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Create a Vision Filter – A Week of Free Life Coaching – Day Five

From January 6th through the 10th I’ll be taking Storyline readers through a life-coaching experience. Each day I’ll offer exercises that will give you clarity and direction. Let’s pretend you’ve decided to spend a week in my office, organizing your life. This process will prove more effective than New Year’s Resolutions, I assure you. If you want more, either pick up the Storyline book or attend one of our conferences.

On Day Four we made a plan and established actionable steps to achieve your goals. Today we will dive into creating a vision filter.

When I was in high school I sat down and wrote out all the goals I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to be a NYT bestselling author, be worth more than a million dollars, live in Oregon by a river with a dog. And I wanted to do it all before I turned 35, which is when I’d allow myself to get married.

Amazingly, I forgot about that list of goals. And yet, when I was in my mid-thirties a friend called. She’d found my list in a box of letters she’d kept from her childhood and everything on the list had come true. For whatever reason, I’d made it all happen.

*Photo Credit: ell brown, Creative Commons

I can’t say exactly why or how it all happened, but my guess is early in life I’d created a vision and that vision helped me make decisions during the early years of my professional career (not to mention I was blessed with great mentors and no small amount of kindness from God.) There’s nothing magic about it, really. Having a vision is just like making a big to-do list, only it’s not for the day, it’s for your life. Once you do that, you have clarity about what you should say yes to and what you say no to. If you want to be a professional triathlete, you begin to say yes to opportunities to meet with people and run in certain races and over dinner you mention your vision and somebody at the table happens to be looking to sponsor somebody and so on. It just kind of happens, not for the use of pixie dust but because you’ve clarified what you want. Nobody can help you unless they know what you want.

These days, I want to grow a large business that creates jobs and when I hit retirement age I want to serve my state through some sort of civil service. And having that vision dictates how I live. I try not to say stupid things because somebody who says stupid things isn’t likely to get elected. And when there’s an opportunity to meet with somebody involved in politics I say yes and learn all I can. My vision has created a filter for what I will and won’t do.

Keeping a moral code without a personal end in mind is nearly impossible. There has to be a reason behind our behavior or we can’t change.

So on our last day of life coaching, our goal will be to set a vision for your life. I want to know what kind of man or woman you want to be. I want to know where you’ll live, what sort of relationships you’ll have, what you’ll be doing to earn a living and what other people will say about you. Only I don’t want to know what you want that to be for today or tomorrow, I want to know what you want that to be when you are 65-years old. (If you’re older than 65 now, we’d decide what you want ten years from now.)

Once you really have that vision in your brain, you’d be amazed at how much easier it is to do your work, to hold your tongue and to operate with integrity.

So here’s our final assignment. On a sheet of paper, write down as succinctly as possible an answer to the following questions.

When You’re 65

What will you be doing for a living?

Describe what your closest love relationship feels like:

If you had children, how do you want them to describe you?

How much money do you have in savings or investments?

What does your relationship with God feel like?

From here, I’d help you edit these down so they are as brief as possible. Then, we’d go for a walk and talk through them. I’d want to get our bodies moving to get us out of our minds a bit. We’d walk and I’d interview you as though you were 65. I’d ask you about your children, about your spouse and about your work. I’d ask specific questions about how you created such a loving marriage or what you did to make your kids have so much love and respect for you. After our walk, we’d likely throw a baseball in the field behind my house and I’d keep talking to you about how you became so awesome by the time you turned 65. The point is, of course, to lock this in as a vision.

This is the vision you’ve set for your life.

Hopefully, all the goals you set for each of the roles you play in life are heading toward this vision becoming true. Again, there’s nothing magic about this process. It’s all about goal-setting and creating and keeping a plan.

Once we were all done, I’d transfer your vision to a small card, about the size of a credit card, so you could pull it from your wallet or your purse any time you needed to see it. I’d also give you the name of a graphic artist who could lay out each answer you gave me over an image, almost like a piece of art, so you could hang them in your office.

Closing Thoughts

Our vision at Storyline is to help one-million people live better stories with their lives. Like most of you, we’re tired of all the negativity, all the fear and complaining about how bad America has gotten. We don’t want to add to the chorus of complainers. We’d rather change the world by living better stories. After all, nothing is more powerful than a person who’s story is inspiring the world.

Hopefully, by now, I’ve convinced you that setting New Years Resolutions doesn’t work, and to really change your life you have to set a firm foundation, set goals, make and keep a plan and create a vision for your future. If you take the last five blog days seriously and do all the assignments, nothing in your life will be the same. We promise.

Thanks for joining us in living better stories. Thanks for helping us change the world.

Much love and Happy New Year,

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