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Personal Vision VIP – Audio

Hello VIPs and welcome to this month’s training. Are you ready? This one is a good one, actually. They’re all good, but this one is one that is quite fun I feel and very, very powerful. And this is one that I use in my life all the time, like every day, almost every day. This one has made a big difference in my life and it’s really enjoyable too. I think you’ll find it quite easy and quite fun to do, in fact. So this month’s lesson the topic is ‘Personal Vision Statement’; making a personal vision statement. What does that mean?

You know we’re all familiar with mission statements. Mission statements are something that a lot of companies use. They write about, supposedly, what their mission is, their purpose; what’s the purpose of the company. Sadly, most corporate mission statements are extremely boring and they’re all bullshit because they don’t actually follow them, so we’re not going to use those as an example. That’s why I’m choosing a different phrase; I’m choosing to call them vision statements.

So the more common phrase is actually mission statements. That’s what you’re going to hear a lot, especially in the business world, the mission statement, the mission statement, the mission statement, but I don’t want to use that because for me it has kind of some negative ideas. Because it’s used so much by so many companies and they don’t actually follow it, I don’t want to talk about that. So we’re going to make a personal vision statement.

What that is, it’s a big, deep vision of your life purpose and your life mission. That sounds serious, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t need to be serious, it can be fun. And here’s something else about it, because when I talk about this I know that some people start thinking I don’t know my life purpose. Oh, my God! You know that’s such a big question, such a big idea. Well, here’s the thing.

This vision statement, it can change, it can evolve and it should evolve. I mean as we get older our values change, our goals change and so our life purpose and mission, we might kind of change how we see that. That’s fine. It’s good. So I just want you to write something and to think about something for your life right now and for the foreseeable future, the next five years or even the next one year.

So, number one, it’s a big, deep vision of your life mission and purpose. So how do you make one of these, because that sounds really difficult, right? That sounds a bit huge.

So let me take you step by step how to create your own vision statement and how to use it in your life to get the kinds of results that you want.

Okay, first let’s just talk about why, why would you want to do this. I mean what’s the purpose of this. Well, I think the number one purpose would be that it serves as a compass in your life. And what does a compass do? It guides you, right? It guides you.

It guides you to where you want to go.

See, in our lives many times we get distracted. You know we have crises come up, “crises” come up. We’ve got problem come up. Things happen that we didn’t expect.

There are all kinds of things happening all the time and sometimes it’s easy to sort of lose your way and it’s easy to forget what’s most important. And maybe you have some big vision for your life, but then all this stuff starts happening and you kind of forget about it or you get pulled away from it.

One thing that a powerful personal vision statement can give you is it’s kind of like a compass to remind you during those difficult times what your purpose is, what your mission is, what you want to do in your life, what your life is about, what your highest values are. It’s a way to continually remind yourself, keep yourself on the path that you want to be on, even when lots of other things are happening that you didn’t expect. So it’s a compass, that’s one reason to do it.

Another reason is that it’s something that will energize and inspire you because, again, in our daily lives sometimes we get so busy with little daily tasks and small things that are not very inspiring, right? Even in my own business I’m very inspired by Effortless English, but I have to deal with little advertising and this little budget and the website is crashing and all these little things that I don’t enjoy very much.

When a lot of those things start happening at the same time you know, again, I can kind of lose my energy. I’m like ah, this is not fun. This is not why I want to be doing this and so I remind myself with my vision statement why I’m doing it and then I can see those little problems with kind of a bigger vision and they don’t seem so bad anymore.

Then another reason why we want a vision statement is this idea of the attractor factor, the idea of focus, the idea of attracting and creating the future you want. You see, what we focus on all the time that’s what tends to happen in our lives, so we want to be focused on consistently the biggest, the best, the most wonderful things. So we want to have a big vision of what we want our life and purpose to be and this vision statement kind of summarizes it and it gives us something to focus on again and again every single day. Just by focusing on it, just by reviewing it, seeing it and thinking about it all the time we will make it real. We’ll make it happen.

It seems like kind of magic, but it’s just the way our brains work. It’s a deep psychological principle and if you’re spiritual a lot of people feel there’s a spiritual component of that. That as you do that, as you get your psychology focused on something that’s big and wonderful and great, you know on this vision that something in the Universe, you can call it Daw or Buddha or God or your Universe or whatever, quantum mechanics, it doesn’t matter what you call it, but that there’s some energy or forces out there that we’re connected to that will start to help us move in that direction.

So it doesn’t matter what you believe, whether you believe it’s just psychology or not, what I can tell you is it does happen and it does work and that’s what’s most important.

So that’s the why of it. Let’s talk about what. What exactly is a vision statement? Well, it is a statement of your highest principles and your highest purpose and you’re going to have to think about this when you make it. You’re going to have to really think about okay, we all have a lot of positive things that we value and you need to just think what are the top three or two or four for me and how am I going to use those values. You know what do I want to use them for? What kind of life do I want to create? What kind of impact do I want to have on the world and other people? And that’s really what you’re going to describe in this vision statement.

Let’s talk about now the details. How do you do it? Well, a vision statement is really just three or four sentences. Now, some people in some companies they write mission statements it’s like a full page or pages and pages and the longer you make it the less powerful it is because then it just becomes a bunch of, you know, general positive stuff and it’s too much. You can’t really focus on it, right? Focus has the idea of looking at something that’s limited and the wider you make it the less you’re focused. That’s the definition of focus. So you want to make it just three or four sentences. I recommend three, three sentences, and those three sentences state your highest values, mission and purpose.

Now, these things need to be your highest and they need to be very general. They’re not dependent on one job or one situation. See, for this to be a compass, for this to guide you through lots of problems it has to be big enough and general enough to apply to many different situations. So if you lose your job this vision statement stays the same.

If you get a different job you still have that same vision statement, the same purpose.

You might do it in a different way, but the vision is the same.

Another thing I recommend is to make it kind of rhythmic, something you can say that has a little bit of a rhythm to it. You could use a little song piece or something like that if you wanted to. You add a little bit of rhythm to it, it makes it more memorable. Because this is something you want to memorize, in fact. I highly recommend that you memorize it, that you just go say it because you’re repeating it every day. Let me give you an example of what I did.

So what I did is I’m a little bit of a geek, which means… How do you describe a geek? A geek is a person that’s kind of intellectual, likes to study. You know not cool. So I’m a little bit of a geek and I like ‘Star Trek’ and I like science fiction kind of movies and shows and things. So in this TV show ‘Star Trek’, the opening of the show actually has a wonderful sort of vision statement or mission statement.

It’s part of the opening of every show and it talks about the purpose of exploring space.

And it’s very noble, these very big high principles of exploring and learning and contacting other civilizations. It’s this very, very noble kind of statement for this show and so I kind of got this idea well, I’d like to have one of those for my own life, like a similar kind of statement of my most noble, high intentions, my biggest purpose and goal and so I used the rhythm that they use in that show. I kind of copied that rhythm, but then I used my own words.

So my personal mission or vision statement and the one that I also use for Effortless English is that our purpose is to explore new opportunities for growth and to bring confidence, vitality and happiness to people all over the world and to boldly go where we have never gone before. Now, that last phrase, especially, I stole from ‘Star Trek’, so what. So you get the idea, but that states sort of my really kind of biggest.

It’s very general, right? It’s not specific, like we will have 2,000 members in the VIP Program. That’s a goal, right? Things that are very specific and measurable are goals and those are important too, but those are kind of the smaller pieces. A vision statement is something really big. It really describes your big purpose in life. I mean why are you alive? Why are you working? Why are you doing what you do? Why do you get up every day? And so this vision statement for me, that’s what I want to do; to explore new opportunities for growth.

I mean that describes for me my commitment to life-long learning. I always want to be growing. I always want to be looking for new ways to learn, new ways to grow. As long as I’m alive I want that, so to explore new opportunities for growth. That word “explore” has a little bit of the idea, it’s a little bit more playful, right? It’s not serious, I must grow and study, no, it’s explore. It means I can get out there and just look for new things and new ways to grow and it’s this adventure and I wanted that feeling.

Then the second sentence is about contribution; how I want to help the world or impact the world, to bring confidence, vitality and happiness to people all over the world. I want people to feel more confident as English speakers, but also just generally in their life, to feel stronger about themselves, to feel better about themselves. There’s so many people in the world who feel weak, who feel sad, who feel shy, who feel nervous and I want to help them feel more confident.

“Vitality” means energy and health and that feeling of being alive, fully alive. And, again, there are so many people who are unhealthy, who feel tired and depressed and bored.

Oh, that’s terrible for me, so I want to help people feel more alive, more energetic, more healthy. And, of course, happiness we all know. I want to help people feel more happy, to live happier lives.

And the last part of that second sentence, “all over the world.” I’m a person who loves travel, especially international travel. I have learned so much through traveling and it’s really taught me so much about myself and I, therefore, want to serve people all over the world. You know I’m not a patriotic person. I don’t like nationalism. I don’t feel America is number one or anything like that. I try to think of myself as a world citizen and so I want to serve people in the world. That’s me. You don’t have to be that way, but that’s my vision.

Then, finally, “to boldly go where we have never gone before” or where I have never gone before. That talks about, again, my personal love of exploring and trying new things, of literally traveling to new places in the world, but also in terms of mentally exploring and going to new ideas. It means both of those things to me, that last sentence. So that’s my vision statement and it gives me a lot of power and here’s, finally, how you use it.

You want to chant it every day with strong emotion. Now, when I first created this it was about six or seven months ago. I mean I’ve had these ideas for a long time, but I actually created them into this little rhythmic vision statement. Actually, it’s more like eight months ago and I did it when I was doing this long walk in Japan. So as I was walking I would start saying this to myself again and again and again, right? My mission is to explore new opportunities for growth, to bring confidence, happiness and vitality to people all over the world, to boldly go where I’ve never gone before. Then I’d repeat it again and again kind of this chant, almost like a little song or rhythm and I did it with emotion.

Emotion is very important. If you just say my mission is to explore new…you know kind of with no emotion, it has no power, but if you say it and you move your arms and you kind of use your face and you feel that energy and passion as you’re talking about your highest principles, your biggest purpose, your mission in life, it will energize you and it will make it more real and it will grow stronger and then you do this every single day.

You can do this as a ritual every morning and you might have other things that you say to yourself too that are more specific goals, you know I’m going to get a better job or something. That’s fine too, but this is the one you want to say every time. The goals especially will change a lot. You’ll reach that goal and then you get a new one, but this big vision statement is going to guide you for a long time, maybe all of your life and you should be repeating it every single day.

If you’re someone who walks or runs that’s a great time because running is kind of rhythmic. Again, when I was running I would do this. I would say our mission is to explore new opportunities for growth, to bring confidence, vitality and happiness to people all over the world, to boldly go where you have never gone before. I’d be doing this, you know? I wasn’t screaming it because other people were around and they thought maybe I’d be crazy.

They still probably thought I was crazy because they could see I was kind of talking to myself as I was doing this, but it really made me feel great. It also made my runs more enjoyable, like I really enjoyed it more. Instead of just running, I was doing this again and again and getting myself really energized. It really made it real for me and it increased my passion and energy and happiness, so it was fantastic. There’s so many great affects of doing this.

If you don’t run, if you’re not a runner, just wake up in the morning and just stand there and do it. You could even put on some cool music and feel great. Whatever you do, you want to remind yourself of what is most important to you and you want to remind yourself of that every single day. You want to focus on it every single day. You want to do it in a way that’s rhythmic because you’ll remember it so you’ll actually memorize it.

You want to do it in a way that’s emotional, very, very powerfully emotional and you get emotion by moving your body, by using your voice, by using your face. If you need to, put on some emotional music too.

So do all of those things. Every day you’re going to chant your vision statement. My mission is to explore new opportunities for growth. You get the idea, right? And you do it many times, not just one time. You know you might chant that mission statement, that vision statement, you might chant it 10 times, 20 times, 100 times, 200 times a day. That will only take about 10 minutes, but each time you’re doing it you get more emotional, more emotional, more emotional and it like locks it in. It programs your brain, I promise you. It gets into there deep.

I mean it is in there deep now for me. I’ve memorized it. It’s in there. I mean I can just say. I don’t need notes it can pop right out of me. I know what my vision is. I know what my mission is in life. I know what my purpose is and so any time I’m confused or I’m having problems in life I can just say okay, wait. What is my vision? What is my purpose? Why am I doing this? That will help me find solutions. It helps me determine what kind of actions I need to take or want to take. It helps me determine which choices I should make, because instead of getting caught in the moment I can be reminded of what is my big purpose in life and that will determine the kind of choices I make.

You need to do this too, so I’ll talk about in the commentary your specific homework. I think you probably know that I want you to write one of these and I want you to put it on our VIP social site and share it because I’d love to read what your vision is. I would really love to know because that would tell me a lot about who you are as a person because it tells me what’s most important to you in life and how do you want to contribute to the people around you and to the world.

All right, so get to work. Go write that vision statement and share it on the VIP social site. I will see you on our social site, be sure you go there and really do this. Chant this thing. Memorize it. Say it every day. It will change your life. Have a great day, bye-bye.