Choose it or Change it
10 years ago, Scott and I sat down and wrote out our 5 year goals. I’m pretty sure it stemmed from me wanting to put some creativity to action and Scott went along with it. We framed it and hung it in our room. There is so much power in visually seeing your goals each day. When your brain sees it each day it is redirected to focus on what you want your life to look like and gets to work. It sends a message to your subconscious to start to figure out how to make it happen. If you have never heard of this before or interested in hearing an expert talk about it, I highly suggest looking up Joe Dispenza and listening to some of the podcasts he’s been on. Its powerful stuff!
Once the date on the first one expired, we sat down and did it again. I’m not sure why we choose 5 years-I think because it was far enough away that we felt it gave us enough time to really make things happen and see changes in our life. It’s always so fun to review them at the end and see what happened and where changes were made. Like for example, our last one that expired had “investing” written on it. At the time when we created those 5 year goals, we had no knowledge about investing, had no investments and [speaking mostly for myself here] no desire to learn about investing. Until we went to a conference in 2019 and met a wonderful man named Phil Town. We signed up to take the Rule One Investing Course and now laugh about that being apart of our 5 year plan so long ago. What a manifestation that was!
Our latest 5 year plan expired in February 2022 and let me tell you, goal planning in the current state of our world felt overwhelming. We spent weeks thinking about what we would put on our new 5 year plan and to be honest, I kept coming up with nothing. Our whole world feels cracked wide open, the possibilities endless and who knows what next month will look like, nevermind 5 years from now. But as we looked back on our previous 5 year plans, I was reminded that just because we put it down on paper, doesn’t mean it will happen or that we can’t change our minds and go in another direction. What’s important is that we are having intentional conversations together and heading out in a direction that we both feel good about, knowing that we are the masters of our destiny and if we don’t decide and take action, life will happen and those 5 years will pass along anyways. So what’s to lose?!
The latest 5 year planning felt the most intentional. We set aside some time and had really great conversations about “what does that look like for us?” We thought about not only what we wanted but what actions would be needed to help us get there. Here are some concrete steps we took:
Intentionally choose a chunk of time when we wouldn’t be interrupted. We choose an afternoon on the weekend that worked for our family schedule and had to finish up another night in our schedule during the week that we have allocated for “date night”.
We got set up with materials. Drinks, snacks and paper and writing tools. I love to get creative with my markers, pencil crayons, colourful pens and blank paper. But this could also work with lined paper and a black pen. Or cut out images and words from magazines or print from the internet. We’ve done variations of vision boards over the years and they all work!
We started with the basics-what are the core areas of our life that we want to tackle together? For us it’s family, our relationship, finances, health, travel, business and experiences. This year we used a separate sheet of paper and brainstormed, took notes through our conversations about key words that stood out to us and categorized the goals.
Then we captured it on paper. Once we felt good with a topic I would creativity design a section on the paper using lots of colours, different fonts, whatever felt good to me [Scott knows I need a certain creative zone to be in to do this, so the right music helped too!] We let the major stuff take up the big areas of the paper and went back to fill in the rest with the fun stuff.
We didn’t hold back. If you get a chance to create your future, why on earth would you limit yourself?! The very worst thing that will happen is that we wrote it on paper and it doesn’t happen. Maybe it gets shifted to the next 5 years or maybe it gets scrapped because things change over time. Regardless, we never want to hold back. This is our time to create a life of magic for ourselves!
We knew it had to be somewhere that we would see it everyday [and that we felt comfortable if other people saw it]. For us that’s in our bathroom. We love to look at it regularly while we are getting ready and check in with where we are at. We also felt like it was important enough to frame too so we bought a simple frame and got it looking all pretty on our wall.
Our thoughts have power and it’s so important to direct those thoughts towards everything we want in our life. If we aren’t changing it, we are choosing it. As a couple, we know that in order to change it, we needed a vision painted before us to help lead us down a path we were excited and proud to walk together.