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Your Envisioned Future

It’s easy to dream, but it takes a bit more effort to actually achieve your envisioned future with planning – and sticking to the plan! How many of us actually know what to do, or what to ask ourselves to effectively plan our future by planning what to do now?

We may think we have a solid life plan or goals list, but we tend to procrastinate (see our last month’s newsletter here for more on procrastination) or stray from the plan for various reasons, thus pushing our envisioned future further into the future. So, here’s an exercise you can complete to figure out what you truly want your future to look like, and how you can achieve that vision.

In 1994, Roberts, Smith, and Ross contributed to a book titled “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook”, written by Peter M. Senge, which is a “pragmatic guide [showing] how to create an organisation of learners”. In its day, it was said to “revolutionise the practice of management by introducing the theory of learning organisations”. (Source: Google Books).

Roberts, Smith and Ross’s contribution was an exercise, ‘Drawing Forth Personal Vision’. Below, we outline the steps in this exercise. For a full PDF version of the exercise, click here. Please note: The below uses direct excerpts from the exercise.

This exercise is to be completed by “making up” a few ideas about your aims and writing them down. There’s no “proper” way to answer and no measurable way to win or lose – but, when completing the exercise, playfulness, inventiveness and spiritedness are all helpful.

Step 1: Creating a Result
First, you need to bring yourself to a reflective state of mind, relaxing, getting comfortable and centered. Once you’ve achieved this, you’ll then imagine achieving a result in your life that you deeply desire, then describe in writing (or sketch) the experience you’ve imagined, using present tense, answering the following:
What does it look like? What does it feel like? What words would you use to describe it?

Step 2: Reflecting on the First Vision Component
During this reflection, you’ll ask yourself if you truly articulated a vision that is close to what you actually want, or if you found it hard due to preexisting negative, or combative, self-beliefs such as:
“I can’t have what I want”, “I’m afraid of what I want” or, “It doesn’t matter what I want”.

Step 3: Describing Your Personal Vision
In this step, you’ll be focusing again on the present tense, as if it is happening right now. You can adjust the categories to suit you. You’ll answer questions based on the following categories to gain a complete picture of what you want: Self-image, Tangibles, Home, Health, Relationships, Work, Personal Pursuits, Community, Life Purpose, and Other.

Step 4: Expanding and Clarifying Your Vision
In Step 3, most people write down a mixture of selfless and self-centered elements. So, you need to suspend your judgement while doing this exercise and instead ask which of these visions is closest to your deepest desires, by expanding and clarifying each dimension of your vision.

You’ll do this by going back through your list of components of your personal vision you wrote down in step 3, and ask yourself some questions such as “If I could have it now, would I take it?” about each element.

Please note: In the full PDF version of this exercise there are examples of how each step is completed; we have merely taken the main points of the exercise to provide a snapshot of the exercise overall.

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Self-Talk and Positive Affirmations

It may seem like flower-power nonsense, but self-talk and positive affirmations truly work, and go hand-in-hand. What is self-talk? And what are positive affirmations?

Self-talk is exactly that – the act or practice of talking to oneself, either aloud or silently (mentally).
Many of us have had life experiences that have created, or society has influenced (with women especially), a repeating track of negative mental self-talk. How many times a day do you think something like, “I’m so stupid, I can’t believe I did that” or “Gee, I’m no supermodel, I’d better go to the gym/buy new makeup/put nice clothes on”. No wonder we feel negativity if that’s what we’re thinking of ourselves! And to succeed, we must be positive about all aspects of our lives, but especially ourselves – if we don’t have faith and believe in ourselves, who will?

The good news is that it’s not that hard to get rid of the negative self-talk soundtrack you have on repeat. To change it, and ultimately get rid of it for good, that’s where positive affirmations come in.

Positive affirmations are statements which affirm something to be true, and the way they’re used is by repeating positive phrases to oneself to describe how you want to be. The thought-process behind this method is that the more you repeat what you want to yourself, the more likely it seems to be possible, thus motivating you to keep striving for it (if it’s goal based). If it’s something like, “I am lovable and likable”, the thought process behind the method then is the more you repeat the phrase, the more you believe it – thus, cancelling out your preexisting negative self-talk.

To find out more about the psychology behind self-talk, visit Psychology Today here – they have a great list of articles and reader contributions to give you practical tips on how to change your self-talk.

To find out more about positive affirmations, visit Free Affirmations here – they explain what affirmations are, the theory behind them, and also offer (as the title suggests) free affirmations to help you get started.

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