Creating Vision Statements with Vision Exercises

Vision exercises are simple and interactive way to create your personal vision. Vision exercises are fun and can help you get focused. These exercises provoke some thoughts and help you understand yourself, your vision and your values in a more comprehensive way. This article presents two vision exercises in detail that will help you discover your vision. Once vision is discovered and the mental image is sketched, transfer this image to paper by using vision statements.

Vision Exercises

You can use any one of these exercises for identifying your personal vision. I would recommend reading all the exercises and picking the best one you like and trying that out. While all these exercises will help you create your personal vision, each one of them is a little different than others. Each exercise has its own strength and there are some aspects missing in some of them. So, if you have got some time on hand, try all of these exercises and consolidate the result to make your vision powerful and effective.

Required Preparation

Before jumping to the exercise there are several things that should be kept in mind to get the most out of these exercises. Having all the required items to start with will ease the process and benefit you the most. Here are the four important things required for these vision exercises:

A Quiet Place – Find a quiet place where you are not disturbed for until the exercise is complete. This will help you concentrate and eliminate the distractions.
15 minutes – Each of these exercises will take about 15 minutes to complete.
Calm mind – I believe a calm mind is the most important asset needed for this exercise. It will help you concentrate during the exercise and help you generate ideas. Creating a time slot on your schedule will mentally prepare you for the exercise.
Writing Instruments – The final thing you will need is writing instruments – pen and paper or a computer. Anything where you can take notes and organize them later will work.

Vision Exercise 1 – With the end in mind

Mr… Stephen Covey presents an exercise to identify your personal vision and values in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Below is the gist of the exercise mentioned in the book –

“Imagine you are dead and are looking down at your funeral from the heaven. Four speakers are scheduled to speak about you at this service. First person to speak is someone from your family, the second person is one of your friends, the third person is some you work with and the fourth speaker is from the community. Think about for a moment, what would you like these speakers from four different areas of your life – family, friendship, work and community, to speak about? What would you like to have contributed to these areas? What character would you want these four people to have seen in you? In what manner do want to have affected their life?”

Take few minutes, think about these questions and write the answers. Keep fine tuning the answers and finalize them to form a vision statements. While you formulate your thoughts into vision and finalize into vision statements, apply the simple tips for writing good vision statements.

Vision Exercise 2 – Your Superb Lifetime

This exercise takes a different approach to discovering your vision. This vision exercise helps to identify your vision but not by asking what would you want people to say about you rather this exercise asks vision questions to someone else – you. Well lets get right to the exercise.

“If you had all the resources and power and wanted to create a perfect life, a flawless day, an exciting week and a superb lifetime, what would it look like? Imagine the life unfolding exactly as you want, what would you want it to look like?

Ask yourself these questions: What is different in your life? Who are the people with you? How are their characters? How much money do you earn and how do you earn that? What is your daily schedule? What do you do for enjoyment? Are you doing community service? If yes, what kind of community service is it?

Again, before continuing ahead, think about these questions and try to answer them. Once you do have answers to these question, write them down and finalize the vision statement and use the simple tips to make it better.

This exercise touches upon several different areas of life by asking questions to yourself and what you want to do rather than what you want other people to think about you.

After you are done…

After you have completed these two exercises, created a vision statement and applied the simple tips, next step is to identify your values and build your personal mission statement. We will talk about personal values and mission statement here in coming weeks.

Now to my favorite part, comments and questions from the readers. Which was a better exercise for you? What did you like about it? Was it pretty easy to visualize the scene in both cases? Were you able to answer the questions easily? Tell us about that in the comment section below.

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Further Reading