3 Steps To Align Your Vision + Your Values For Long-Term Success
1. VISUALISATION + VISION + VALUES
This is your greater picture of life. Your life’s purpose. Who do YOU want to be? How do you want to be living your life? Your vision is meant to move you and inspire you in this world. Dig deep and dream big. Here are a few questions to reflect on to help you craft the path towards your life vision.
VISION: Look over these next set of questions, and then sit with yourself with close your eyes for 10–30 minutes to reflect and visualize. After that grab a journal and try to answers these next set of questions with honesty from the heart.
✽ Who do you want to be? ✽ Where do you want to live? ✽ What’s your experiences would you have? ✽ What’s your purpose — your WHY?
VALUES: Ask yourself:
✽ What matters most to you? ✽ How would you spend your time if you had no restraints? ✽ What makes you truly content? What doesn’t?
I.E:
My personal time and space
Manageable and flexible working hours
Freedom and time for creativity
Time for personal growth and development
Residing beside nature and ocean
Daily personal yoga practice
Etc…
2. ALIGNING GOALS TO YOUR VISION AND VALUES
For long-term success, it’s important that your goals align with your values and greater vision. The problem comes when we get too ahead of ourselves with distractions and desires that don’t align with our values. For example: If I value working freelance for the flexible hours to benefit my personal development and yoga career, choosing to work a corporate 9–5 job to make more money will not bring my joy, rather the opposite — frustrated, overwhelmed, confused.
GOALS: Goals need to work hand in hand and align to our values and greater vision.
Ask yourself: (Think of SMART when you write down your goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based)
✽ What are your goals and intentions for the next year? (Be specific) ✽ What do you want to accomplish? (Personal, career, relationship)
3. CONSCIOUS ACTIONS TOWARDS ALIGNMENT
Align your actions to your goal. What are the current actions that you’re taking to get you to the greater vision? If you want to go to travel the world then you might need to save more money or have some other source of income while you travel. In order to ground the energy, do what you would be doing in the case when you’d be certain that it’s already yours. Take the actions that align you to your goals, dreams, purpose.
The hard part then comes when you realize that your current actions don’t align with your values and goals at all — causing a blockage in your path towards your vision. This is when denial and event heartache kicks in when you know you need to give something up for the future greater benefit. Again, it all comes back down to honesty. Listen to your gut, and take it back to the big picture — your vision.
ACTIONS: Now, for every goal, what are the actions that you will take to reach that goal? Be as specific as you can. I like to list 3 actions for each goal at a minimum.
For example: My goal is to host x3 yoga retreats year in 2020
Actions:
Build a strong sense of community among my students in classes
Host initial opening retreat in year 2019
Offer more workshops outside of Hong Kong to increase student reach
There you have it, folks. 3 steps to lead you into a direction of greater clarity towards your vision. Now, this isn’t an exercise to just simply rush through — It took me nearly a week. First, you have to get past the bullshit and desires and recognize the real. What REALLY are you after in life? That’s the hard part. Take your time. As they say, all good things come time. Let this be an exercise in practice.
