Having a clear vision for the life that you want to build can provide an incredibly amount of clarity.
Knowing who you want to be and where you want to go makes every decision in your life that much easier because you know the path that you’re pursuing.
And it enables you to live with intentionality and purpose, which creates a rich and fulfilling existence.
Without a clear vision for the life that you want to build, the opposite can occur. You may grow to feel stuck and that life is passing you by because you don’t know who you want to be.
So in this post, I’m going to walk through my process of how to establish a vision for your life.
It start big picture to frame your thinking, and then works toward making it more tangible, and finally ends with writing a short guiding statement to guide your path.
Let’s get started.
Step #1: Order Your Values
We all operate on a set of values that guide our behavior. Our values are the things that we think are important in the way that we live our lies and interact with others.
For many of us, these live in our subconscious. But to me, it’s critical to sort through your values with intentionality and use those as the guideposts for establishing the vision of how you want to live and who you want to be.
So when thinking about what you want to do with your life, and the type of lifestyle that you want to live, I believe starting from a place of determining the things on which you place the most value is step one.
To help you do that, we wrote a full article on how to determine your values, with a different exercises that you can use, that you can find right here.
Step #2: Write a Future Biography
Once you have established your core values in life, it’s time to use those to frame the vision for where you want to go.
My favorite way to do that is to use your values to inform the creation of a future biography.
Writing a future biography is an exercise that takes about 20 minutes and, from my experience, helps to bring to life the life that you’re working towards.
Basically, all that you do here is imagine what your ideal future life looks like and then write about it as if you’re in it. Write about what you’re doing in that life, how it feels, and what a typical day looks like.
The process of picturing yourself in the future that you want to build and then making it concrete by writing about it I find helps give you a sense of the ideal future that you want to work towards.
We wrote a complete article about how to write a future biography here.
Step #3: Write a Personal Mission Statement
The last step in the process of establishing a vision for your life is to take your values and your future biography and turn them into a crisp, easily memorable statement of the vision that you’re working towards.
Basically, you want your personal mission statement to be less than 50 words and no more than 2 – 3 sentences and serve as a high-level guiding summary of how you want to live your life.
It should serve as a short, top of mind reference that you can access whenever your face a decision about where to go next.
We have a full article about how to write a personal mission statement that you can reference.
Conclusion
Having clarity in your life is based upon having a clear vision of who you want to be and what you’re working towards.
Without that vision, many people drift through life feeling lost and frustrated.
I’ve found that intentionally defining your values, which you then use to frame a future biography, which can then help create an easily memorable personal mission statement can be an incredibly effective process for providing clarity on where you want to go and what you want to do.
