How to Create Your Vision Statement for Success

Last week I posted an article on How to Create Your Personal Mission Statement. Now we’re going to take it one step further and create a personal vision statement. While the personal mission statement defined your values in life and how you want to live life. The personal vision statement is the next step. It defines what you want to achieve or become in the future.

Success in life can be summed up to this:

* Vision
* Plan
* Action

To achieve success you have to know what you want in life to be happy. That is your vision. You need to have a plan to get there and you need to take action on that plan to get from where you are today to that vision of the future you.

A lot of people seem to be working to be working. In other words, they are working hard, learning ways to be more productive at working, but have no end goal in mind. This leads to frustration, feelings of having no purpose, and loss of ambition.

If you know where you want to go and have a plan to get there, it makes waking up in the morning and getting to work much more exciting and purposeful. You can’t wait to work on the next step to that future you.

The process is very similar to creating your personal mission statement. While defining you vision statement it may be helpful to reread your personal mission statement to help guide you on what you value in life.

Let’s get started.

Step 1 — Define the Future You

Set aside some quite time and really think about this. Use your imagination and brainstorm. Don’t worry about current limitations such as money or other restrictions. Just focus on what you want to be. Imagine the future you. This version of you has achieved everything you have ever wanted in life. This version of you is happy and living your definition of success. This is basically YOU version 2.0.

Remember this is what you want to be with no limitations or restrictions. Feel free to use you personal mission statement as support to guide you on your life values. It should help you define the new you. For me I thought of sentences starting “I will” that described how I envisioned the perfect me. For example, “I will”, “be a caring and loving leader in my family”.

I categorized my statement down to my family life and work life. Think about all the roles you have in your life and describe how you want to be in those roles in the future.

For this step just jot down ideas. Brainstorm what you want to be. There are no bad ideas, just start writing whatever comes to mind and in the next step you can work in narrowing it down into your final vision statement.

Step 2 — Write Your Personal Vision Statement

Now pull up Word, Google Docs, Evernote, or whatever else you like to type with and type it out. Just write what you feel, you can always come back later and revise it. It doesn’t have to be short or long. It’s totally up to you, as long as you are describing to yourself what you want to strive to be in the future.

To give you an example, here is the vision statement I designed to guide me to who I strive to be:

I will be a caring and loving leader in my family who is available for those who need me. I will lead, educate, and inspire all who I work with.

Step #3 — Design Your Personal Vision Statement

Once you have settled in on what you want your personal vision statement to be let’s design it. Just like anything else you create. If it is not in front of you daily you’ll forget it about it and it’ll be a waste of time.

Pull up your favorite design tool. For mine I used Canva, but you can use whatever you would like. Put your vision statement in it and create or use one of their templates to give it a unique and personal look that you feel matches you and your vision.

This will give your vision statement an image. Almost like a logo that will bring it to life much better than simple plain text words on a white paper would ever do.

Here is an example you can use to get ideas. This is the vision statement I created in Canva:

My Vision Statement

Step #4 — Read It and Live It

Now that you’ve got you your vision statement design created. Print it out on your printer. If you don’t have one just put the file on a USB drive and take it down to a place like Walgreens and have it printed for a couple dollars. I bought a 10 pack of frames on Amazon for about $10 dollars that got the job done. I printed it out as a 8x10, framed it, and placed it on my desk.

The point is that if it just sits on your PC in a folder you’ll never remember or do anything with it. If it’s always in vision when you are working you will remember it and remember to take action on your vision. It will be a guide to where you want to go in your life and what you want to become.

Each time you make a decision, create a goal, or take action in life make sure that it falls in line with your vision of where you want to go in life.

David Shepherd is the founder of Let’s Automate Your Life, lifestyle automation for personal finance, success, productivity, business and much more. To learn more about automating your life visit www.letsautomateyourlife.com.