Podcast 98: Making Your Holistic Business Vision Come to Life
Jan 06, 2022
Your vision is having an idea of how you want your life and business to look and feel in the future. Knowing what you want your lifestyle to be will help you to create a business that supports it, in the right way for you.
You don’t need to know all the answers now, and your vision will evolve and change as you do. But it will give you direction and help you to plan your business.
This in turn will stop you from getting side-tracked and help you focus on the things that will move your business forward.
Setting a vision is one of the best things you can do for your business, but often gets completely missed. If you don’t have a vision, check out blog and podcast 47 on creating yours - it gives you the questions to ask yourself to get you thinking about your future.
How to represent your vision
Once you’ve got a good idea for how you want your business and life to be in the future, it’s time to make your vision work for you.
There's no point reflecting and writing everything down only to put your notebook in a drawer never to be seen again. Your vision is your compass, your North Star – you have to let it guide you to creating the business and life you want.
How you do this is different for everyone, but the important thing is - you make it personal and something that you see all the time, so it acts as a constant reminder.
And you can create it in a way that suits you and your creativity. Here are 4 options on how to create yours:
Create a vision board
You don’t need to be arty to create a vision board, you just need to know what you want to achieve. Your vision board can include lots of different elements such as:
- Photos
- Pictures from magazines
- Words
- Quotes and affirmations
- Drawings and doodles
- Different souvenirs such as pebbles and tickets
The traditional way of creating a vision board is to get a selection of magazines and cut out pictures and words that represent your goals. You then make a collage of them by sticking them onto a sheet of paper or board. If you want something more flexible where you can add to as you go, you could pin your cuttings to a pinboard.
Another option is to create yours digitally using design software such as Canva. If you do this, print it out so you can display it somewhere prominent to reinforce your vision.
Ultimately you want a collection of different images and words that represent your goals for your business and life.
Draw your future
If you love drawing, create an artwork that represents your future and how you want to live. It can be abstract, real – anything that works for you, and you totally get it when you look at it.
I used to work with a brilliant cartoonist who would create personalised illustrations using this idea. They would illustrate the person and around them, create a fantasy world full of different elements to represent different aspects of their life and dreams.
I have a few of these that I still treasure and although they don’t represent my life now – it’s great to look back on them and see how things have changed.
Written description
This could be created as a list of points or as a personal story of your life either in a beautiful notebook (but one you look at every day) or printed out and displayed where you can see it a lot.
This is what I did this year, and I also incorporated a couple of images too for good measure. I then printed it out and put it on the wall in my office. The first thing I do each day before starting work is to read it out loud to myself.
Create a word cloud
A word cloud is a graphic representation of different words that are in the shape of a cloud. It's a way of simply analysing text and the size of the words is dictated by what’s most important. You can create your vision word cloud by taking your text description of your future, or a list of points, and uploading them into word cloud software.
You can create your own using software such as Word or PowerPoint, or you can get free software that will do it for you – simply google ‘free word cloud software’.
Do whatever works for you - find a way to represent how you imagine yourself living and working in the future. Then use your vision to constantly reinforce what you're working towards and as a compass to focus your plans for your business.
Planning to Thrive in 2022 – Saturday 8th January 2022
Join me on Zoom for one day and let’s get 2022 planned and ready for you to thrive.
You’ll create your personalised plan to keep you focussed for the rest of the year, so you know where to direct your efforts.
I’ll help you identify the right marketing activities for your business based on you, your values, your strengths, and your available resources.
The day will be practical and interactive with a comprehensive workbook/planner to complete which will guide you through the rest of the year.
Places are limited to 8 so you’ll get personal feedback and the opportunity to connect with like-minded practitioners and support each other.
So, if you want to get a great start to the year, join me - find the full information here.
Podcast 98 show notes:
- (01:59) How to represent your vision
- (03:11) Creating a vision board
- (5:02) Draw your future
- (06:35) Written description
- (07:37) Create a word cloud
Podcast 47 - creating your vision
