effectively for most people. Pick the one that feels like more fun to do.

1. Writing your vision. In your imagination, fast forward yourself to a point in time when you are living your dream. For a few minutes, close your eyes and imagine what it is like as if you are living it right now. Imagine it as clearly as you can in your mind, engaging as many sensory details as you can conjure. Enjoy living it in your mind, and notice how it feels to be living your dream. What are the primary feelings? Empowering? Free? Fun? Exciting? When you notice that you have reached a point in your imagination that you can really feel what you are living, then open your eyes and begin writing, in present tense, your experience, as full-blown ‘feeling’ as possible. Write quickly, almost automatically, as fast as it will come, and without edit. Allow yourself to write without punctuation; just get in the flow of it and write. Sometimes my clients go back and edit their visions later, but most of them just love to keep the freshness of the first time they wrote it, when it just spilled out. It has an immediacy to it that is usually very engaging, and when you read it again, it will transport you to the feeling state easily. Your vision is for your eyes only, so keep it fresh and immediate.
2. Creating a collage. Collect some magazines that have images that are exciting and compelling for you. The content of the magazine doesn’t have to match the nature of your dream, but it might (for example, nature images for someone making a shift from living in the city to living more rural). You aren’t looking for images that are an exact representation of your reinvention; you are sorting for images that have the feeling and energy of what your life will be like when you are living your dream. In creating a collage, you are just representing your reinvention visually instead of doing it in words. To create your collage, do the imagination just like I described in #1. Then, when you feel immersed in the feeling of your reinvention, open your eyes and begin moving through your magazines very quickly. Pull out any images that resonate with the feeling of your dream. Again, it’s important to remember that you aren’t going for a literal representation. You want to gather images that evoke the feeling of your experience when you are living what you want. Don’t edit, and don’t second guess your choices. Just go with your gut. After you have sufficient images to cover a piece of poster board, get some glue and put your collage together. Again, in this stage, just follow your gut about where images go, and how they fit together. It probably won’t make sense, but when you complete it, it will have the feeling of your dream, and when you look at it in the future, it will evoke that feeling in you.

Now that you have a ‘feeling’ expression of your dream, either written or visual, come back to it and let it continue to inspire you, day in and day out, throughout your reinvention. When you get back into the feeling of what you want, you will find that you’ll often be inspired to take some action in the direction of your dream. Listen, feel, and pay attention. Allow yourself to be inspired to the next action.

Filed under: Your Map, Your Compass, Tools, Survival Tactics on March 31st, 2008