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If you’ve been in business for even just a few minutes, you likely already know how easy it is to get wrapped up in your work and put your life on the back burner. When this happens, most small business owners and leaders think that their systems are the issue. In other words, they believe that if they just had the right systems in place, they’d finally achieve work-life balance.
While there is some truth in that, according to Strategic Life and Business Coach Mark Dolfini, systems aren’t usually the issue—or at least not the only issue. More often than not the true problem is a lack of clarity and direction for both your life and your business.
In this episode of Priority Pursuit, we are joined by Mark as he strives to help you bring clarity to your personal and business lives by guiding you through how to create a personal vision for your life and business.
What is a Personal Vision
Your personal vision—at its core—is defined by what you want in and from your life. By this, we don’t mean simply thinking of goals you may have or fun things you’d like to do in your spare time and leaving it at that. A personal vision should be a written set of guidelines and focuses that impact your daily life.
Essentially, with this vision, you are bringing focus to the things that you want in life—which can have a major influence on making your goals happen. To help explain this, Mark brings up the concept of reticular activation.
The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is a cluster of nerves located in our brainstem responsible for sieving out extraneous information, ensuring that only the important details are allowed to pass through. Activating this system causes us to notice more things in our lives when we draw focus to the specific things we want. Basically, when you are regularly thinking about and focusing on certain topics, you are more likely to connect the dots and see opportunities for integrating them in your daily life.
With this in mind, it’s important to note that your personal vision should be a list of what you want—not what you don’t. Many people tend to focus on what they don’t want from life: debt, working 80 hours a week, a boring job, etc. However, by putting your focus on these things, you are inadvertently paying more attention to and potentially attracting what you don’t want rather than what you do.
Steps on How to Create a Personal Vision for Your Life & Business
While many small business owners and leaders have a vision for their business, very few give the same dedication to developing their personal visions. However, by focusing on your business first, you can lose sight of what you want and create a life where you serve your business rather than the other way around.
Much like creating a business plan, making your personal vision takes time and intentional planning. Mark breaks down the basics of creating this vision into the following steps.
Find Neutrality
The first step to creating your personal vision is to understand where you are emotionally and get to a place of neutrality.
Oftentimes, we put too much focus on emotional extremes rather than the simplicity of neutrality. Even if you’re an extremely positive person, when it comes to understanding your life, you need to take stock of where you are mentally and try to reach a point of emotional neutrality.
After a frustrating day, it can be easy to focus on negative emotions like shame or guilt. However, Mark shares that it’s important to remember that those emotions relate to and exist in the past. Instead, you need to try and focus on the present moment.
One way to do this is to create a list of what you’re grateful for. Now, Mark acknowledges this may seem silly and small, but when you sit down and do this, your emotions will start to shift. Sure, you may still be frustrated during the first few lines, but after that, your consciousness shifts to the present—and to neutral.
Mark suggests that you take at least ten minutes, if not longer, to write down or speak aloud this list. This puts you in a really good place to start considering your life and what you may want out of it.
Write Your Hundredth Birthday Speech
Another great way to start taking an introspective look at your life is through your hundredth birthday speech.
In this exercise, think about what it would be like if you were writing a speech to give on your hundredth birthday. What would you say? Who would you want in the room? What message would you want those people to carry outside that room after they left? What would you want them to say about you after this speech or maybe even before?
For most people, this focuses on impact and purpose.
Vision isn’t the final piece of understanding your life, purpose is. As Mark states, “Vision is the keyhole we look through to see our purpose on the other side.” As you orient yourself to your vision and get closer to the keyhole, you’ll see your purpose. And, for many people, you won’t see it all at once. Maybe you’ll find just the purpose for that day or season.
For now, focus on your vision. As you get clearer and more honest about your personal vision, all of a sudden you’ll be able to better see the pieces of your purpose on the other side with greater clarity.
Use Affirmations
Your personal vision isn’t something that you create and then leave in your desk drawer. It should be something you are constantly focusing on and reminding yourself of. Using affirmations helps you keep this vision front of mind and turn negative thoughts into productive ones.
Affirmations are an effective way to recondition your brain towards something you really want.
Just as your personal vision is, these affirmations should be in alignment with your core values—which are the things that you not only value but are willing to stand up for. When you have a core value, it’s generally going to be noticed when someone does something that hurts you. For example, if someone lied to you and you were deeply impacted by it, you may have honesty or integrity as a core value.
Regardless of what your affirmations are, they should always be in the present tense, relatively short, and done in your own voice—whether verbally or on paper.
Mark explains that he especially uses affirmations during times he is in “Alpha State”—or when he is doing monotonous tasks that tend to leave the mind wandering and daydreaming. In using these times to listen to or speak through your affirmations, you can work to recondition your negative thoughts to be more in line with your vision.
Avoid Self-Sabotaging Behaviors
This reconditioning is especially useful in regard to your self-sabotaging behaviors. These behaviors are often linked to a limiting belief. We all have beliefs, but a limiting belief lies outside our cognitive brain—where our emotional processes lie.
Where we process emotions and decide on actions are two separate areas of the brain, but oftentimes, our emotional processes dictate how we respond to or act on a situation.
For example, when a stimulus happens, it funnels down through your beliefs, values, and emotions. If someone were to say something to you that makes you really happy, it creates a state of joy which then dictates how you react. Maybe you would smile or laugh or respond with a witty comment.
With this in mind, it’s clear that your emotional processes can influence your cognitive actions. This can be also applied to self-sabotaging behaviors. When you’re looking at your behavior, it could help signal your limiting beliefs. Consider your self-sabotaging behaviors. These can range from procrastination to mishandling money, but almost always they are tied to some limiting belief and some level of self-inflicted unworthiness.
Using affirmations connected to your values and personal vision is a great way to begin reprogramming your beliefs and ensuring your behaviors work with your personal vision rather than against it.
Reassess and Adjust Your Personal Plan Yearly
Creating your yearly plan is not something you can sit and complete over a cup of coffee. It takes time and intention to craft effectively.
That being said, it’s also not something that should stay the same. Even from year to year, things in your life will change, and there is nothing wrong with that. But as your life shifts, so should your vision.
Again, you need to make sure you are always clear about what it is you want, and sometimes these things become clearer over time. Mark brings up the example of wanting a boat. Perhaps at one point, that was an important part of your vision. But, as you get older, you may realize you don’t necessarily want a boat, you want something that your family can actively do together.
Life isn’t static, and nor should your personal vision. Don’t be afraid to change up and alter your personal vision. In fact, Mark recommends you create a completely new vision from scratch every year. Restarting and rebuilding your personal vision may seem daunting at first, but Mark assures it is 100% worth the effort.
Be sure to listen to this whole episode (at the top of the page or wherever you listen to podcasts) to hear more about Mark’s advice on how to create a personal vision for your life & business. If you’d like to connect with Mark, you can find him on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, or visit his website https://markdolfini.com/.
Links & Resources Mentioned in This Episode
- Watch Mark’s Video “Do Affirmations Really Work?”
- Visit Mark’s Website
- Find Mark On YouTube
- Receive 50% Off Your First Year of HoneyBook
- Learn More About Treefrog’s Small Business Marketing Resources & Services
- Join the Priority Pursuit Facebook Community
- Follow or DM Treefrog Marketing on Instagram
- Follow or DM Kelly Rice on Instagram
- Follow or DM Victoria Rayburn on Instagram
The Priority Pursuit Podcast is a podcast dedicated to helping small business owners define, maintain, and pursue both their personal and business priorities so they can build lives and businesses they love.
You can find The Priority Pursuit Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Stitcher, and wherever you listen to podcasts.
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