The New Year is the perfect time to look to the future, but we invite you to reflect on your life and on what you want to create at any juncture during the year.
What Does Envisioning Entail?
When you’re able to clearly see your future, you’re more likely to make it happen. Visualizing your future clearly also helps you decide if that’s really the future you want for yourself. Think of envisioning as both a life planning tool and a “bring it to reality” tool.
Writing and Imagining Your Future
In the Search Inside Yourself book, Chade-Meng Tan describes a potent writing exercise for discovering and reinforcing your future vision. Here’s how it works.
Set aside seven minutes in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Take out a piece of paper and answer this prompt: “If everything in my life, starting from today, meets or exceeds my most optimistic expectations, what will my life be in five years?”
Visualize this image in as much detail as you can muster. What are you doing? Who are you with? What’s inspiring about this image? Put yourself in the shoes of the future you. How do you feel?
This image can be a guidepost for you to move towards. As you make big life decisions, ask yourself: is this bringing you closer or further away from the you that you want to be?
Share Your Future With Others
Talking about your ideal future with others helps bring it into reality. How?
- You’ll inspire others. You’ll recruit supporters for your success. Having these allies can go a long way towards making your dream real.
- You’ll reinforce your dream for yourself. The more you talk about it, the clearer it’ll become in your mind. The clearer it is in your mind, the faster you’ll move towards that vision.
- You commit yourself. It’s hard to talk about a dream and not take action towards it. Once you put it into words, it becomes real – and you’ll begin the process of committing and following through.
Take 10 minutes for yourself. Do a little life planning. See and create your future. Then start to talk about it.