Vision Mapping

As business owners, there are always three main things we’re chasing:

In your professional life, personal life, and family life, what are the things you’d like to achieve in order to earn you that extra bit of time/money/freedom?

On top of that, what would that goal look like once you’ve achieved it? Does more time equal more vacations, more time to spend with friends? Think about it for a moment and consider what each branch of your life would look like if you earned more of all three things. Get specific and jot down one concrete thing you’d like to achieve for each aspect of your life.

Maybe this is a rearranged work week or a 9-day fortnight in your professional life. Maybe for your personal life, it’s about being able to reconnect with an old hobby. In your family life, it may simply be about spending more time with the people that matter most.

Now, what do you need to do this year to achieve more time, money, and freedom? You don’t have to get it exactly right the first time around. But having a vision map of the baby steps you need to take to reach your goals will help you get there. Maybe your 9-day fortnight starts with a half-day once a week. The point is to find clarity in your life as it is right now and understand the space you have – and more importantly, the space you need, to achieve your goals.

Start with your big goals, then break them down. Next year you want to run a marathon. Well, you aren’t just going to show up on the day and expect to run 10k. No, you’ll train and prepare and make small improvements leading up to the big day. For instance, you might start with running 1k twice a week for a month.

And remember, the goal isn’t just to run a marathon. It’s to find more freedom in your life to focus on things that make you feel good.

Now it’s time to map out your entire year with your time, money, and freedom goals.

Imagine a matrix made up of these goals, where money is on one sliding scale and time and freedom are on another. Realistically, every single one of us will land somewhere on this matrix right now, and most of us will be close to somewhere in the middle. While we may not be complaining, we’re not exactly where we want to be. The point of this is to look at where you want to be, and which direction you want to start moving along these sliding scales.

Ideally, most of us want to be somewhere high up on both sliding scales.

Right now, there are a number of things we’re doing that are keeping up at our current place in this matrix. What are they, and what do we need to do differently to help us slide along those scales?

On the same note, there are a number of things we’re doing that are pushing us along those scales and these are the things we need to identify, keep doing, and if possible, do more of.

If you’re someone who buys a takeaway coffee every morning to start your day and are struggling to slide yourself along that money matrix, maybe you need to stop buying coffee every day and start bringing your own keep-cup on your commute. (Just a thought!)

In order to achieve more time, money, and freedom, start by identifying one thing that you should stop doing, one thing you should keep doing, and one thing you should start doing… today