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Creating an Inspiring Vision for Your Life

What is your "vision" for your life? (Your long-term plan, your "ideal" for how your life will turn out, or the legacy you'll leave behind?). Most of us don't have a clue - beyond "getting married", or "having kids" or getting "divorced", or having a successful career as a (you fill in the blank). Each of these is a goal but not much of a vision.

Constructing a vision demands we ask the big questions about our life. Not so much what we want to do, but rather who we want to be; our values, our character and integrity, our life purpose, our impact on others, our final legacy.

Our core values - making money or helping others, achieving fame or growing in wisdom, etc, will play a major role in contributing toward our vision. Most important of all the various factors in creating your vision is identifying your ultimate purpose, and the special gifts God has given you to help achieve your purpose.

Putting it all together

If you have consciously chosen values that support employing your gifts on behalf of your life purpose you have the basic building blocks in place to develop your vision. Since your vision represents how you want your future to look, it should reflect the logical end result of using your "gift" to pursue your purpose based on your core values.

The process might look something like this:

Some of my core values are to share God's love by helping others. I have the gift of encouragement and understanding (empathy) as well as patience. My purpose is to make a difference in the world - i.e. with the people around me. Since I love children my vision is to be an inspiring mother and a teacher - to combine my values and gifts to achieve my purpose by making a difference in someone's life, not just as a mother and teacher, but as someone who is recognized as a force of love, mentoring, inspiration and encouragement.