I’m going to skip the apologies about not posting for so long etc and get straight to the point of this post – an update on how my lifestyle design project has developed.

Instead of posting on lifestyle design here for the last twelve months I have been actively creating the lifestyle of my design.  So what does this lifestyle look like?

Business

One of my true passions are all things leadership and management so it makes sense to me to continue with this in my professional endeavours.  To this end, last year I created my own business called Curious Fish Coaching, Training and Consulting (check out the website – it needs heaps of work so any feedback would be most welcome!).

Starting up a new business has been one of the most professionally and personally developing experience I have had yet.  Still got a long way to go but the early success is encouraging!

Personal

A huge 12 months on the personal front.  Here’s a snapshot of how I’m achieving my lifestyle design:

• Bought 1.5 acres in one of the most beautiful parts of Australia (Noosa Hinterland).
• Owner/Build a new house on our new land.
• Moved into our new house and kissed the rental market goodbye!
• Finally hit the top of the waiting list for our kids for the school of our choice (Noosa Pengari Steiner School – an amazing learning organisation) and they are now both enrolled and attending.
• Running, swimming, surfing, bike riding and family activities on a regular basis.
• Achieving an amazing work/life balance which is enabling me to meet my professional needs as well as spending time with the family and supporting my wife meet her needs.

Looking back at the last 12 or so months it is amazing to reflect on how much of my lifestyle design I have achieved.  It hasn’t always been easy but embracing and overcoming the challenges has been hugely rewarding and generated plenty of personal growth.

New Direction

After some re-evaluation of the purpose of ‘Uncork Your Mind’, I have realised that two of the three original points of what this blog is about are no longer relevant.  To this end, this blog will no longer be about tracking my progress or holding me accountable throughout my significant shift in lifestyle.  Instead this blog is going to concentrate on the first original aim of providing ‘a valuable and relevant source of information about lifestyle design’.

I plan on achieving this aim by focussing on posts of high quality and actionable information on lifestyle design-related topics to help you achieve the lifestyle of your design.

My business website will focus on things related to leadership and management, so if this also interests you head over to Curious Fish Coaching, Training and Consulting and sign up for my newsletter.

Thanks to all readers out there who continue to visit ‘Uncork Your Mind’.  Drop me an email and say ‘Hi’.  I’d love to hear from you.

Uncork Your Mind is now a “DoFollow” website.  If you choose to leave a comment you will get a link back to your website.

If you’ve been following Project Lifestyle Design from the start, you’d understand that the project is aimed at  managing my transition from my 13 year service in the Army into my new lifestyle design.  Building Uncork Your Mind has been a great way to track my own progress, learn new online skills and write about one of my passions: lifestyle design.

Each month I write progress reports which tracks the development of Uncork Your Mind and sets myself goals for the next month. This month’s progress report is a little different.

Clarifying My Lifestyle Design

February has been a great month for clarifying my future lifestyle design and what I intend to do once the paid leave stops in August. I now have a far more solid plan and one that I will share in the near future.  I have already dropped a couple of hints about where I am headed but needless to say that it will be a model that has both an online and offline component.

I am now in the process of setting up the legal structure, registering a business name, building a stand alone website etc and once I have this sorted out I will be sure to let you all in on the plan.  The business is related to the topics covered on Uncork Your Mind so you may also find this new venture interesting.

Re-Energising!

February has also been more of a ‘consolidation’ month for Uncork Your Mind.  After directing significant time towards all the online ‘extras’ in January, February has seen me stick more to the basics to re-energise my online energy.  Things like blog commenting, guest posting, article writing, online connecting etc have taken more of a back seat this month.

Interestingly this has only seen a small drop in traffic (less than 10%) from January’s figures.

March’s Focus

After spending a lot of time over the first six months of this blog carefully tracking stats and following ‘expert advice’ I have decided now that if less than 90% of my time and energy is not focussed on generating great content than I am just another ‘me too’ blogger in an online sea of mediocre websites.  Practically this means that I am now spending less time on things like blog reading/commenting (other than the good ones!), worrying about what Twitter strategy will attract the most of amount of followers or which web 2.0 tactic will give me better backlinks.

To this end my  aim for March is to keep writing valuable and actionable lifestyle design posts to help us all work towards our chosen lifestyle design.  My guiding principle when deciding where to direct energy online is “will this provide value for the readers of Uncork Your Mind and the internet as a whole.” From here on in I will only be completing tasks that clearly align to this principle.

I will also be sure to let you all know about my new venture as part of my new lifestyle design once I have things in place.

Thank you all for your continued readership. Hearing from you provides a heap of motivation for me so please leave a comment, drop me an email or sign up for Uncork Your Mind’s free monthly newsletter.

Uncork Your Mind is now a “DoFollow” website.  If you choose to leave a comment you will get a link back to your website.

Its no secret, the internet is full of low value generic information and ‘me too’ articles. Spend a couple of dollars on a domain name, upload WordPress for free and the gates to the internet have now opened. With such low (almost no!) barriers to entry it’s no surprise that everyday sees more low value info clog the internet.

Just ask A-List blogger Corbett Barr who is currently on his own mission to inspire blog writers (like me!) to change this trend.

Okay, Uncork Your Mind is not a blog about internet commentary or online social trends so lets get back ‘on topic’. This is a round up of 8 recent Uncork Your Mind articles aimed solely at providing actionable information to help you progress towards the lifestyle design of your own choosing.

Hopefully you find that the information in these posts bucks the online trend and provides real value to you:

• Vision Boards: How to Picture Your Lifestyle Design. How to use visual cues to help you focus on and achieve your desired lifestyle design.
• Learned Optimism: How To Overcome Life’s Challenges. A simple mental tool to disrupt negative thoughts and transform them into energising feelings and actions.
• Design Your Lifestyle For Happiness and Fulfillment.  Complete this quick self-coaching activity to identify your basic human needs in order to develop a lifestyle design for happiness and fulfillment.
• You Are What You Think. A short video on achieving goals from one of the masters of self development: Brian Tracy.
• Live Your Life By One Rule Only. A post on the power of letting your values guide you towards your personal vision.
• Personal Vision Statements: Propel Yourself Towards Your Dreams. A ‘how to’ guide on creating a personal vision statement. Purely practical info only!
• Mission Statements: Putting Your Vision To Work. A tool for getting your vision statement to start practically working for you.
• How To Be Unhelpful – Give Others Advice. Why giving others advice rarely and what you can do to effectively help others.

My aim at Uncork Your Mind is to provide useful and actionable information to assist you to design and attain the lifestyle of your choosing. I hope these posts help you to achieve this.

I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future posts via the comments below or through my ‘contact me’ page.

Uncork Your Mind is a “DoFollow” website.  If you choose to leave a comment you will get a link back to your website.

I’m a smart guy (just ask me!) with a lot of life experience.  I’ve lead and managed diverse teams from 2 to 200 people. I’ve served in the Army in three combat zones, trained senior Iraqi Army officers, negotiated with Afghan warlords and shared meals with Taliban insurgents. I have an honours degree in Engineering, have traveled widely and am now self-employed.  People should listen to me!

At least that’s what I thought until I recently read a very interesting book called Quiet Leadership by David Rock.

Hold On: Here Comes a Paradigm Shift!

Reading this book gave me a flash of inspiration, an ‘A-Ha’ moment:

Giving advice rarely works so why bother

Why does advice has such a low effectiveness? Because our brains are all very different. The way we store, organise, manage and retrieve information is very different. When we give other people advice we make the unconscious assumption that the other person’s brain is the same as ours.  As David Rock puts it:

“….we input their problem into our brain, see the connections our brain would make to solve this problem, and spit out the solution that would work for us. We then tell people what we would do and are convinced it’s what they should do.”

Take The ‘Advice’ Test

After reading David Rock’s thoughts about the ineffectiveness of giving advice, I thought that it made sense but reading something isn’t always good enough for me. So I undertook the simple activity that David includes in his book to prove his thoughts for myself. This activity required me to carry a pen and paper for a week and to record every time someone gave me advice and whether this advice was useful or not.

I lasted three days before being completely converted to David’s opinion.  Here’s what I recorded in these three days:

Total Advice Received = 15

Useful Advice Received = 2

Percentage Useful Advice = 13%

Extrapolate this out to a full year and it is reasonable to assume that over the course of one year I will receive 1825 pieces of advice of which 87% will not be useful!

Prove it to yourself and start this activity now for the next seven days. It certainly changed my perspective!

A Better Way: Help People Think

So if giving advice only helps in about 13% of cases, what is a better way to assist others? Help people to think instead.

Thinking for yourself and creating your own brain connection to solve a problem is what creates those ‘A-Ha’ moments. The energy given off from the creation of these neural pathways is what creates internal motivation and drives action. Whether this energy is actual or metaphorical is a question for your local neuroscientist. What I do know is that whenever I experience an ‘A Ha’ moment when encountering a challenge I can barely contain myself from moving into a heightened state of motivation and action.

How To Help People Think?

For my mind, the easiest way to help someone to think is to ask useful questions.  Useful questions are ones which allow someone to put the problem into perspective, clarify their thinking and create their own solution to their problem. There are thousands of sites on the internet that provide great lists of useful questions.  Rather than me re-create the wheel, search for ‘coaching questions’ to find a lot of great example questions.  Here are a couple of good links to get you going:

• Useful Coaching Questions by Jan Brause
• Great Coaching Questions from Keay Consulting

What Now?

Next time you find yourself about to give some advice, remind yourself that the overwhelming odds are that  your advice will not be helpful for them.  Instead ask some useful questions and help them think instead!

Hopefully my advice in this post beats the odds and sits in your 13% of useful advice received!

Uncork Your Mind is a “DoFollow” website.  If you choose to leave a comment you will get a link back to your website.

As a different type of post today, I thought that I would share a poem with you that I recently read.  Noting that the poem is written by Rumi, a 13th century Persian Sufi mystic and poet, I’m sure that it can be interpreted in many different ways.

On the surface I find it a great inspiration for rising early and progressing towards your personal vision. I can also understand how with deeper reflection and different beliefs, the poem could also take on spiritual significance.

Regardless of individual interpretation and beliefs, I think it is a great poem that can be appreciated on different levels. Its called ‘The Breeze At Dawn’:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you

Don’t go back to sleep

You must ask for what you really want

Don’t go back to sleep

People are going back and forth

Across the doorsill

Where the worlds touch

The door is round and open

Do not go back to sleep.

Rumi

Uncork Your Mind is now a “DoFollow” website.  If you choose to leave a comment you will get a link back to your website.

After recently writing a post about how personal vision statements can propel you  towards your desired lifestyle design, it seemed natural to write about another useful lifestyle design goal setting and motivation tool: the Mission Statement.

Vision and Mission: What’s The Difference?

If the personal vision statement is a detailed description of what your future life looks like and how you’re going to get there, the mission statement is a short and easily remembered summary to support your vision. Your mission statement ‘operationalises’ your vision.

What I mean by this is that your mission statement provides a concise platform to align your thoughts and actions to your personal vision statement.

How To Write It

In military operations, every mission has a mission statement.  Having been an officer in the Australian Army for 13 years I have written and delivered thousands of tactical mission statements.  The Army formula for writing a mission statement is simple: who, what, when, where and why.

This formula is directly transferrable to any context including your own lifestyle design.  I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining each component but instead some examples have been provided below.

You may choose to encompass your vision into one mission statement or alternatively you may find it useful to have different mission statements for the various aspects of your life.  Each of these mission statements should tie into your personal vision statement.

For example, you may have a mission statement that relates to your professional work:

• I am going to train and practice to become a professional coach within the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane areas no later than May 2011 in order to help people achieve their full potential and to create a sustainable income to support my family.

You may have a mission statement that relates to your online projects:

• I am going to provide exceptionally high quality and actionable information on lifestyle design through the Uncork Your Mind website and newsletter throughout 2011 in order to help each and every reader to progress towards their desired lifestyle design.

You may have a family mission statement:

• The Russell Family will create a positive, supportive and fun environment at our home on the Sunshine Coast during 2011 in order to achieve happiness and fulfillment both individually and collectively.

How To Use Your Mission Statement

So you’ve now written your mission statement(s).  How do you prevent them from becoming just words on paper in a world full of unactioned information?

• Remember It. If you’ve followed my method, your mission is a one sentence statement.  Remember it so you can recall it at will.
• Display It. Put it on your vision board, use it in your business documentation, write it on your website, stick it next to your bed, keep it in your wallet, stick it on your fridge, set it as your computer’s wallpaper. The options are endless.
• Internalise It. Visualise and believe it.  Use it to guide your decision making. Question the usefulness of your feelings and actions against it. Live and breathe your mission statement and be amazed at the opportunities that present themselves to help you achieve it.
• Share It. For collaborative projects develop joint mission statements. For family mission statements, create them with everyone’s input. For personal mission statements, tell your loved ones.

The Next Step!

Remember the wise words of the 11th president of India in the post about personal vision statements: “Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant”.  If you haven’t written your personal vision statement yet, read the post on personal vision statements and take the time to write it. If you have already written your personal vision statement, create your mission statement(s) and start using them to achieve the lifestyle of your own choosing!

If you’d like my help or feedback, email me your vision statement and/or mission statement(s) via my contact page. I’d love to help!

Start living life by your design!

Uncork Your Mind is now a “DoFollow” website.  If you choose to leave a comment you will get a link back to your website.

This month’s Project Lifestyle Design progress report reflects on the progress of Uncork Your Mind in my first full month of self-employment. A big month both on and offline saw a significant increase in traffic as well the purchase of a block of land to build our family home on and the receiving of an Australia Day award.

Here are all the details and statistics:

January Stats

January saw a great 78% increase in traffic compared to December.  I’m pretty happy with this!  I’ve still got a bit of work to do to get the bounce rate down and the average time on site up and the only way to do this is through a continued commitment to great content. I’m not really sure what the bench marks are for bounce rate and average time on site.  I’d love to hear from other bloggers out there if you’re willing to share your percentages.

Subscriptions

• RSS: 20 (4 new: + 25%)
• Twitter: No longer reporting – See ‘Goals Achieved’ section
• Newsletter: 15 (6 new: + 66%)*
• Alexa Ranking (one month): 301,572 (improvement of 13%)
• Google Page Rank: Lifestyle Design – 555 (prev 637 improvement of 13%) (Market Samurai was playing up tonight so no screen capture this month)

Another month of steady subscription increases although these figures are suggesting to me that I need to offer more to attract a higher number of regular readers. This will be a focus area for my February goals. My Alexa Ranking was as low as 280,000 at one stage but snuck back up at the end of the month.

*With my newsletter subscriptions, three people didn’t re-confirm their subscription when I transferred from Mail Chimp to Aweber.  I have taken these numbers off last month’s total to calculate the percentage increase this month.

Top Traffic Sources

Traffic from Google doubled this month which I am assessing is a result of more content for Google to index and an increased commitment to better SEO. I still have so much to learn about SEO but I am happy my results are demonstrating improvement.

Traffic from Feedburner also increased which I take to be a direct reflection of an increase in posts each week. I also note the increased traffic from social media sites such as Delicious, Stumble Upon and Twitter. This is also encouraging and I think that it just takes time to develop these sources with improvement a result of persistence and continual growing of the website.  Now I understand why many bloggers commit to posting every day!

Top Content

Its great to see my more actionable posts featuring in the top 10 of posts. This is definitely the style that I want to continue with. It is also interesting to see that my second top post is one on homebrewing that I write last year while I was still exploring what I wanted to write about. I have done nothing to perpetuate or promote this post so maybe this is an opportunity in the future to create a new website on another one of my passions!

Newly Discovered Websites

Here are some of the better websites that I discovered throughout the month:

• Skyward (Jason Hughes) – a blog about growth.
• Getting Unstuck (Riley Harrison) – amazingly detailed posts about living a full life.
• Ending the Grind (Steve) – one man’s struggle to create a better lifestyle design.
• Evolify (Andrew Badenoch) – a perspective-challenging and insightful website about evolutionary psychology.

January Review

One of my main aims for January was to focus on building up my traffic and with a 78% increase I am pretty happy that I achieved this to a reasonable degree.  I am working on further implementing Pat Flynn’s Backlinking Strategy and Steve Scott’s Blog Lead Generation Diagram during February so I will continue to keep these as a focus. I really need to work harder on the Backlinking Strategy as while my traffic saw a significant increase this month, my keyword ranking in Google continues to stagnate.

During January I really wanted to affirm my commitment to making Uncork Your Mind about actionable lifestyle design information.  With a number of practical coaching activities included in posts and the monthly newsletter I am satisfied that I am moving in the right direction.  More great lifestyle design activities to come!

Goals Achieved

One of my goals for last month was to develop an informational product that I can use as part of Steve Scott’s Blog Lead Generation Diagram. I significantly progressed this project during January and it should definitely be ready for release this month.  This also ties into another of my goals for January to develop an email list plan so between the development of my info product and the implementation of Steve Scott’s Lead Magnet blueprint I assess this goal as being achieved.

I did write my monthly newsletter and focussed it on getting to know yourself through understanding your values. If you’re interested in reading it as well as conducting the free coaching activity to help you better understand your values, sign up to the newsletter on the right and January’s newsletter will be sent directly to your email inbox.

One of my goals for January was to write two guest posts. I did write two guest posts but one of these posts I didn’t think was good enough to use on someone else’s website.  I only want to export my best so I turned this into an article that I will submit to an article directory.  My other post did get published as my first ever guest post on the very popular Steve Scott Internet Lifestyle website.  Check out the guest post - Two Questions (Three Words) For Every Problem.

I have made significant progression towards the development of my first niche website using Corbett Barr’s Affiliate Marketing For Beginners training course.  After some final design work with my graphic designer (who doubles as my wife!) I will let you all know the name of the site if you’re interested in checking it out.  Once I can demonstrate some results (good or bad!) I will write a review on Corbett Barr’s course.

I successfully completed my goal of writing two articles for an article directory.  Both are currently in various stages of approval with Ezine Articles which does seem to be taking for ever! I guess the up side is that Ezine Articles takes the time to ensure that only higher articles are published.

After reading a number of different opinions about how to use Twitter I still remain a little perplexed.  I understanding the theory of following heaps of people on the basis that many of them will follow you back.  This gives you a heap of followers to read your tweets and hopefully drive traffic to your website.  But doesn’t this defeat the purpose of using Twitter to connect to people? If you are following thousands of people how can you read and interact with all of those tweets and if all of your followers are adopting the same methodology than surely your tweets will get lost in their giant pool of information.  I have decided that I am going to use Twitter for what I think is its original purpose – follow people who I genuinely want to interact with and send tweets to my followers as if I am having a conversation with them.  I’m also going to stop tracking my Twitter follower numbers as part of my monthly report as I don’t think the numbers are relevant with how I intent to use Twitter.

One of my big goals for January was to write something every day.  By my count there may have been one or two days at most when I didn’t achieve this so I count this as a resounding success.  I also aimed for commenting on other blogs everyday and while this was more of an aspiration I would have achieved this for close to 80% of the days in January.

As an aside, although my current aim is not about making money with Uncork Your Mind I did achieve my first (and second!) affiliate sales this month!

Goals Not Achieved

As I only finished reading Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guide to Working For Yourself late in the month I haven’t yet written a review.  I will roll this back to next month.  I also didn’t write an article on the 80/20 Principle as it relates to lifestyle design as I had too many other topics that I wanted to write about!  I will also look to roll this back to February.

I have decided that Squidoo is not something that I want to pursue.  It no longer feels like something that I want to put time into so I am striking this goal off the list.

Books Read

I managed to get through a number of books this month.  Books that I finished:

• Unconventional Guide to Working For Yourself by Chris Guillebeau – A very interesting read about lifestyle style and earning money online with some good audio files included of Chris speaking.  Geared more at those looking to start working for themselves rather than those who have already made the break.
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill – Now I know why it is such a highly regarded classic. Don’t let the title put you off – I prefer to mentally replace ‘Grow Rich’ with ‘Achieve Your Goals’.  This is a must read.
• Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers – Quite possibly the most useful business book that I have read. Provides a brilliant and simple system for generating business models.  Also useful for not-for-profit groups, government departments, professional associations – pretty much any individual or group that creates something of value for someone else. I am officially a huge fan of this book!
• Attention! This Book Will Make You Money: How to Use Attention-Getting Online Marketing to Increase Your Revenue – Another good book for changing your perspective on how to get yourself and your product known in the marketplace. A very easy and interesting read.

Thanks to Chris Brogan for the book recommendations of the last two books; both  great reads.

Books Reading

The following are books that I will read this month:

• Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina.
• Hypnotic Writing by Joe Vitale – Recommended by my wife to develop my writing skills.
• The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself – Another Chris Brogan recommendation and if it is half as good as his other two recommendations that I read last month it should be a cracker.

January Posts Summary

• You Are What You Think
• Live Your Life By One Rule Only
• First Guest Post – Two Questions (Three Words) For Every Problem
• My Big Audacious Challenge
• Personal Vision Statements: Propel Yourself Towards Your Dreams
• Excuse A Bit Of Self-Congratulations
• Get To Know Yourself – Understanding Your Values

February Goals

My key focus areas for February are to continue to create useful and actionable lifestyle design content, further implement Pat Flynn’s Backlinking Strategy and to further implement Steve Scott’s Blog Lead Generation Diagram.

If you read my post about my first personal Big Audacious Challenge, you’ll know that I am also developing a plan to interview the self development blogging superstar Steve Pavlina. I have the basis of a plan now and will be writing more about this plan within the next week.

Here are my specific goals for February:

Content

1. Finish info product.
2. Write a guest post.
3. Write monthly newsletter that includes another self-coaching activity.
4. Create a video post.

Website Marketing

1. Use info product to implement Steve Scott’s Blog Lead Generation Diagram.
2. Write no less than two articles for article directories.

Income

1. Publish my first affiliate website (I’ll be sure to let you all know the web address!)

Self Development

1. Read Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.
2. Read Hypnotic Writing.
3. Read The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself.
4. Implement my plan to interview Steve Pavlina.

Online Connecting

1. Keep the aspiration of daily blog commenting (noting that this won’t always be possible).
2. Connect with five great bloggers via email.

Summary

Overall a pretty exciting month both offline with the purchase of our block of land to build our family home on and my Australia Day award and online with a significant increase in overall traffic.  February is all about more valuable content and maintaining momentum!

Uncork Your Mind is now a “DoFollow” website.  If you choose to leave a comment you will get a link back to your website.

Before you can determine what you want from life, it is very important to understand who you are.  Your desired lifestyle can only bring you happiness and fulfillment if it aligns with your individual values and needs.

This month’s recently released edition of Uncork Your Mind’s newsletter focusses on values including a very useful coaching activity to help you better understand your own values. Subscribe to the newsletter using the sign up box on the right and get free access to the Understanding Your Values coaching activity as well as all future editions containing useful lifestyle design information and activities not published anywhere else.

Start living life by your design!

Please indulge me while I give myself a quick pat on the back but today is kind of a special day for me……

On the giant island down in the Southern Hemisphere, today (26th January) is known as Australia Day.  If you’re from this great country you’ll need no further explanation on what its all about.  If you’re from other parts of the global community, Australia Day is our national day and is pretty much a giant celebration.

Australia Day is also when the Governor-General (The Commonwealth Queen’s representative – its kind of complicated!) announces the official National honours and awards to recognise Australian citizens “for excellence, achievement or meritorious service.”

Today I had the great privilege of receiving a Distinguished Service Medal (DSM) as part of the Australian Day Honours 2011.

The Distinguished Service Medal is awarded for “leadership in action.”  If you’re interested you can read the official fact sheet on the Distinguished Service Medal.

Specifically I was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for leadership in action during my nine month deployment as an infantry officer with the Australian Army in Afghanistan in 2009/10 where my team and I lived with, mentored and worked alongside an Afghan National Army Infantry Battalion.

While it is great to receive an individual award I feel that this is deserved recognition of my entire team of exceptional officers and soldiers who worked with me and achieved so much as a collective group.  If any of my team are reading this, I sincerely thank you for your support and friendship throughout the deployment.  This is just as much recognition for all of your hard work, achievements and sacrifices.

Thanks must also go to my wife and children as well as my extended family for their love and support not just whilst I was in Afghanistan, but also throughout my entire military career.

I also pause for a moment to remember all the Coalition and Afghan soldiers who have paid the ultimate price in Afghanistan and also those seriously injured (both mentally and physically) who will bear their scars and challenges for the rest of their lives. My thoughts are with you and your families as you progress through your recovery.

vision (noun):

1. the ability to think or plan the future with imagination or wisdom.
2. a mental image of what the future will or could be like.

Oxford Dictionary

If the concept of ‘vision’ is new to you open up Google, search for ‘vision statement’ and pick from the 8,590,000 search results of generic information.

If you’re more interested in a quick revision of what vision statements are but more importantly some actionable information on creating your own motivating personal vision statement as part of your lifestyle design toolkit then read on.

A Quick Re(vision)!

Your personal vision is how you see yourself in the future. In a lifestyle design context, it is a detailed visualisation of how your desired life looks at a point in the future. By understanding what you want, you can propel yourself forward with useful actions, behaviours and thoughts to achieve your ideal life.  As Stephen Covey would say, ‘Always begin with the end in mind!”

Mark Twain was a much better writer than I will ever be, so I will let him explain the importance of vision:

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want. Once you are crystal clear about the intended end result that you seek to produce, all the ways that it can become a done deal start to reveal themselves to you. There are many who have accomplished exactly what you want to achieve and could show you the way. You are not ready to ask them because you are not clear and you have not determined which questions need answers.

Your Personal Vision Statement

Your personal vision statement is a written description of your future desired life as visualised by your mind’s eye.  Despite what some will tell you there is no ‘correct’ format or length although the more detailed and specific your vision is, the more connected to you it will be.

A stronger connection to your vision statement significantly increases its power as a tool for manifesting your future outcomes through your thoughts and actions.

Personally I like to type mine in a Word document and make it as detailed as possible. My personal vision statement is the very first thing that I read at the start of my weekly review and planning session each Sunday.

Your vision statement should also cover the important areas of your life.  Here are some suggestions for what these areas may be:

1. Work.
2. Family.
3. Hobbies.
4. Travel.
5. Values and Beliefs.
6. Habits to develop.
7. Self Development.
8. Spirituality.
9. Finances.
10. Living location.
11. Relationships.
12. Health and Wellbeing.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Here is a list of some useful questions to ask yourself as you develop your personal vision statement:

• What are the things that I really enjoy?
• What brings me happinesss/joy?
• What were the two best moments of my past week?
• What are three things that I would do if I won the lottery?
• What are the issues and causes that I care deeply about?
• What are my most important values?
• What are the things that I do at the good-to-excellent level?
• What are the things that I’d like to stop doing or do as little as possible?

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Mission Statement Vs Vision Statement

In my thirteen years as an Army officer I wrote a lot of mission statements for military tactical operations.  In the Army the mission is a concise one sentence statement with the key ingredients of “who, what, when, where and why.”  The same formula is relevant for writing a personal mission statement and will be further explored in a future post.

In essence, the mission statement ‘operationalises’ your vision. By this I mean that your mission statement provides a concise platform to align your thoughts and actions to your personal vision statement.

Where a mission statement is an easily remembered one sentence statement that intentionally omits the detail, a vision statement is a full description of your desired future as visualised by your mind’s eye.

Your Next Action!

Now that you have revised yourself in what a personal vision statement is, use the focus areas and prompting questions above and WRITE YOUR PERSONAL VISION STATEMENT.  Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant (thanks to Abdul Kalam, the 11th president of India for this great quote!)

P.S. It can also be useful to turn your personal vision statement into a vision board or vice versa.  Read my post on creating a lifestyle design vision board to learn more about the power of visual cues for creating your desired lifestyle.

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