3 Steps to Your Harmonious LIFE Vision
Expand your mindset, beliefs and imagination to envision your destination of a life you would love.
The Destination You Envision
In my blog The 7 Steps of the Creative Process, I explained that the steps can be divided into 3 parts - The Destination You Envision, The Company You Enjoy and The Journey You Experience. The Destination You Envision includes the first three steps, which are focused on the mind. By expanding your mindset, beliefs and imagination, you can envision your destination of a life you would love. The steps are as follows:
Step 1 - Envision Your Infinite Possibilities
Step 2 - Claim Your Harmonious LIFE
Step 3 - Imagine Your Vision Realized
In these steps you practice aligning your thoughts, beliefs and imagination intentionally with what you want to experience.
Step 1 - Envision Your Infinite Possibilities
Expand your awareness of infinite possibilities by expanding your mindset from limiting beliefs to limitless possibilities, so you can create your harmonious vision between your fulfilling career, loving relationships and abundant health and wealth. What would you love?
If your first thought in response to What Would I Love? is “I can’t have what I want.” or “I can’t figure out how to get it.”, then you’re envisioning doubts and limitations instead of possibilities. This is a fixed mindset. Carol Dweck teaches us to use a growth mindset, which opens up possibilities that you can logically figure out how to achieve. You can open to even more possibilities with an expansive mindset, which has no limits to what you can achieve, if you truly want to achieve it.
Imagine that you could truly have anything you want without having to figure out how to get it. Just trust that you will know what to do and when to do it. Envision what you would truly love, not what you think you should want. It has to be rewarding enough to motivate you through any challenges and around any obstacles. It has to be worth any risk of releasing what no longer serves you, no matter how attached you are to your current circumstances.
LIFE has infinite possibilities. You are full of LIFE, so you have infinite possibilities from which to choose your vision of your harmonious life. Start with a 3-year vision, long enough to not know every step you need to take, but short enough to motivate your first step. Your vision is your choice, so you’ll naturally refine it as you move forward and gain clarity in your vision or awareness of new ideas. You get to choose what you want to do with your life. Make intentional choices for what you truly want.
Step 2 - Claim Your Harmonious LIFE
Choose the specific ideas you would like for your life, your unique desires, and claim them with the same natural level of knowing expectation that you have for growing your hair. You don’t have to know how, but you know it will happen. You’ll use the amazing power of words to shift to knowing expectation to naturally claim your harmonious life vision.
People often wish for what they think they want, but don’t really expect to get it. How many people do you know wish to win the lottery, thinking that would solve all their problems? Yet the evidence shows that most people who win the lottery spend it all very quickly and end up back to their previous economic level. If your focus is on making more money, then you’ll never have enough, because your belief is that you need more money. Many rich people don’t feel they have enough money. Yet many economically challenged people feel satisfied with what they have and are grateful for their wealth of relationships and life experiences. So instead of wishing for more money, focus on what you would love to experience if you had all the money you needed. What special moments would you like to experience with loved ones? What type of projects would you like to create as your legacy, your life purpose? It doesn’t have to be a big endeavor in someone else’s eyes. It just needs to have a big emotional impact on you to fill you with love, inspiration and motivation.
When you first start the visioning process, you typically believe in your ability to achieve it at the level of hope, you begin to take steps toward your vision optimistically, yet you still have a lot of doubt and worry about figuring out how to do it.. You increase your level of belief when you have faith that you can achieve it. You believe it is possible without knowing how, yet you still have some lingering doubts that you try to push down. You truly believe you will achieve your vision when you reach the level of knowing expectation. You know it will happen with the same level of expectation you have for growing your hair and fingernails and for taking your next breath or feeling your heartbeat. You may not know how these things will happen, but you just know they will.
Assess your level of belief about each part of your vision. Do you believe you can have deep meaningful relationships? Do you believe your occupation can fulfill your life purpose? Do you believe you can have all the time, energy, money and other resources to fulfill all your needs? If not, then continue to challenge any limiting beliefs and affirm your limitless possibilities to shift you to the next level of belief.
Step 3 - Imagine Your Vision Realized
Imagine your life in beautiful, glorious detail, using simultaneous multisensory images that feel like they are happening right now. Your brain won’t know that it’s not real and will produce real physical and emotional responses, so that you actually experience your vision now.
Most teachers have learned to use multisensory instruction, focusing on different learning modalities in different exercises. When I was an Academic Therapist, working with dyslexic students, I learned to use simultaneous multisensory activities to tie the memory together, which allows the students’ strengths to naturally support their weaker modalities. I use this same idea in the visualization process.
If I ask you to describe a strawberry using all your senses, you would probably be able to tell me what you see, maybe what you feel if you think about the seeds. You might remember how it tastes or even how it smells. But you’d probably laugh at me when I ask you how it sounds.
Writers repeat the line ‘show, don’t tell.’ So instead of telling that someone ate a strawberry, and it was delicious, you could go through the description in the last paragraph and enhance your story. You could show someone eating a strawberry and provide details about its appearance and delicious taste, so yummy they want more. Now try using simultaneous multisensory images.
I grasp a perfect rosy pink ripe strawberry by its leaves. The fresh fragrance hits my nostrils, lighting all my senses. I bite into it, simultaneously tasting sweet and tart, feeling the firm flesh and seeds, and hearing it squish between my teeth. Memories of picking them with my mom on a sunny spring day warm my heart.
Did you feel the full embodiment of the experience? Even the squishing sound it made. Did your mouth start watering? Did it spark your own memories of eating them or picking them with a loved one? This is the level of embodied experience that you want to feel every time you imagine your vision.
Try daydreaming to fully embody your vision. Try on different ideas and play with them. Shift your ideas until you find what lights up all your senses. Then memorize that experience so you can recall it any time you envision your harmonious life.
Tying together your expansive mindset, your knowing expectation level of belief and your imagined embodied vision, you have created your Destination You Envision.