04 e book defining a vision for your future

Course 4

Defining a Vision for Your Future

e-Book / Course TranscriptionAuthor: Domonique Bertolucci

Course 4: Defining a Vision for Your Future

Hello I’m Domonique Bertolucci. Welcome to the Your Best Life self-coaching program.

Right now you are listening to Course 4 – Defining A Vision For Your Future.

First lets talk about how to make the most of this course. Each course contains an mp3 recording, like the one you are listening to now.

Each recording runs for about 60 minutes and is designed to feel just like a coaching session. There will be times when I’m doing the talking, asking you questions and sharing my insights, as well as plenty of time for you to be thinking and documenting your responses. You might want to listen to this recording a couple of times, perhaps the first time just to get a gist of it all, maybe even on your iPod, or whilst driving the car.

Then listen to it in more details to work through all the exercises, and participate fully. Finally, you might want to listen to it just one more time to make sure that there isn’t anything you’ve missed.

Each course also comes with a full transcription of the recordings as an e-book, so you can read through everything that was said. You will also receive a workbook, to work through your answers from the recordings as well as any additional actions I’ve set and a calendar to keep track of your progress.

Why not get a file so you can keep all your workbooks together. You will be amazed to see how much progress you’ve made by the time you have finished all the courses in the program.

So lets begin.

Do you have a vision for your future? Do you know what you would like your life to look like in five years, 10 years, or 20 years time? Do you know what you might look like your life to look like in a month’s time? Or are you focused on working on a day-to-day basis.

Before we go into a details about how to define a vision for your future, I want to remind you of a few a few things you can do to help you achieve your goals and

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ultimately to support you in achieving this vision that you want to create. Remember to use a journal. A journal is there for you to help you keep accountable, to yourself for the goals that you set. Now some of you are very diligent and disciplined about your journal, and others of you dip in and dip out. I would recommend use the journal weekly, but at the very least make sure that you use your journal monthly.

Another great way to support yourself in achieving the goals that you want for your future is to get your friends to participate with you. You might want to encourage a friend to join the coaching club, or simply ask a friend support you in the goals that you want to achieve and you work together supporting them.

Let’s talk about defining a vision for your future. We’re going to be doing a lot of thinking. So I hope you are happy, relaxed, sitting in a comfy chair with a notebook and pen handy in front of you. We’re going to begin by talking about what vision is. What does it mean to have a vision? Companies have visions, but what does a personal vision look like?

Then were going to do an exercise to start unleashing what your vision might involve. We’re going to look at the difference between dreams and fantasies, and some of you will remember that from the book. But I want to apply it back to the exercises we do. We’ll look at how having vision can be useful in your life, how to believe in it, and then how to actually put that vision to good use so that it supports the reality that you’re trying to create.

So first let’s talk about what is a vision. You think about it, most companies have a vision statement, and that their bold, audacious statement about who they intend to become, who they intent to be in the marketplace, how they intend to address competition.

As an individual you need to be looking at your vision statement in terms of comparing to your competitors. But you need to be looking at what is a big, bold statement, or collection of statements, that define the future you would like to see. Most often what people are doing is setting goals with day-to-day things they want to achieve. They want to be more organised, they want to lose weight, and exercise more, to change jobs, to save money. And all of these goals are really important in terms of improving our lives.



But if we can understand how they fit and what role they play, in terms of our own big audacious picture for our future, not only will we become more motivated, but your goals will be easier to achieve. In addition to that, you’ll actually the achieving goals that really make a difference in the way you live your life. Another important benefit of being clear on your vision is that you’ll know very quickly when you’re pursuing what I call a ‘Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda Goal’, or a goal that relates to something you think you should be doing but not something you want to be doing.

Perhaps it might be a goal that relates to somebody else’s ideas of or vision for your future. Finally the really important and most important thing about having a vision for the future is once you define this bold audacious big picture view of your life, you'll find that you’re able to achieve far more, and bring far more real success into your life than you ever could if you simply focused on the achievement of those day-to-day goals.

So for our first exercise, in a moment I’m going to ask you to close your eyes and take a moment to think about the life you would like to have. I’ll talk you through the exercise first, and then I’ll ask you close your eyes and just have a think about it. So often in our hectic life, we don't take any time to simply daydream and think about what we would like our future to be like . I always spend plenty of time on what we don’t want in our life right now. You know, frustrations, anxieties, complaints, etc. But how much time do you spend thinking about what the future could be like.

So what I want you to do is think about what your life would be like. If you could have exactly the life you wanted. You don't need to be practical at this stage, I don’t want you worry about constraints like time, and money, and energy. I just wanted to suspend reality and think about a perfect day in your perfect world. I want you to picture yourself in this life. What you look like? Who else is in your life? What are you doing? What are you wearing? Where are you living? How you spend your time? What do you do for holidays? What do you do for work? How much money do you have? Who else is in your life? How do you accessorise your life? What people do you bring in your life? What relationships are happening in your life? What is your health like in your perfect life?

What I’m going to do is give you three minutes to close your eyes and just indulge in a little future dreaming. Close your eyes and think about that perfect world. If nothing could stop or get in your way, suspend reality, forget practicalities and just enjoy at daydream.



If you find that you've run out of things to think about, then that means you really don't daydream often enough. You’ve only had a moments' silence so far, there’s another two minutes to go. Start letting your imagination really run free; what could your life be like? What could it be like if you could have everything you wanted, nothing could stop you? And you didn't have to worry about practicalities or realities. Keep dreaming.

I hope that’s given you enough time to have a good think about what your life could be like. What potential is there for your life, what potential is there for you in that life? And I just want to take a few moments to make some notes about all the things your daydream life included. You don’t need to write everything down in detail at this stage. Just make enough notes so you don't forget you thought of when you had the luxury of time to think about your future. You might want to make a list, note some important bullet points, make a mind map or randomly scribble on your page, it doesn't matter. What matters, is it captured the ideas that you had. I’ll give you a couple of minutes to do that.

Before we finish the dreaming part, I just want you to review what you've written.

Have you been as bold or as audacious as you pos sibly can? Is there something you thought and you said to yourself ‘oh no, don’t be silly’, or ‘that’s not very realistic’.

I want to give you just one or two minutes longer to think of everything this life could possibly involve - everything. I want to make sure that you’ve been as bold and as audacious as possible. I want to make sure they you are not living within your current reality – this is a dreaming exercise. I just want you to ask yourself “If nothing could stop me, if I could have eve everything I wanted, what would I have?”

I’m just going to give you one more minute to make a note of what those things might be.

How did you go? Do you have a gigantic audacious starting point for a vision of the future? Now a lot of people when I ask them to suspend reality; to forget impossibilities; to overlook constraints on realities or practicalities, start to feel very anxious. And one of my favourite stories is a story about George. And George is one of the case studies in my book but I’ll remind you about George's story now.



When I asked George to define his perfect day, he was a private client of mine so he and he did this as an exercise and he came back and he had this wonderful vision for his future. This wonderful vision for his future included taking a six-month sabbatical and travelling around the world. But one of the things he had on this world trip was a different woman in each port to greet him when he got there. And after handing over to me his perfect world, he said to me “Domonique, look I really like some of these ideas, but please don’t make me achieve all of them! I’d love a different woman in every port. But the truth is I’m happily married, and I’d really like to stay that way”.

And I think that George’s story tells us a very important point. Just because we dream of something doesn't mean that we want it to be part of our reality. And I like to distinguish this as the difference between a dream and fantasy.

In George’s world, his dream was to travel the world and take a sabbatical. He actually wanted to go and look at his industry, and see all around Europe and America what people were doing in his field to reinvigorate and reinspire him. That was part of his dream. It was a fantasy to have a different woman waiting for him in each port. He actually didn’t want all of the implications of acting out that idea. He wanted to remain happily married; he had values around fidelity, trust, and commitment towards his wife.

And so what I’d like you to do is have a look at that list of ideas that you wrote down. All of the things that your perfect world could contain, and I want you to check through that list and ask yourself what are fantasies? What are things that as much as I could enjoy thinking about them, I’m actually not interested, genuinely and authentically, in achieving them in my life’?

It may be that you're not willing to put in the work to achieve those things. It may be that if you were to achieve that like George, you would be in conflict with one of your other goals. It may be that pursuing that is in conflict with your values. It may be that simply you love to daydream about it, but in reality it may not make you feel good to have it

I could certainly enjoy life where I ate chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner but in reality that would be definitely be a fantasy for me because in reality I wouldn't actually enjoy that. So what I want you to do is just take a moment to go through that list and have a think about what things are really fantasies they not dreams. They're not things you genuinely want to bring into your life.



Take a moment or two to review your list, and cross off your fantasies and seeing what things are genuine dreams - things that you would really like to have in your life. It's not about saying what is realistic and what isn't realistic it is not about and what practical it was not practical it's more about would a conflict to me if I was to pursue this or what would be in conflict with my values, or what am I really not actually prepared to make happen.

So were still suspending reality and practicalities, but were starting to look within and say ‘what would I be happy to have and what would actually potentially make me unhappy because it really is just a fantasy, it’s not a dream of mine’. Just take a moment and review your list once again.

So by now we should have is a list of dreams you would like to reality in the life. And what I’m going to tell you and what I firmly and fundamentally believe is that if your dreams are authentic, if they are things that you genuinely want to have in your life. If that is all that are consistent with your values and things you're willing to work to achieve, you can have them. You can make your dreams your reality.

I challenge you to look down your list of dreams and see which, if any, you can't think of an example of somebody else achieving. If your dream is to own an airline – Richard Branson owns an airline. Its possible, therefore it must be possible. If your dream was to be an actor – there are plenty of those out there. That’s definitely proof that that dream can become a reality. If your dream is to have a bigger home or to have a 12 month holiday, or to change careers, or to move into an entirely different field, to give yourself and the whole life of total makeover. People are doing these things all the time. Look around you and you see plenty of examples of other people achieving dreams very similar to your own.

So I firmly believe that if you have a dream, you can achieve it. But first you have to identify that dream and what so often happens for people is they don't take the time. Take the time to do the exercise that we've done so far to daydream, to think about the lovely luxurious ideas for our future. And then to work through that list and cross off the things that we know in our hearts are truly fantasies. And then once you have a clear list of what your dreams and your dream life involves, you can start refining that into a vision for your future.

What is a vision? As I said at the start, it’s a big audacious statement for what your life could really be like. What the future you could create could possibly be like.



I would like you to take a moment and look through your dreams and what you’ve noted and just start to see what falls into the different categories from our wheel of life. We want to look at what your dreams around relationships. What are your dreams around family and friendship? What are your dreams around money, wealth, affluence, finance? What are your dreams around spirituality and personal development? What are your dreams around health, fitness, wellbeing? What are your dreams around career or mental stimulation? And so on.

And I want you to start to pool these dreams together into categories. You might find it easy to take a page and divide it into halves, halves again, until you have eight sections on your page and then you could start in each section to put down what the different dreams are for each of those key categories of your life. If you have something and you'd like to say ‘looks recreation is really important to me, so I’d actually like to break that down into two categories of subcategories’.

Just use that as a tool to start sifting through these dreams and seeing which aspects of your life they relate to and what elements they contain. I’m going to give you a bit of time to do that because what we've done so far is brainstormed to think about what dreams may be included in a vision for our future and what I know want you to start doing is start putting some order to those ideas. Take those ideas and break them down and categorise them into career or mental stimulation, into romantic relationships, into family and friendships, into health and well being, into finance into spiritual development or personal development into recreation or social time. And any other categories that you want to include. Take a moment to work through that, I’m going to give you five minutes.

As you're working through this exercise if you find that one of your categories is particularly bare, you might need to close your eyes and go back to the daydream state, and start to think about how you might enrich that aspect of your life if you could have whatever you dream of in that area.

Of course as always if you don't get a chance to finish an exercise, finish the exercise in your own time , just because we don't have time or way to complete every single aspect, don’t let that be your excuse to not creating your best life.

So I want to talk to you a little bit now about why it's important to have a vision for your future and we talked about at the start why it's useful. But I want you to think about how important is it. At the end of the day, if in our life we were able to achieve



our day-to-day goals – Be more organised, be more efficient, lose weight, save money, payoff our credit cards – we’d be improving our life. We’d be improving our life, but would we be achieving the ultimate potential for our life? Would we be looking back and saying, ‘You know what? My life simply couldn't have been any better than it was’ and that’s the importance of having a vision for your future.

When we define a vision for your future you’re saying, ‘If I could create a life that simply couldn't be better than anything I could imagine. If I could create that life and I could live that life, what would it be like?’

And for me personally I think that’s an incredibly inspiring, uplifting, motivating, exciting and encouraging place to begin my day from. Every single day I'm not just trying to achieve my day-to-day goals, although of course, I have plenty of open working towards, but what I'm trying to do is create the best possible life. That’s what this is all about; it's about your best life. Not pretty good life, not a quite a nice life, but Your Best Life. And until you take the time to define your vision for your future, you’ll be having a pretty good life. It will probably be quite nice. You probably won't be unhappy, but will you be truly and genuinely successful. Will you have success and happiness in your life that is real and meaningful to you? When you go to sleep at night thinking “You know what, it couldn't be better than it was today”, and that's a dream that I hold for you – for all of the readers of my book, and the members of my coaching club, and for my private clients and people who attend my workshops. I want you to feel that you are living the best possible version of your life. And if you don't take the time to think about what that best possible version of your life can be how will you know how to achieve it? How will you know how to go out and make it happen, to find it, to create it and to live it?

For me, having a vision is the foundation set everything that I work to achieve. And I find it makes my life so much easier if I had an opportunity that I need to make a decision about, I simply ask myself ‘Does this opportunity take me closer to, or further from, my vision for my best life?

It makes your life so much simpler if you know what it is you're working towards achieving. So what I want you do now in look at three of those categories that you’ve just broken your dreams down into. You want to choose friends or family or career or finance. But choose three categories - relationships, health and fitness etc. And what you to do is to begin to draft your vision statement for that aspect of your life.



For example when I think about people in my life, my vision statement says ‘I am surrounded by inspiring people who are committed to living their best life possible’. That’s what I want in my life in terms of other people. I want to be surrounded by people who are committed to living their own best life possible too. Only people who encouraged me and whose company I find uplifting. And so I have that as part of my vision for my future.

The way to create a vision statement is exactly the same as we would create an affirmation. The same rules apply. You want to write it in a way that is positive, that is present tense, and that is deeply personal to you.

My vision for my relationship - I have a vision statement that says “I am living a great love story. Every day my relationships gets better and better.” That is my vision for my romantic relationship.

If you think about that statement, that was positive – ‘a great love story’, with present tense – ‘I am’, ‘I am living’, and it was deeply personal, because it used language that excites and inspires me, that may not necessarily excite or inspire you.

I want you to take a moment and just work through three categories for now, and start to draft out what your vision statement might be for that aspect of your life. Remember to keep it positive, present tense, and personal. I’m going to give you six minutes so what I want you to do is to spend two minutes on each; I’ll let you know when the time changes over. Don’t worry about getting it perfect now just start to capture your ideas. So begin draft your vision statement - positive, present tense and personal.

Leave that statement where it is and move onto the next category, remembering once again to keep it positive, present tense, and personal. And of course, remembe ring to keep it very bold and very audacious.

This is a vision for your future that you're working on.

Now finally I want you to move onto your third category that you're choosing to work on for the purpose of this exercise, and begin defining a vision for that area of your life. You want to keep it positive, present tense, and personal and of course make it sound as bold and as exciting as you possibly can, making sure you capture all of those areas that you noticed when you were dreaming.



Now what you should have is the beginnings of a vision for your future. With the remaining eight or you may have created some more categories of your life, I'd like to work on visions statements for those as part of the homework from this exercise. I hope what you’ve been able to see by working through this, is how much more you could have in your life then what you currently strive for. And how much greater the success and fulfilment you could bring to your life if you were to focus on a vision of your future rather than just focusing on day to day goals. Day to day goals are important, I don't mean in any way to diminish those. But for so many people, they focus on their day-to-day goals and never get around to focusing on the visions of the future or the big picture goals or their dreams and aspirations for their whole life.

It’s about your aspirations for your life, what do you want your life to be like. And I hope you're starting to feel a bit excited and a bit encouraged about what your future could hold. But I know for many people around now they also start to feel overwhelmed, perhaps a bit scared, perhaps a bit distressed that they haven’t been working towards that vision up until now. And I want to reassure you that all of that is okay. At any point, you can begin working towards your future. If you only have one year left to live, would you only say ‘I only have one year left, so there’s no point in making it my best year possible?’ Of course not! You’d say ‘I have one year left, I better make it the best year possible’.

I’m hoping that for all of you have long and healthy lives ahead of you. But regardless of where you and your life journey now, there is no reason why you can't start focusing on your vision for your future and start immediately – tonight, tomorrow – in making that vision a reality.

So don't be disappointed if you hadn't been working that way until now. Know that everything you've been doing up until now has been laying the foundation. It’s been putting in place the groundwork.

If on the other hand rather than feeling a little bit disappointed, you found yourself feeling fearful, I also want to let you know that that’s okay. A lot of people when they start to think about what their life could really be like find it scary, it’s scary how good things could be.

And so often in improving our life or making our life better, we have to let go of things that we may have been attached to in the past. We have to let go of some



negative habits, and negative associations, some negative relationships or relationships that haven’t been enhancing our life.

The journey toward your best life won’t always be easy. There will be time when in order to achieve your vision for your best life. You might make some tough calls. You might have to do some things that terrify you. You may have to step right outside of your comfort zone. And if you feel afraid about that right now, that's okay.

What I like to think of that feeling of beings as scary good; when you feel afraid, but you know that that's because you're standing on the precipice of a very exciting, dynamic, and positive change in your life.

If through the course of doing these exercises you have felt overwhelmed, or afraid, or disappointed distressed, please don’t let that become your excuse for not pursuing them further. If you’ve had any of those feelings don’t consider those to be negative feelings Just say to yourself ‘When I was doing that exercise about vision I felt scared, isn’t that interesting’. Don't judge a feeling, just acknowledge them and carry on with the exercise regardless. If you found as you were working through it the first time that your anxiety or fear or apprehension actually got in the way of you been able to complete the exercise successfully, if it's overwhelmed your mind or took up far more than its fair share of mental space and you found yourself not able to work into the detail and get into the dreams of much you would like to, fear not. That's one of the reasons why these are recorded. It’s so that you can work through it again. And then at sometime in the future you might find your life is changed and you need to re-evaluate your vision of your future. Perhaps you find yourself in a meaningful relationship. Perhaps you find yourself single again. Perhaps you retire. Perhaps you begin a family.

At any point in your life you may need to reassess your vision. Come back to these exercises and do exactly what we've done on this call. Start by dreaming, and then have a think about it what you would include if you could have everything you want. And then when you have a big list start to refine it by removing the fantasies and saying, which are the things that I would genuinely, like to welcome into my reality. And then I want you to start to create vision statements, exactly what we’ve done today.

Now the final exercise is just to take one of those vision statement areas and have a look at one of those and start to think about what a short-term goal would be. What



could you do over the next 1 to 4 weeks that would take you one step closer to achieving that goal, or achieving that vision for your life?

Then I want you to have a think about a medium-term goal. What would be something you could achieve over the next 3 to 6 months that would take you closer to making that vision in your reality?

And the third step, I want you to think about a longer-term goal - something that might take you one or two years to achieve. But that would take you closer to making that vision a reality.

Now all I want you to do the purpose of this exercise is just identify one short, one medium, and one long-term goal. Of course in making your vision a reality, the goal setting process will be most likely a little more complex than those three steps. But I want to make sure you end knowing that bringing that vision into your life is simply a matter of planning and setting goals to achieve it. So I’m going to give your three or four minutes if you think through and make a note for just one of those vision areas for what your short, medium, and long term goal could be that would simply move you closer to that direction. Do not worry the purpose of this exercise about completion of perfection, just move yourself a step closer. I’ll give you three minutes.

I hope that given enough time just to begin thinking about what you might need to do to make that vision a reality in your life. Don’t be concerned if you haven't finished it all now, there’ll be plenty of time for you to work on that in more detail.

I hope that by listening to this that you’ve begun to open yourself up to the idea of having a grand vision for your future. If you already had a vision for your future, I hope this has helped you to flesh it out and get some more detail behind it. And if you haven’t, I hope it’s set you off on the exciting journey and adventure towards your truly Best life.

I have some exercises that I would like you to do for homework.

The first one is to take some time to continue that daydream. That daydream we started the with about what you're your perfect world could be like. One of the reasons we find ourselves living the same old, same old so often is because we don't take any time to dream. And what I’d like you to do is commit to finding just five minutes each day to enjoying that daydream about what your life could be like. I



want you to close your eyes and I want you to see your vision for your future. I want you to you see yourself. I want you to be able to smell the air; I want you to be able to taste the sensations. I want you to close your eyes and watch yourself walking through a day in your perfect future. Or a week, or a holiday, or an adventure. Each day you might want to look at a different aspect of your vision, or what you might want to do is look at the same one several days in a row until you’ve fleshed it out in more detail.

Now some of you will find it easiest to spend this five minutes last thing at night before you go to sleep, and for many of you that will be very positive.

Others of you may be a little more like me, and if I do that as the last thing at night I find I’m far too excited to go to sleep because I’ve started focusing on this fantastic future that working towards achieving.

So for me I find it much easier to do it at the start of each day, or at the end of my working day before I commence my relaxation time. So I might come in of an evening and sit down and then spend five minutes. Five minutes isn’t a lot of time and I know how much we all focused on getting more managing our time getting more out of our day. So I'm sure you’re all up for finding the five minutes that you need.

The second exercise I want you to do is complete those vision statement, the ones that you began, for each and every aspect of your life. There should be at least six or eight vision statement that you're completing as a part of this exercise, remembering that each of those statements needs to be positive, present tense, and personal – One for each area of your life.

If you feel overwhelmed, intimidated or afraid as you do this, repeat those vision statements like affirmations. Repeat them over and over and over again, until they feel like they’re the most natural and automatic future you could possibly be envisaging. Until they just feel like the only possible outcome that you could be working towards achieving.

Then the third exercise I want you to do is to start looking at each of those vision areas and just begin to flesh out some goals. A short-term goal, a medium-term goal, and a long-term goal, that will take you closer to making that vision your reality.



Start to look at what those steps will involve, and then begin work on the short-term goals. You don’t need to worry about changing your life overnight, or making the world a different place for you instantly. But move forward one step; take action.

The final exercise I'd like to suggest that you do is to start creating a scrapbook or a vision board that helps fuel your inspiration, your daydreams for your vision.

On my vision board I have the kind of house I'd like to live in. I have the holidays I'd like to take. I have the legs I’d like to have. I have a medal from a fun run I've done to remind me about my physical fitness. I have a postcard from Paris to remind me that in my perfect world I’m able to go to Paris regularly.

So start to think about having either a scrapbook, or a vision board, that captures words and images to stimulate you and inspire you and encourage you to continue this dream, to continue to build this vision to your future.

As an optional exercise you might like to of course read Chapter 4 of Your Best Life, and do those exercises again. And you also might like to listen to this again because there was a lot of thinking time and I think you'll find it very beneficial to go back through it, think it through again. Look at the answers you’ve written so far and refine those a little further.

Don’t forget there are lots of other courses to help you to really live your best life, so until next time take care and remember that real success is not about having it all, its about having the things that matter.


04 e book defining a vision for your future

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