3 Methods to Invest Aligned with Your Vision
Invest your time, talent and treasure on pursuing your purpose, harmonious relationships and abundant health and wealth.
Live in the Flow
Stepping into the flow of abundance allows you to create and maintain harmony between your occupation, relationships, health and wealth. In my blog, 3 Strategies to Invite the Flow of Abundance, I shared several strategies to invite you to step into the flow of generosity and gratitude. This blog goes deeper into the strategy of investing your time, talent and treasure in your vision and life purpose.
Spending Aligned with Your Vision
Spending your resources in alignment with your vision allows you to create and maintain harmony between your occupation, relationships, health and wealth.
My last blog, 3 Ideas for Investing Your Resources Intentionally, emphasized the importance of shifting your mindset from settling for the status quo to consciously investing your resources in your vision and life purpose. This blog emphasizes the methods for connecting and aligning with your vision and life purpose. Here are three methods for spending aligned with your vision:
Tithe where you feel spiritually fed
Support other people and accept support from them
Invest your resources intentionally in your vision
Being clear about your vision and life purpose can simplify your decision-making process significantly. What are your values and purpose? Use your answer to help you reduce the number of choices you have to make. Establishing good habits and systems can remind you of your values and purpose, so you don’t have to keep making the same decisions repeatedly.
Tithing Where Spiritually Fed
Most people have heard of tithing to your religious church or spiritual center. Tithing means to give ten percent. I was taught to tithe where I’m spiritually fed, which isn’t exactly the same thing. I can also be spiritually fed by individuals and organizations that aren’t directly labeled as spiritual or religious. In her book, The Four Spiritual Laws of Prosperity, Edwene Gaines tells the story about being spiritually fed by a compassionate waitress, so she gave part of her weekly tithe to that waitress. Who has helped you when you were struggling? Consider contributing part of your tithe to them.
Local nonprofits and other businesses can spiritually feed you by doing inspirational work. You may consider your donations to be charity rather than a tithe, so you may contribute from a separate pool of funds. The main difference between a tithe and charity is the direction of the flow of love. You pay a tithe for being spiritually fed by love. You donate to charity because you want to give love to others. Both are good practices and aren’t always mutually exclusive. I like to take the concept even further.
When I find a restaurant that I enjoy and I want to support, I will deliberately go to the restaurant on a regular basis. I want to keep the restaurant in business for the sake of all the employees and our community. If I find a restaurant that doesn’t treat its employees well, I will not frequent that restaurant, because I don’t condone that practice. I consciously support corporations that take care of their employees and offer quality products and services. Their practices spiritually feed me with evidence of the good people can do for and with each other. I avoid supporting corporations that do not demonstrate these good practices, because they do not spiritually feed me when they mistreat employees and customers.
When you consciously spend in alignment with your vision and values, you’re likely tithing much more than you realize. My goal is to tithe 100% of my resources to individuals and organizations that spiritually feed me by espousing practices that align with my vision and values.
Nature can feed you spiritually. I happen to be writing this on Earth Day. I choose to embrace “green” practices as much as possible, so I can give back to nature, which constantly feeds me mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. You can easily support your natural environment with many little practices. In addition to the reduce, reuse, recycle ideas, you could plant a garden, allow natural wildflowers to grow to support pollinators, or pick up trash when you see it in the park. What ways can you think of to tithe to nature part of your time, talent and treasure?
Where do you feel spiritually fed? Spend some of your resources supporting individuals, organizations and natural locations that feed you spiritually.
Supporting People
Share your time, talent and resources with family, friends and community organizations that are important to you. Many people volunteer at their own religious organization, but don’t know about or have time to support other organizations. You can get creative by overlapping ideas. Maybe you want to spend more time with your family. Can you think of a way to join a local organization where you can all volunteer together to do something good for your community, whether it’s helping other people or protecting your natural environment?
If you truly don’t have time to volunteer, you can give financial support to charities and other organizations that support and uplift people. Some people say, “give him a fish you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime.” I’ve learned that both are necessary. A starving person isn’t able to learn to fish on an empty stomach, so feed people and teach them how to feed themselves. I like to find local, national, and international organizations that do both so I can have the most impact. Think about the organizations that you would like to support.
Send loving, healing, peaceful energy to all. Intentionally send loving energy to coworkers before going into a meeting for a mutually beneficial result. Send loving energy to local, regional, national and global leaders to invite them to lead with love and respect for all. Energize all with loving, compassionate energy to invite what you want in the world - peace, love, health, equity, justice. What would you love? Intentionally energize that vision with loving, healing energy. Give what you would love to receive.
Supporting others has the added benefit of increasing your sense of belonging. When you need more friends, be a friend. When you need love, give love. If you want to belong, participate with others and make them feel like they belong, too. Humans need and thrive on social interactions. Find the ones that resonate with you.
Investing in Your Vision
The first two methods focus on interactions with other people. This method invites you to focus on your own vision and life purpose, to be more proactive in searching for the right investments to move you closer to manifesting your vision. You already learned that having a clear vision helps you make better decisions when you’re faced with excessive numbers of choices. Creating good habits, rituals and systems will support you as you achieve your vision of your life purpose.
Focus on your vision. Make sure it includes all aspects of your life - your purposeful occupation, your harmonious relationships, and your abundant health and wealth. Be sure to consider all your mental, emotional and physical needs. When your vision is clear, imagine embodying the “you” in your vision. What would you think and believe? How would you feel about yourself, others and LIFE itself? What emotions do you feel? How would you behave? What would you create? What types of choices would you make based on your values?
In what ways are you currently not thinking, feeling and behaving like the “you” in your vision. How can you embody that version of you? What are a few simple steps that you can take to be the “you” in your vision? Tweak a habit or start a new one easily by attaching it to something you already do, and crowd out one that no longer serves you. Set up a system to help you make decisions that better align with your vision, such as before making a purchase, ask yourself if you’re in alignment. You can pause before responding to someone, and determine if your response is in alignment. If the “you” in your vision does not tolerate being treated disrespectfully, how can you create boundaries that require the people in your life to treat you with respect? Slow down enough to see if you’re in alignment as often as you can, and take one step at a time to embody the “you” in your vision more fully.
Flow in Abundance
Choose to intentionally invest your time, talent and treasure in ways that support your amazing life vision being realized. Establish relationships, habits and systems that invite the flow of abundance for you to achieve and maintain the life you have envisioned.
In the next blog post, I will discuss the final strategy to invite the flow of abundance in more depth.
3 Concepts of Consuming Consciously
Energize your decisions, habits and actions to experience the journey of manifesting your vision.