Category Archives: how to have a vision and protect it

What Is Your Vision?

Does Your Vision Include Financial Rewards?

Even when they’ve found their passion and purpose, many people cannot imagine making a living doing what they love to do. But really, why is this? Simply because you have a liming belief which tells you it’s not possible? (We’ve examined the connection between limiting beliefs, lack of achievement, and ways to deal with injunctions and shadow belief systems elsewhere.) 

For example, you love to go sailing but you don’t think this could provide you with a living? Is this real, or a limitation due to a lack of vision and imagination on your part? Or is it the product of some deep shadow belief you hold in your subconscious mind?

Truth is, my friend Colin Masterson loves to go sailing, and he’s made a very good living for many years skippering mega-yachts for the rich men and women who love a life on the ocean wave.

My friend Alan Jackson is passionate about photography. He’s now making a very good living selling beautiful landscape prints and greeting cards. He also is commissioned by publishers to take spectacular photographs of the most dramatic and inspiring beauty spots throughout the world. Not only does he get to enjoy his passion of photography, but he also gets to travel around the world doing it! And his bank balance reflects the skill and esteem he’s achieved in his particular profession.

Sir Ian McKellen always loved to act. After developing his skills in the theatre, at the age of 50 he turned to movies. Then, in his 70s, he was offered defining parts in some of the biggest movies of all time. (Gandalf, in The Hobbit Trilogy, in particular.)

These people definitely have passion and purpose. You may say they have outstanding skills too. Sure, but they learned those skills somewhere, just like you can.

Jesse Heiman is a portly redhead with a degree in English who loves acting. He’s made around 60 appearances in mainstream movies and big-hit television shows. In his short acting career, he’s appeared alongside stars such as Leonardo Di Caprio and Kisten Dunst. You’d never take Jesse for a star but casting directors seem to have many roles which suit him. And if he can fulfil his aspirations in this way, so can you.

My friend Jan Day is a woman who loves to help people build better relationships. She’s making a decent living because she has passion and purpose about running workshops in which she shows people exactly how they can establish greater intimacy and enjoy truly rewarding emotional and sexual relationships.

And my colleague Marianne Hill loves to help people explore their shadow and achieve their full potential. She has developed her skills to the point where she is now running a highly respected training course for shadow work facilitators. She is making a very good living doing exactly what she loves: running run workshops in which people can find their deepest truths, heal their deepest wounds, and explore how they can bring all of themselves into the world for everybody’s benefit.

If these people can do it, so can you! 

Your Vision Doesn’t Need A Road Map To Go With It

 A lot of people working on their vision start getting wrapped up in concerns about how they are going to make it into a reality. But at this stage you don’t need to worry about how this is going to happen. Once you’ve formed a clear vision and you’ve “programmed” that into your mind, a mysterious energy will take over.

This is the energy of the universe, which wants to support you. Soon you will soon find yourself enjoying all kinds of unexpected coincidences, synchronicities. There will be many moments of good luck, good fortune and opportunities that will speed you on your way. This is The Law Of Attraction at work.

We’ll talk more about The Law of Attraction later. For the moment all you have to do is work on creating a vision of your future.

One good way to form your vision is to create a detailed picture, image, visualisation or description of how your ideal life would look like you’ve achieved it. This is what you’re going to do now.

Of course your vision can change as time goes by, so a great idea is to revisit your vision every few months. This is your starting point, and you have seven major areas to think about.

1 A Healthy Approach To Wealth and Material Goods

The first area to focus on is your financial vision. Here you can determine exactly what annual income you require, how much you wish to have in savings and investments, how you’re making provision for your retirement, and other financial safeguards such as ensuring you have insurance for your family.

This might be the first test of your ability to believe in your vision. Suppose you want a multi-million dollar investment fund for your retirement. You could easily sabotage yourself by choosing to decide that this just isn’t possible.

Remember, though, at this stage you’re not concerned with how your wealth is going to come to you, or whether you’re making enough money to build such a fund. For now, all you do is simply create your vision of what you want, imagining your ideal picture of your life as it is in the future. This is the time to create a detailed GPS destination for your brain to work on.

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.

But if you do know where you want to go, you can start the journey right here, right now.

Another important aspect of your vision around wealth is what you do with your money. Do you support charitable enterprises or good causes, do you support your friends or family? Is your money being used to support a particular interest of yours such as health promotion, helping people develop greater vitality and well-being, promoting sustainability – or something else which benefits humanity?

2 Home & Material Possessions

You need a vision of your future home, including its size, its location and the type of furnishings you are enjoying. You might also want to visualise the type of car you’re driving, the kind of possessions you enjoy owning, and anything else which seems relevant to the physical structure of your ideal life.

3 Purpose and Mission

 The second area to focus on is your life’s work. We’ve already talked in this book about soul purpose – aka life mission – and right livelihood – aka your ideal occupation.

Now it’s time for you to crystallise the vision of your ideal job or occupation. Where are you working and what are you doing? Do you have a clear image of your co-workers, clients and business associates? Are you running your own business or are you working as an employee in a company? If so, what kind of company is it, and what position do you occupy?

Let your imagination run free here, because as we saw in Chapter 1, your job needs to be something which feeds your soul.

In short, what do you do which serves both yourself and the world?

Continued here

 

What is Your Vision 2

Continued from here.

Manifesting Your Vision

4 Free Time (Including Spontaneous Leisure and Joy)

You can pack so much into your life, if you know what you want to do. And nowhere is this more true than when you envision the time you allocate to your own recreation and leisure, both spontaneous and planned. This can be a major source of your joy and pleasure in life.

In your ideal vision of life, what time and adventures do you share with your friends and family? How much free time do you have among all the other occupations and interests that fill your days? How much time you spend on vacation?

And what do you really love to do that takes you so completely away from work that your heart sings with joy?

 5 Body (Including Physical Exercise to Energise & Food As Nourishment)

What is your ideal state of health? This is about being healthy and well and staying free from disease, and about the level of exercise you enjoy, exercise which keeps you fit and energises you.

You may also like to form a clear picture of the kind of food you enjoy to give nourishment to your body, your soul, your life and your environment.

How do you imagine your level of energy and vitality? What are you doing to ensure that your body remains at peak condition until you choose to leave this planet?

6 Family, Community, Friends and Relationships

Next, consider your relationships. These extend to your nearest and dearest, your friends and family, but they also extend your relationships with your community, and the world beyond your community.

What kind of friends do you have, and what kind of energy do you take from those friendships? How do you ensure that your relationships are all loving and supportive, free of judgement, and based on a principle of mutual acceptance and tolerance? And in all these relationships how are you maintaining your boundaries, establishing your sovereignty, and still accommodating the needs and wishes of others?

Finally, consider the relationship between your physical home and your community. Where is your spiritual home? How are you relating to your community and to the people around you?

7 Personal (Your Ongoing Journey Inside)

There are some things in life which you do truly for yourself. One of them is the ongoing journey of self-exploration on which you’re embarking right now, or perhaps continuing from years gone by.

In any event, what are you doing to maintain your emotional well-being and ensure your continued personal growth and development? What kind of therapy, coaching or support are you using for your personal development? How and where are you receiving support and affirmation by being with others in a team?

What makes a successful team? Vision – or something else?

You may not be a Navy SEAL, but you can take all these steps to manifesting your vision. Do you have a spiritual practice such as meditation or daily worship? And how are you expanding your interests and achievements in the personal arena? Do you enjoy new challenges such as painting, music, writing or sport? How do these things feature in your ideal vision of your life?

Forming Your Own Vision

 When you’re ready to form your own vision of your future, find a quiet space and time where you won’t be disturbed.

This is sacred work. As you choose what your future will look like, you are invoking the energy of the universe as an ally to help bring it towards you. It has been said, correctly, that the deepest therapy is spiritual work. This is important because to enter into the realms where the universe helps you by opening doors for you and guiding you to fortuitous coincidences, you need to have entered a spiritual mindset. This can only be done with considerable personal work, that is to say therapeutic work, like shadow work (read more about that here)  or deep Jungian therapy. 

Video – spirituality and manifestation

However, to move on to the practical parts: you can take each section separately, adapt them as you see fit, or you can work your way through the seven sections one by one. Whatever you do, write down everything that comes to you so that you have a written record of your vision.

Your mind needs to be programmed with your vision as the destination for your internal GPS system. So read through it every day of your life, either before you go to bed in the evening or just after you wake up in the morning. Also, visualise at least one part of it for ten to fifteen minutes every morning.

When you adopt this discipline in combination with the techniques described in this book, you’ll be absolutely unstoppable in achieving the different aspects of your vision.

And it will come to pass sooner than you can even begin to imagine.

Sharing Your Vision

Unfortunately, there are plenty of dream stealers and “negomaniacs” around who would prefer to maintain the status quo and stop you achieving your vision. They want you to be who and whatever serves them, not your magnificent self.

So only share your vision with people you trust to hold it sacred and support you in working towards it. Never share it with anybody who doesn’t support you in being your fullest self. If you hear any destructive criticism or negative judgements from somebody when you do share it, make sure you leave those people out of your circle in the future. You deserve more.

You need one or more friends who will support you, friends who want the same as you do: financial security, a beautiful home, loving relationships, and a meaningful life. A great way to make this happen is to form a Mastermind group. I’ll explain how to do that in another post. 

Sharing your vision is a beautiful thing. Before you know it, the power of your friends’ energy and loving support will be helping you move towards your vision. You’ll find coincidences happening, you’ll find people entering your life who can somehow help you work towards it, and you’ll discover resources appearing unexpectedly from all around you.

And every time you read through your vision, or share it with others, it will become more real and more achievable.

Movie star Jim Carrey has shared a story about his vision which shows the power of imagination and desire. It also shows the irresistible energy generated when you repeatedly visualise or imagine these things in your mind’s eye.

Jim didn’t have a great start in life, that’s for sure. At one point he and his family were living in a camper van on a relative’s lawn because his father was out of work. And apparently he didn’t even complete high school, dropping out to further his comedy career.

His first appearance in a stand-up comedy club bombed so badly that he considered giving up. But, with the quality of resilience and persistent that separates the truly successful from those who don’t make it, Carrey continued to develop his skills.

When he was 19 he went to Hollywood, like hundreds or thousands of other wannabes. The difference between Carrey and the rest of the people who don’t make it was that he had resilience, persistence, and a clear vision of his future.

In fact, sitting one night near the famous Hollywood sign, in his beat up old Toyota, Carrey wrote himself a check for $10 million “for movie services rendered”.

Carrey kept the check in his wallet for a decade or more. Well, we all know the outcome!

Sure enough, he manifested $10 million for making a movie.

Here’s what he said on the Oprah Winfrey show in 1997: “I wrote myself a check for ten million dollars for acting services rendered and dated it Thanksgiving 1995. I put it in my wallet and it deteriorated. And then, just before Thanksgiving 1995, I found out I was going to make ten million dollars for Dumb & Dumber. I put that check in the casket with my father because it was our dream together.”

That is the power of visualisation and repeated daily reminders of you goals. Every time Jim Carrey opened his wallet, the check was there to remind him of his vision.

Carrey is also reputed to have said, “I want to be a positive force in the world, I would like to make people happy. The thing is, I’ve always tried to create transcendent moments. Moments that take people away from their concerns. Heaven to me is when people find a way to become so involved with life that they’re no longer concerned for the future.”

That sounds to me like a clear mission statement or life purpose. How did he do it? How did he “create transcendent moments,  moments that take people away from their concerns”?

He did it by playing in comedy movies. This appears to have been Carrey’s right livelihood, because he’s also on record as saying, “I love acting. I love play-acting. I love pretending. I love telling stories so whether they be comedic or serious or whatever, it doesn’t really matter to me. I enjoy telling a good story. I have it all in me.”

And so do you. For now, make sure you have a clear vision. the GPS road map for your subconscious mind.