Just like I teach my clients who are trying to reach their health goals that they need to have a vision of their ideal future because how they view their future directly influences your present day actions.
I ask how they see themselves in 1-5 years from now if they were to follow through on their daily health habits consistently. I ask them to bring as much detail into the vision as possible. How do they feel? What do they look like? What are they doing? Who are they with? How will achieving this goal impact others? This vision should be a source of inspiration and positive feelings.
Likewise, I ask them to bring to mind how it would look if they continued on their current path and didn’t change a thing. I get them to ask themselves all the same questions. This can be a useful reminder in times when you have to decide if you are going to act based on your old habits or your new values.
I even suggest coming up with a vision statement. Something that you can easily remember as your personal code of conduct. The goal is to grow the identity you need to achieve future goals and so the more reinforcement the better.
Here is my vision statement:
I leverage my talents, knowledge and skills to live a life of financial, mental, emotional and physical freedom and I help others do the same.
And my mission: To constantly improve my knowledge and skills in the areas of coaching, self-mastery, nutrition and movement to help as many people as I can get unstuck from old emotional and thought patterns.
Your vision is like the destination and the mission is how you plan to get there in case you were unsure of the difference between the two.
The key is to have very happy, positive and hopeful feelings regarding your ideal future vision. If self-confidence issues prevent you from being able to see your ideal future self without feelings of lack, or disappointment because you don’t think you can pull it off, or if it makes you feel stressed then don’t use visualization as a technique until you boost your confidence, which will come over time as you engage in small daily actions that build your desired identity and prove to yourself that you CAN do it.
Put your vision statement somewhere that you can read it daily as a regular reminder of where the majority of your focus should be during the day. It doesn’t have to be a big deal where you carve out a lot of time for “visualization sessions”. Take a few minutes before you go to sleep and a few minutes upon waking to have cozy thoughts about your ideal future vision!
If feelings that don’t make you feel so great come up when you are trying to visualize then you can skip the visualization and downgrade your vision statement to something that is less grandiose and turn it into something that is more believable to you that won’t cause you anxiety or fear of failure. For example: “I commit to being responsible with my money, and building my finances for my future” may be more believable and easy for you to feel good about than “I will be a millionaire in 3 years”. You can upgrade your vision statement as you progress.
I personally believe 100% that I can and will reach my vision despite it being an ambitious one. I’ve had practice using this technique in other areas of my life so visualization sessions are a great tool for me (and anyone else) who has that confidence in themselves but are prone to falling off track when they feel resistance to the process. And resistance comes up regularly for me when it comes to marketing myself as a coach, so a vision statement reminds me of my why and puts me back on the path.
Follow me to see how using the strategies I use with my health clients works for growing my coaching business!
