For those of us seeking to reach our next level in personal life, career, and finance, the ability to create a mental picture to focus your actions is essential. According to Merriam-Webster, vision is defined as, “the act or power of imagination.” When you apply vision to the future, you can create a mental picture that can be used to direct your actions.
The problem with using a vision to direct your actions toward a new level of success comes when you treat your vision as an inflexible mental image, rather than part of a process of imagination. The vision becomes something to achieve, rather than an inspiration to routinely recast and refocus meaningful steps. Vision is a noun pregnant with potential. Rather than an image you paint and display, it is a reflection of you that adapts with setting and time. The power of vision is always in your personal potential.
You’re not a business, so why treat your money like one?
A business has a vision and mission statement in order to help direct it’s key activities. From that flows the business plan and budget, against which the business executes. That works great for a business, but not so much for you, since you are a person with passions, interests, and endless possibilities. When you want massive change in your life, the vision you craft is all about possibility, and you need a way to be 100% invested in making that happen, but also 100% open to shifting your focus as needed. This process is about combining flexibility and focus, and is the way to inject the power of vision into personal finance.
Flexibility + Focus
Through my program Your Money, Your Values, I’ve learned to devote as much time to teaching a process for creating a vision, as for creating action steps around money. We have learned that the big shifts are rarely about the money itself, but rather your decision-process around money. Getting clear on a vision of who you could be (potential), and then linking your money habits to that vision (focus) is how you see the big shifts personally, professionally, and yes, financially! However, you won’t get the big shift if you remain stuck in the “plan/execute” mode.
Grounding Your Vision
You have to change into a mode of possibility with key focus areas that make sense right now. Because personal finance is personal, and you are continually adapting, executing specific steps on a given day may not work. How many women suddenly realize that care-taking for elderly parents is coinciding with supporting their child’s launch into adulthood? Use the mantra “adapt to thrive,” instead of “stay the course.” Yet your deep values and dreams likely won’t shift as much as you might imagine, even if you are in the process of recasting and reevaluating.
By choosing a handful of focus areas each year, and reviewing them at a cadence that makes sense (sometimes every few months, sometimes six months in), you can achieve a great deal. Your key focus areas are what enable you to ground your vision. Grounding your vision around a handful of key focus areas, is what enables you to move from “plan/execute” (which can be exhausting, and hard to keep the momentum up), to “possibility/focus” (which lets you stay flexible, energized, and action-oriented).
The key to this process lies in picking focus areas that are intimately tied to you today, tomorrow, and in the future. When connected to your driving values, they have the potential to transform how you focus your money, time and energy.
Photo by Bud Helisson