How to Live the Life of Your Dreams

By Inner Fire Luminary: Savannah Wishart

Well, here we are at the 6 week mark from the start of the new year. If you're anything like me, I don't remember ever making a resolution and sticking to it. What is a resolution, anyway? Weight-loss goals and dieting come to mind – two things I was never interested in. But life can be so much more than that, so much juicier.

This is a great time to reassess what we want from our lives. In modern society, it's a more traditional time to look back at the prior year in order to make a plan for the year ahead. With the practice of resolutions, we often set goals without much thought or strategy. We find ourselves off track with our goals and our resolutions sit unfulfilled. Better luck next year, right?

The life of your dreams is only a few months away – all you have to do is get visual.

A Vision Board is a smorgasbord of the dreams that are the dearest to your heart, big or small. It serves as a visual reminder and activates your brain to consciously, and subconsciously, create the life of your wildest dreams.

Here are 10 steps to start your very own Vision Board and make your dreams come true.

Step One: Get Clear on Your Values

A value is “one's judgement of what is important in life.” Start with making a list of 20 values. Then break them down until you've honed in on the key elements that will guide you through life. Creativity, curiosity, movement, travel and culture remind me that I want to live a life of adventure – this means freelancing all over the world, staying active and having experiences that turn me into a storyteller.

"Culture. Creativity. Curiosity. Travel. Movement."

Step Two: Decide How You Want To Feel

Choose your Core Desired Feelings (CDF). Sensual. Courageous. Free. Connected. I love Danielle LaPorte's CDF strategy. When I get real about how I most want to feel, it makes it easier to imagine what I want to do and who I want to be. If we follow our feelings, the rest will come.

"Sensual. Courageous. Free. Connected."

Step Three: Visualize the future.

Let's go with 10 years from now. 2026. How old will you be? What will a normal day look like for you? How are you serving the world to make a living? What are you wearing? Be detailed, but keep it to a few paragraphs so that you don't overwhelm it. Include all the areas of your life that you can think of – travel, work, finances, personal, relationships, you name it. Let your values guide you. Remember that this is a guideline, always open to change.

"At 33, I am living between two homes - one in the Swiss mountains and one on an island. I have published two cookbooks and am the editor of a certain magazine. My partner and I run retreats that combine our non-profit animal rescue."

Step Four: Highlight Six Important Categories in Your Life

Look at your values to determine the most important areas in your life. If one category really sticks out for you, it might deserve its own vision board all to itself! I know I could fill an entire wall with my travel visions.

"Travel. Career. Financial. Relationships. Personal. Health."

Step Five: Choose Three of Those Categories To Reflect Your Future Vision

These three categories cover a lot of ground, which is why I use them when it comes to setting goals. Personal might include relationships and anything miscellaneous, while career covers money and your job. Health can be anything from how you care for your skin, to running a 10k in record time.

"Personal. Career. Health. "

Step Six: Break Down Your Vision Into Goals

Pick three years that are spread apart from now until your chosen vision year. Write your goals as if you are already there and give a by-when date. This will give you a deadline and keep you accountable. “I am, I have...”

1 Year (Personal) – I am fluent in Russian. (by December 2016)
5 Years (Career) – The magazine I am editor for goes from digital to print (by January 2019)
10 Year (Health) – I join a juice detox retreat every year (by March 2022)

Step Seven: Scour Pinterest for Images That Represent Your Dream!

It doesn't have to be perfect. If you can't find the exact home you want to live in, find a bedroom that catches your heart aflutter. In a visual sense, generalization will work; it's the goals you want to keep specific. Pinterest is a great resource because you can usually find almost exactly what you're looking for.

 

Step Eight: Create Your Collage

Drag your photos into photoshop to create your own layout of images. If you want to make it less time consuming, Picasa will automatically place all your images in a grid. Computers aren't your thing? You can get hands-on, with a printer, some glue and a posterboard! Make it authentically yours and place a photo of you as happy as can be right smack in the middle.

Step Nine: Put Your Vision Board Somewhere You Will See It

Make it your desktop background, laminate it and put it in your shower, frame it like a piece of art, tape it to the fridge. The most important thing is to keep your dreams right in front of you. With them in our mind's eye, we remember our "Why." No matter how hard days might get on our way to our dreams, we can come back to our vision board to remember why we're doing what we're doing.

Step Ten: Renew Quarterly

Keep your dreams fresh! Allow them to breathe and transformed. Be prepared to leave some behind if they no longer serve you. If your dreams are happening faster than you imagined, take it as an opportunity to do more and be more. Whatever you do, don't let a dream of the past hold you back from your future. Sometimes a dream is there simply to show us that it wasn't actually for us, and we were meant for something else.

Never stop dreaming.

Now, over to you . . . have you made a Vision Board? How has it helped your dreams come true? Please tell us in the comment section below.

Savannah Wishart,
Owner | Primal Revolutions

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