“A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.” ~David Brinkley

Did you get a chance to read through my personal vision for this next year?  If not, take a few minutes and read it over; you will find it as part of yesterday’s entry.  I want to point out a few of the special features of my vision statement for the coming year that you might consider incorporating into yours.

  1. Everything in my vision assumes that I have already been successful.  I mentally want to be in the place where I expect to succeed.  Sure, something could happen that prevents me from achieving one or more of my goals, but every day, as I read my vision, I am going to put myself in the mental frame of mind that I succeeded – that I found a way and made it happen.
  2. I talk in my vision about how it feels when I have made my goal into my reality.  I talk about how great it feels to have achieved this.  I am creating an anchor of feeling great that I am attaching to thinking about each of my goals and to taking action on each of my goals.  For those of you that have attended one of my seminars on positive self motivation strategies, I am sure that you see the reasoning behind that already.  For the rest of you, look for a series of articles about positive self motivation strategies in this blog in the future and you can also search the archives of this blog – I have talked about this before.  For now, take this as a given – you want to concentrate on how great it will feel to have something done rather than concentrate on the effort that might come along the way.
  3. I include in the vision the fact that I had to grow as a person and make changes in myself – become more.  I know that my goals will not automatically happen – I will have challenges along the way and I will certainly need to figure out some things.  Again, I begin by believing, expecting, that I will make these changes and figure out the things that I need to figure out.
  4. I included a special mini-section on each of my five top goals for the coming year.  I did this so that I could include the specific motivators – the drivers – the things that excite and motivate me, about each of these goals.  I want to be in touch with these things on a daily basis and since I am going to be listening to or reading my vision every day, this is a great way to maintain this connection.
  5. I included the changes that I already know that I need to make in myself.  I looked at my goals for this year, reviewed the past year, and asked myself: “What will I need to do differently, or what traits will I need to have at a higher level, in order to accomplish all of my goals?”.  This was how I arrived at the section of my vision statement where I talk about focus, self-discipline, self-promotion, courage and massive action.  I have all of these, at least some of the time now, but I need to develop them more in order to achieve my goals for the coming year.  If I discover more changes that I need to make along the way, and I probably will, I will add them to the vision.

I hope you found my example useful.  This is a living and breathing document.  I will enhance it as the year goes forward and make sure that it does the best job possible of positively motivating me,

Next time we will talk about building a shared vision with partners or team members.

Bye for now…Jack

“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.” ~Dale Carnegie