Grow your Goals and Create your Future

Blossoming This is the last week of our regular posts, which means it’s time to consolidate what you have discovered and learnt during this Health and Wellbeing Blog. Perhaps most importantly, it’s an opportunity to make preparations to continue creating and maintaining healthy habits and self development into the future.

If you’ve been working with your goals for the past few weeks, you may want to adjust or review some of them, and make them even more powerful by creating a picture of the journey and the outcome of your goals – a physical visualisation of what you are striving for. It’s sometimes called a ‘vision board’.

How are your earlier goals growing? Are there short term goals that you’ve already reached, or that you will achieve shortly? Are the milestones for the longer term goals within sight? Remember that it’s important to see your movement towards your goals as a series of sprints rather than a marathon – it doesn’t have to be a long, hard slog, it can be a pleasurable journey – if you design it that way!

It’s those attainable steps towards your goal that will keep you moving forwards and motivated to achieve it.

TASK

The physical realisation – drawing a picture of your goals – is a step on from the mental visualisation you’ve been practicing. Use a large piece of paper, or you can buy the ‘Grow Your Goals’ download.

Please don’t be put off by thoughts that you can’t draw, because that’s not important. In fact you can sketch or doodle your goals, or create a collage with pictures from magazines or newspapers, perhaps a mixture of the two – any image that closely represents what you wish to achieve is perfect. If written words work for you, make them bold and colourful, and use them with your pictures, as your subconscious mind works with pictures.

The important thing is that you create an image that truly means something to you. And remember to feel the emotions you will experience as you achieve these goals you are creating – feel fantastic!

This task expands on the idea of your goals starting as ‘planted seeds’ from which your results arise – ‘from little acorns, mighty oaks do grow’ as they say. From small beginnings, great things can be achieved, and from the beginnings you have made I am confident that you can go on to grow the biggest and strongest oaks in the forest.

Look over your goals and select the one that is most important to you.

• On the download, write your goal, boldly, in the ‘MY GOAL’ box at the bottom of the page. Spread it out to form the solid base of your tree.

• The ‘Step’ boxes are where you put illustrate the steps or milestones that lead towards you goal.

What milestones you have put in for your goal? Can you illustrate your milestones in some way? For instance, healthy eating could be represented by a photo of fruit and veg, whatever indicates good health to you. Or if you want to learn something, take a course maybe, a picture of someone studying or even graduating – cut to the chase and see yourself achieving the degree, diploma etc.

• Populate your branches with the steps you need to take, and let them lead you up into the top of the tree. Don’t worry about ‘staying between the lines’ on the download – burst out of the boxes by all means, there’s no restrictions here, let yourself go!

• Find images or draw pictures that represent your completed goal and all the things that arise from it, and draw or place these at the top of the tree, or in and around the outcome boxes.
Material objects are easier to illustrate, obviously! But if yours is a more abstract result then enjoy using your imagination to visualise all the outcomes of achieving your aim.

For instance, if your goal is ‘good health’ find pictures that show your idea of what a healthy life means to you – walking or running on the beach, playing with the children, working well, and if learning something new is towards a career change, then remember that the end result is the new job you want – what does that look like? What will that new job bring you? If your goal is to look stunning on your wedding day, where’s the picture of the dress? Yep, you stick that on your board. Create on your vision board everything you will do, feel, and have at the result of your goal.

• Once all your steps and all your goal representations are in place, step back and take a look. You have a strong visual idea of where your goal starts, how to get there, what to expect once you’ve achieved it, and what that feels like.

Put your finished vision board somewhere you’ll see it every day – having your goals in front of you is a great means of focussing on achieving them. Out of sight can mean out of mind.

This is a task that where you could really pick up the ball and run with it. You may find it’s appropriate for you to create a vision board that shows a number of your goals at once, with several outcomes together – this is a great opportunity to get really creative, you are in control, let your imagination run wild!

Having clear objectives in mind – goals, intentions and desires – is integral to creating and maintaining real change in your life.

The final two posts of the Blog will build on this clear vision and help you to create a plan – until then enjoy your vision board, it’ll help you to grow your goals and design your life!

- Get the picture! ;0)