6 Steps To Creating Your Vision
We all have that one dream—that one exciting thing we want to do with our life. Maybe we’ve already envisioned it but think we could never accomplish it. What we might not realize is that having that dream is already a huge step—a destination on our map of life.
With anything complex, important or beautiful (like our dreams) a great deal of work goes into making it the most it can be, and, like a director’s film, a coder’s website or a carpenter’s house, we need to know where we’re going before we start. The same goes for God when He created us.
God, too, needed a goal. The Divine Principle explains how He yearned for someone to return joy to Him, and the Bible says that when God created man and woman, His masterpiece was complete. If that’s true, we must have been the very first thing God wanted and thought of. If we look at the makeup and biology of all living things, we can see how each organism is made up of simpler organisms and structures, each clearly leading to something more and more complex—almost as if He had planned it all along! (Wink, wink.) If not, then to what end would atoms and molecules have been designed? When building a house, all the little nails, screws and bolts serve a higher purpose of holding everything together.
As co-creators ourselves, we can achieve our desires by beginning with the end result in mind. Of course, for this to really work, we need to be able to look beyond the now, which requires faith and investment. It also takes imagination, but not the daydream kind, in which the time we take imagining a goal makes us less likely to achieve it. It’s all about differentiating between fantasies that stall us and visions that empower us.
A creator is someone who envisions, then creates. On the daily. Here are some great ways to envision your future and make empowering goals:
Create a personal mission statement. With just a couple of sentences, you can reaffirm your life values, goals and aspirations every day.
Write down your thoughts (with pen and paper!).
Do something that makes you feel like a kid again, like jumping on a trampoline, raking leaves and making a giant leaf bed, finger painting or whatever else to release that childlike creativity we often bottle up. Draw from this energy for your next brainstorming session.
Pinpoint your ideals and values. What gets you fired up?
Use pictures or magazine clippings to illustrate your ideals and aspirations in a collage.
After writing down some specific goals, map them out with a daily to-do list.
Eventually we’ll find that the blueprint for our life lies within our true, uninhibited, creative, imaginative self—the part of us we got from God. What’s an idea that you can map out today?