Envision Your Dream Life
It’s time to look forward. Vision is the key to being the creator of your own reality. Imagine that you are at the end of 2022. Feel free to wave the magic wand in your imagination. Dare to envision things that you think are totally impossible and awesomely magnificent, exactly as you’d want them to be. And dare to just find out what unfolds. Start the year with a commitment to yourself to make 2022 a year where you become even more uniquely and beautifully you. Have a wonderful New Year.
Happy holidays, fearless friends. I want to share a simple new year’s practice that you can use to get yourself set up to kick some major you know what in the new year. I love this part of my yearly routine, and I think you will too. This is a great time to breathe deep, reflect on the past year, and then intentionally create a 2022 vision for yourself. Vision is the key to being the creator of your own reality.
Reflection and Manifestation Exercise
All you need to do for this exercise is to answer a few simple questions. You can listen now and think about it. Grab a pen and paper. I encourage you to write this stuff down. It does wonders. So here are the questions for you and feel free to ponder this.
How Have You Impacted the World Around You?
In the year 2021, what did you help to create, complete or accomplish? What did you create at work? What did you create at home? What did you create in life around you, with the people you know and love? What changes did you create in the world? Also, what challenges did you face? You can think again through all these different areas of your life, appreciating yourself for the challenges that you were met with and the challenges that you took on at home, in your family, in your friendships, in your creative work, in the impact that you’re trying to make in the world. What did you learn from each of these challenges?
Every challenge brings learning. Some learning is easeful and pleasant, and some learning brings great discomfort. Lean into the discomfort of some of those learnings. Allow yourself to feel the sadness, the pain, the regret, the anger, and the fear of some of those learnings. Allow yourself to feel the joy, excitement, and inspiration of what you discovered and uncovered this year creating and facing challenges and learning.
What Are You Leaving in 2021?
Now, what did you say goodbye to, or let go of in 2021? Some of these things may have been intentional choices. In other cases, you may have said goodbye to loved ones, old jobs, old possibilities, old ways of being, and some of that may feel pretty out of your control. What did you invite into your life? What did you invite in that’s new? What were you open to receiving that maybe you were not open to before, or that you didn’t even know how to ask for, and this year you did? Appreciate those things. Appreciate the open, unmet invitations just as much as the ones that feel like answered prayers.
Who Were You?
Now, how were you being? This is the money question guys. How is it that you were being that made all of your answers to these questions possible? What I mean by being here is usually it’s an adjective. It’s the way that you were operating and navigating the world, the qualities of you that you were expressing. Were you being steadfast? Were you being open, creative? Were you being fixated? Were you being blamey? Were you being resistant? Any way of being brings different results and can lead us in expected and unexpected directions. So be really, really open to the answer to these questions.
Visualize Your Ideal Answers for 2022
All right, now that you’ve captured something about the way that you were being in 2021 that led to all of this, it’s time to look forward. Now, imagine that you are at the end of 2022 and answer all of those same questions again as you would want one year from now. When you answer them, I want you to answer them in the present tense, as if you’re really in the year 2022. In 2022 what I helped to create, complete and accomplish is this. The challenges I faced were these. What I learned from them was this. What I said goodbye to or let go of was this. What I invited into my life was this. And how I made all of that possible was by being like this and this and this. Boom, that’s your 2022 vision.
Feel free to go back and make it even juicier, even sexier, even more mind-blowingly amazing. Dare to envision things that you think are totally impossible and awesomely magnificent exactly as you’d want them to be. Feel free to wave the magic wand in your imagination and dare to just find out what unfolds.
Curiosity is Your Most Valuable Tool for Growth
Now here’s a coach’s tip. The game-changing goal of this exercise is in that last question; what was your way of being? As you’ve heard me say here before, when you change your way of being, changes in what you’re doing come easily. The way of being is what creates the path of least resistance in front of us, making certain choices and actions and behaviors easier than others. When I’m being a certain way, I will naturally do certain things and I will get certain results from those actions.
If we focus like so many people do only on things we’re going to do and do differently so we can get different results, we’ll often end the year in almost exactly the same place we began, except for things that accidentally happened to us. The thing I want us to do here is be really, really intentional about how we want to be so that our way of being creates something mind-blowingly amazingly different and exciting, and helps us realize who we really are on the inside. And this is of service to all things.
4 Ways to Turn Your Vision Into Reality
Now here are four optional power moves that you can use if you want to make your vision real and bring it into real life without pushing.
Number one: Share your vision. Share it with your coach if you have one. Share it with your family, your loved ones, your friends, your partners at work. Ask a few others you know well to challenge you, to make it even simpler, older, more true and more you. I have done this many years in a row and I’m always amazed how my vision becomes so much more focused and directed and less complicated and more free feeling, where I feel actually this is what I want. It’s not all these other things. It’s this. And when I write it down, it multiplies the possibilities of it happening. So sharing it and getting feedback is a really great and fun tool. You can even gather some friends together and do this together. Do it in your partnership. Do it in your marriage.
For bonus points, post it to social media. Ask people do they see this for you? What else do they see? Ask them what their vision is. You’re welcome to tag me and ask for feedback from me. You can do that either by tagging at caneel.is, or tagging #AllowedPodcast. I will see it either way. I’m to bring you feedback on that.
So game-changing, optional power move number two to bring your vision to life is to engage all five senses in imagining what this will look like, feel like, sound like, taste like as it’s all unfolding easily for you and in the most magical, amazing way that’s just as you want it without any pushing at all. So really feel free to walk around the virtual reality world of your own imagination as you envision this. Look under every stone and pillow, and down every hall and aisle and see what’s there in this new, amazing world that unfolds around you so easily, this new, beautiful person who is vibrant and that looks and sounds like you.
Optional power move number three for making your vision real is to read this vision to yourself each morning to fire you up, to stoke your inspiration, to reground you in your intention. And read it again each night. This actually really, really helps, just like studying flashcards before bed because it engages your subconscious learning mind and puts it to work while you’re offline and sleeping. In the dreams that you remember and don’t remember, your brain will be working through this and integrating everything about your consciousness and beyond to bring it all into focus for you so that it can unfold easily. You’ll be amazed when you turn around one day and you say, “Hey, there’s that pot of gold I was imagining I was going to find. It’s right here.” Pick it up. Bring it with you. You’re done. It can be so easy.
Power move number four: Find a structured group that you can support and that can support you, a group where you are peers and where you can ask each other to challenge each other in your own growth. Sharing your vision with them is a sexy and fun form of accountability. It’s enrolling them as an action partner, a creative co-conspirator in the universe of what is possible for each other. Dare to dream really big here about who you’d like to invite into this circle. You might start with one person. You might connect with somebody else who’s following this show on social. You might reach out to me and see if anybody has asked me to find a partner. I would love to help connect you.
You also might find that there’s a lot of people around you right now, especially this year I’m noticing this is happening across the board and people I never thought would be interested, there is a big hunger right now to connect over personal growth things, to really get intentional and look at ourselves. Coming out of this past couple years of global challenge has presented a really neat opening in a lot of hearts, and people are willing to do things that maybe you think they might not be willing to say yes to. So give it a try.
You can also get more formal and professional about this and just gather some work friends to do some visioning about the next year, and some reflections and learnings. You could even call it a postmortem and do it on the year behind. There’s all different flavors of doing this, but the key is to create some structure and support in a group setting. This is a game-changer.
If you really enjoyed this exercise, this is just a sample of some of the material that you get when you sign up to be an Allowed Insider, which is a totally, totally free program that gives you instant access to exclusive bonus content that goes with each and every episode, your own personal, deeper, brief coaching session guided by me personally. And I would love for you to have access to that. So please sign up at allowedpodcast.com and start the year with a commitment to yourself to make 2022 a year where you become even more uniquely and beautifully you. Make sure that you subscribe so that you don’t miss any episodes of Allowed, and you can keep your self-exploration journey on track with great ease and support.
I can’t wait to get to know you and hear from you on social about how your vision is unfolding and to see you inviting challenge and inspiration from others. Reach out to me at caneel.is, on Instagram and TikTok, and I’m also @caneel on Twitter. Can’t wait to meet you. Have a wonderful New Year.
