- Dream Big with no Censorship
- Organize and Categorize
- Add Action Items
- Create a Mantra
- Share your goals with Family and Friends
- Identify Frustrations that keep you distracted
- Make appointments with yourself
Day 8: Create a Vision Board: Now that we are clearly seeing and connected to a set of goals. We have an end in mind. We are clear on the Why and are working on the How. Another way to help connect and stay connected on a daily basis is to create a ……Vision Board. Yes, that is what I said and meant. A picture is worth a thousand words for a reason. It is so easy to communicate multi-faceted, complicated ideas with pictures.
So, start noticing photographs of scenes, ideas, concepts that you are drawn to because you want what that picture communicates. You use the pictures, graphics, charts, etc and create a board with them that helps you tell yourself the story you are creating. The last time I created a board, this is what I had on it.
> A photo of a pottery studio because I love to work with clay and want more time for that and want to spend lots of time in retirement working with clay.
> A photo of a Villa in Italy because I wanted to spend a few weeks in Italy. That has actually been accomplished already, but it is still on my board because I want to do it again and again and would love to own a home in Italy, so I am dreaming big and reminding myself to think about that dream when I make decisions
> A photo of a beautiful tennis backhand. I am very visual with Tennis. The more I watch the more I can improve my play just by watching other player’s form and strategies
> A graphic that I created showing my revenue goals over several years. It was big with brightly colored bars every year showing the goal, the percentage increase I needed, the number of hours I needed to bill every year and the number of clients I needed in order to bill that number of hours. I broke down the billable hours into weeks and that helped immensely to motivate me to work toward find work so I could bill on average the correct number of hours a week to reach my goal.
That revenue goal grew and at one point I knew I would have to hire more staff in order to reach my new revenue goals for every year. There was just a limit on my gross revenues if I did not hire other people who could produce billable time for me. I eased in with part-time staff, but then got so busy, I finally knew I had to commit to my first full-time employee in order to do what I do best, which is sell my services to potential clients, supervise the work and the quality, but delegate work that could be done by others to others so I had more time to do what I really enjoyed. But the connection to my revenue goal was the only reason why I grew my firm. If I had not first thought it and then connected to it, I would never have realized that I needed help to get them.
There were other things more personal to me, but the great thing is that when people see my board, they don’t really know what it is about so I am not revealing to people more than I want to, but I am communicating very clearly with myself.
Think of visuals that would help you connect and would quickly re-establish the idea of your goal every time your look at these images. Create them, google for images of them, cut them our of magazines and start creating a collage of images that speak to you in a powerful, concise manner and surround your self with these images. If you do not like the idea of a board, simply find a way to place the images in and around your office so you connect with them very frequently. You will find that these images start to feed your brain, your thought process and decisions that you make.
