Here’s what usually happens to most people at the end of a year: we realise that we haven’t met some (or any) of our goals – we didn’t save money, we didn’t lose weight, we didn’t improve ourselves as deliberately as we thought we would. So we do the logical thing and carry our goals forward to the next year with renewed zeal and excitement and promise ourselves that this year WILL be different. But you know what? If one key ingredient is missing, yet another year will roll by and nothing much will change.
What’s the ingredient? Vision….
Vision, very simply is your ability to picture and plan the future. It gives you a clear picture of what, where and how you want to be or desire for something to be. Vision is an expectation and hope for the future. Goals are different from vision even though most times confused as the same thing. To illustrate, your vision can be described as a house and you goals are the building blocks that make up the house. They are the smaller wins that bring us closer to our desired end.
Why is vision important to achieving your goals? Where there’s no bigger picture (vision) there’s really no compelling reason to stick to something that may be difficult, challenging or uncomfortable for any extended length of time. When your goal doesn’t look as exciting as it did at the start of the year, at some point you’ll ask yourself, “why bother?”
But where there’s a vision, you have a reason for doing what you’re doing. Your goals are WHAT you do, your vision is WHY you’re doing it.
Now, the task faced by most people is finding out what their vision is: how do you know what your vision should be or what it should look like? Your vision does not have to be the entirety of your life, it can be the bit you can see now. But for a vision to work it has to be born out of your core, it has to be what you really want.
Last week Oprah gave a rousing speech at the Golden Globes. After watching her speech, I looked through some of the interviews and speeches she had given in the past and came across an interview given when she just started her channel and she spoke about her vision for her life so clearly! It is no surprise she is where she is now.
For the next few weeks I will be working through living a life of vision with you. I hope you get to learn, define your vision, redefine your vision and keep working with your vision.
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