127: How to Create a Vision for the Future of Your Life and Business

Welcome to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Liebross. Each week, I focus on the systems, strategy, and big thinking you need to CEO your business and life to the next level. Are you ready? Let's go.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I just want you to know that I'm frustrated with technology. I just spent the past 15 minutes trying to get my podcast microphone to work and it wasn't working so we're just going to go with the old AirPods. How does that sound? We'll see how the AirPods do. I'm also still in my very echoey house because it's emptied and we are moving out in just a couple of days. Those two things together, I don't know, lots going on here.

But today I want to continue our discussion about having a vision, dreaming, and looking ahead. Because I think this is a really important topic that gets glanced over like it's a fluffy thing. It's a little woo woo, I call it, and in the coaching world, it's a frequently talked-about topic, but I want to talk about it in a slightly different way than maybe you've heard me talk about it on the podcast before.

On the podcast before, I've got a couple of podcasts on visioning and the four reasons why it's important to have a vision. I've talked about creating a 10-year vision in your business. I've talked about having both vision and traction and the importance of you needing the vision before you can take the action or have traction. But today I want to talk about it in a little bit of a different sense. This podcast episode is coming out in the middle of the Design Your Successful Summer Masterclass week.

If you are listening to this right when it's coming out, there's still time to sign up at andreaslinks.com. If there are some spots left, go grab them. I don't know. I'm recording this over a month ahead of time. But even thinking about summer and your vision for what summer should look like and feel like is important. Now I'm fresh off coming back from my mastermind retreat. I took my mastermind clients who are in the Runway to Freedom Mastermind to we’ve had an Airbnb outside of Atlanta. It was just completely delightful, blissful.

As a matter of fact, everybody had their own room and a bathroom and we had all the meals prepared for us. We had a lot of fun. We brought in a reflexologist. We brought in someone to help us learn how to cook better. I mean, it was great and we had lots of time to also work. At the beginning of every work session, I gave them some little toy or something to spur them on to think about things in a different way.

The very first, I call it prize I gave them was a magic wand. Those magic wands, I refer to magic wands pretty often, that magic wand is very powerful. I call that magic wand the best tool in your toolbox for dreaming, visioning, or thinking big. I want to caution you that when we talk about visioning, dreaming, or thinking big, this is a place, this is a land that is bigger than a goal. Goals might help you live out this dream or vision.

But when I talk about vision, I like to think about this as the place that you're trying to get to. You've also heard me talk about you climbing a mountain and trying to get to the top so this might be the castle at the top of the mountain. There's a light-up top of beacon. Maybe I picture it like a lighthouse that's going around and around and you're trying to get to that top of the mountain to the castle on the hill. Whatever your castle on the hill is, that is your vision. That is your 10-year vision.

That's different than goals. Your vision acts as your beacon. Your goals are just the steps along the way that guide your actions short term. I love SMARTER goals. SMARTER goals are specific and measurable and they feed your dream or your vision. Think about it. If something is specific and measurable, it's probably not a vision or a dream. Dreams aren't usually measurable.

Goals are just the fuel for the dream because you've got to take a series of actions in order to make the dream a reality and SMARTER goals are a great way to get yourself to implement maybe a new habit or to follow through on things that you want to be doing and that you want to use a stepping stone to reach the castle on the hill.

Now if you're not familiar with SMARTER goals, then go listen to a few of my past podcasts on goals. I actually created a Spotify playlist specific to goals, and you can listen to all those episodes back to back. I'll put the link in the show notes to the Spotify playlist. But what I'm talking about is if you had a goal to increase your followers by X percent by December 31st, you might have a quarterly focused task or rock to post on Instagram once a day, five days a week for the next year. That goal of increasing your followers by X percent is being fed by weekly tasks.

You can set goals like that, but that is not what we're talking about here. What I'm talking about here is why we are doing that. Why are we posting on Instagram every day? Why do we want to increase our followers? What is the ultimate goal? Not just for this year but maybe for the next 5 years or 10 years? What is that? That is your vision. That is your castle on the hill. That is where you're trying to get to.

I think it's really okay if you're not sure if you can't see that castle on the hill. I think it's okay if it's a fuzzy picture. But overall, what are you trying to do? What are you trying to impact? Who are you trying to impact? What are you trying to shift? For me, as a business and life coach, my vision is to show women how they can think bigger, and when they do, what happens? I want to lead them to be something bigger and go beyond what they think is possible in business and in life.

Personally, my vision is to be an active, adventurous loving woman who is beyond satisfied with all aspects of life and really creates intentional time to focus on herself and loving others. I envision working hard and playing hard until I die and living in places that inspire that curiosity and creativity to show women how they can think bigger and what happens when they do to live out my life in a way that has adventure, love, and activity. Those are the two pieces to my castle on the hill.

Now there are different things that come into play in terms of goals and objectives that I have along the way or along my journey to make that vision a reality to help bring that vision into fruition. For example, right now I'm writing a book and I'm hosting amazing retreats. Those two things are feeding that business vision.

Personally, I am recording this week from this house that we've lived in for over 21 years. We're about to leave it and move into a temporary apartment for about six months before making the real move into a new home in the fall that we're building. That home is someplace that I have created that inspires me, that allows me to live out my vision.

These decisions to write the book, to host the retreat, to build the house, they are leading me up the path toward the vision, toward the castle on the hill. I have more evidence that I am moving toward my vision when women, my clients say to me, “I have made such a shift from thinking small to thinking big. I'm seeing the world totally differently. I have more confidence and less shame. I have a more balanced life. I continue to believe the vision is becoming a reality. I am doing it. I am getting to the castle on the hill.”

They have waved their magic wand and they can see their castle. Whatever the dream is for you, that vision, what do you think and feel when you think about it, and how often do you think about it? With my vision for retreats, I feel energized when I think about these retreats.

I feel like coaching people in person isn't something I've been able to do a whole lot of because my business is virtual, and it's different than being in person. But when I have a small intimate group of women in a mastermind together in a room for an extended period of time, we are energized and we 10x our decision-making power, we 10x the impact that we can have on our business and our personal life.

I feel like I can really live out my vision when I'm in that small intimate group of women and it is a lot of fun. I feel like it's an experience that changes people instead of just knowing. It's an experience where when you're together in a retreat, for example, it's where we can engage our senses. Through Zoom and phone or through the computer, you don't get to engage as many of your senses. We get a different experience through that modality than we do when we are in person.

My next retreat is still in the works. Stay tuned. But I am planning on having more women there. Really start to consider whether you want to be part of this small, intimate group of women in a mastermind and if you want to 10x your impact. That's an important thing to think about because what would happen if you were on a fast track or an easier path? It makes it so much easier to reach the top of the mountain to get to the castle on the hill when you've got support around you. It makes that vision so much more of a reality.

Going back, I asked you, what's your vision or dream? Whatever it is, I want you to ask yourself, what is your relationship like with that dream? Do you even have a relationship with it? Do you think about it? Have you articulated out loud? I will say this. I think it's okay in the beginning that we keep our vision, if we choose to, our vision or a dream to ourselves.

Let me pause, although, I do notice a lot in the beginning, it's hard sometimes to share. But finally, when we do share, the energy that comes from the sharing brings the vision alive. One of my visions is to have multiple in-person retreats each year where we work and play. They're like VIP days on steroids because that energy and progress made in just those few days are really immeasurable.

I've told my coach that I want to have multiple in-person retreats a year and maybe I've mentioned it to my husband. I did mention it to the women that were on this past retreat. But really until the last week or two, I mostly kept it to myself. The vision really crystallized or formalized when I was on this past retreat with my mastermind clients.

Now I've said it out loud in the podcast that I want to have multiple in-person retreats a year. It is becoming even more and more of a reality. The vision isn't as fragile or delicate. It's not a glass house or castle on the hill. I'm actually building a solid foundation and I'm on a path to get there a lot easier and faster now that I have people, you, my listeners who can come along with me on this journey.

It's like when you have a new relationship with your vision, you don't want to tell anyone because you're afraid of what they'll think. Like when you first start dating. When I first started dating my husband, I did not tell my parents because I was not really sure what was going to come up in this relationship, maybe it would just go away. Maybe it was just a fleeting moment. But at some point, I decided to tell them but maybe not right away because I felt like it was too fragile.

But once you tell someone something, it becomes way more of a reality. Think about that. Once you take the lid off of the pot, so the pot has been simmering, the water in the pot has been simmering, once you take the lid off, you can actually start to engage all of your senses. You can see, hear, and smell what's cooking. Your dream might be like that. You might feel like it's fragile, and it's just simmering so you want to keep it to yourself and protect it, and that's okay.

But I want to ask yourself, are you nurturing a healthy relationship with that dream? Are you thinking about it in ways that make you feel excited? Do you intentionally choose how you're going to think about it? I learned on my retreat, ironically, a little about internal family systems from my client, Rebecca, who is a counselor. If you're like me, and most people and most humans, then we think about things from all sorts of points of view. I call it the little voices in the back of your head.

Rebecca informs me that, if we follow internal family systems, they're really different family members in your head. I don't mean literally family members, I mean, your family in your head. There's this whole thing in psychology called internal family systems where we have a family in our head and each of the family members has different voices that we've developed through our lives that try to protect us and try to help us prevent danger or failure.

They fall in that motivational triad. They want things to be simple, easy, and convenient. They want to keep you safe. Those family members in your head sometimes want to shout at you and sometimes they want to be heard. They want to say things like, “You know this vision of yours might not ever happen. You know that if you share it with people, people might judge you.”

If you tell people that you're writing a book because you want to encourage women to think bigger, what are they going to say about that? It's hard to ignore that family in your head. You have to let everybody have their say. But ultimately, the real you needs to come forward. You need to be in charge of that family. You make the decisions from your conscious, logical, wiser, and calmer brain. You don't just listen to that little sister that’s scared all the time.

Do you let the rowdy family run the show? Do you let the rowdy family scare you? No. You choose intentionally how you're going to think about your dream and your vision and how you're going to think about getting to that castle on the hill.

Here's another thing I want you to think about: I'm a big proponent of how can we make this simple, doable, and fun, are you having fun with your dream or your vision? I think a lot of you don't have fun. I know this from when I coach you that you're not doing the work of making it fun. But I'm telling you that doing the work of making it fun is going to make it a whole lot easier.

I talked about that a lot with one of my clients at our retreat. Her business wasn't feeling fun anymore. What could we do to make it fun so that she could make her vision a reality? If it's fun, it's going to make achieving that vision a whole lot easier. It'll make it worth it.

When you want to throw the towel in, when you're tired of writing emails, when you can't figure out technology, like I couldn't write before this podcast, it made it a whole lot easier to get through my technology frustrations because I know delivering this message to you in a podcast every week is helping me get closer to my castle on the hill. It is fueling my dream to make an impact and to teach women what's possible.

But if I was not having fun with that vision, then I would have probably thrown in the towel and not come up with the solution of just putting my AirPods in. Now, this AirPods thing is like duct tape, like I talked about a couple of weeks ago so I do have to figure out what's going on with the microphone, but it's going to work for right now.

I want you to have a relationship with your dream. Some people even go as far as to give it a name or give it a gender, whatever works for you. But I think if you can have a relationship with that dream, it's actually one step that you can take toward thinking bigger and understanding and examining your relationship with your vision is going to allow it to happen because here's the truth, you're either neglecting that dream if you don't ever think about it or you have a very negative relationship with that dream if you have a lot of negative thoughts and feelings about it.

The alternative here to those two options is to have a fun, positive, playful, friendly, and ideally loving relationship with your dream. Negative self-talk or a negative relationship with it isn't helpful. Neglecting it isn't helpful either. But if you had a positive, playful, friendly, and fun relationship with it, at some point you would love it.

What's your dream? I'm going to ask you again. What is the castle on the hill? Did you know that you can be anyone you want to be and that vision could be anything you want? It does not have to be something noble. It does not have to be contributing to the world. It could just be something that sounds fun.

It could just be something that you know will stretch you a teeny bit further, challenge you, and would be cool to experience in your lifetime. My coach Jody Moore brought that concept to light for me. What if it's just something that could be cool to experience? But not everyone wants to write a book but then helps women think bigger. Not everyone wants to run an in-person retreat. In fact, I think a lot of people think those two things sound terrible. But I let myself have fun thinking about my dream.

Even though I still have the family in my head that says, “This will never happen. Who do you think you are? You're not interesting enough. You're no different than the rest of the world. Why would someone want to come and spend time with you physically in an Airbnb for a few days? Why would someone want to spend time reading what you wrote?” all of that is still there but I don't let it stop me from having playdates with my dream and having a lot of fun with my dream.

The dream of living in a place that inspires me is fueling building this house because believe me, there are lots of voices that tell me and ask me why am I doing this. I thought you never wanted to build a house or it wasn't something that was important to you. Well, the building of the house is not really what's important to me, but the end result is because it's getting me closer to my dream.

My friends, what is your dream? What is your vision? What is at the top of the mountain? What's your castle on the hill? What are you doing to fuel your journey toward that dream? What are you doing to take leaps, not just baby steps? Are you thinking big? Are you thinking small? What would make it more fun?

Who is with me envisioning and dreaming? I want you to figure out your dream and then nurture a healthy relationship with it. I am here, my friends, to help you. Who's your coach? If you don't have a coach, I would be honored to help you fuel that dream. The next best step in that is to go to andreaslinks.com and schedule a consult call.

Even if we decide we don't want to work together, that's totally fine. But if on that call I can help you wave your magic wand and come up with your dream or vision, I think that call would be worth it. Those complimentary 60 minutes that you're going to spend with me would be worth it. I'd be happy to be your guide in creating your vision. It's the first step.

The vision is the first step, even before the goals, the habits, and the tasks, even before the planning, the scheduling, and just finding the time. It's the vision. Let's do this together. I would love for you to be at that next retreat. Go jump on the waitlist for when I opened the doors to the mastermind later this month. Get on that waitlist. It'll be worth it. You'll see and let's chat.

I can't wait to hear from you schedule your call. See you soon, my friends. See you next weekend. Remember, this is leveling up. Visioning is leveling up. There are no two ways about it. Have a great week.

Hey, listening to podcasts is great. But you also have to do something to kick your business up a notch. You need to take some action, right? So go to andreaslinks.com and take the quiz. I guarantee you'll walk away knowing exactly what your next best step is to level up.