Creating 2020 Vision: How to Get Clear, Set Goals and Create a Life You Love

When you have 2020 vision, you have clarity, direction, purpose and this creates a strong focused mindset. If you are ready to see what you want clearly and prepare yourself to remain motivated, inspired and truly live your vision, stay tuned all throughout this year! We are going to get motivated and stay motivated with a constant search for and connection to clarity.

This post today will walk you through three basic steps to create 2020 vision for your year ahead—the year 2020! First you will use clarity questions to dive deep within yourself and get super clear on where you’ve come from through reflecting on this past year. Then you will set specific goals to set you up to move towards what you want. Lastly you will create a life you love through consistent action and maintaining a determined mindset. Ready to get started? Here we go!

Step One: How to Get Clear

Clarity requires self-reflection. Inner reflection can be painful, or at least uncomfortable…so we tend to either avoid it through procrastination, busyness or through plain old denial. If you can reframe the process of self-reflection from painful or uncomfortable to a process of getting super clear on what hasn’t worked so far, so that you can make adjustments and create a plan for change, you might actually enjoy the process!

Getting clear is not about regret, self-deprecation, self-punishment or anything else that feels negative. Self-reflection and getting super clear in order to allow yourself to problem solve and use those solutions to move forward in a way that creates feelings of empowerment and deep self-awareness. Take time with these self-reflection questions to dive deep and GET CLEAR! Get out your journal, set your ego and fear aside and gain the clarity through self-reflection that you can learn and grow from to make 2020 your most purpose driven and powerful year yet.

1.    What was the most memorable part of this past year? Why?

2.    What is the biggest lesson you learned this past year? How can you apply that lesson to the year ahead?

3.    In what ways have you changed over this past year? Are you satisfied with that change, why or why not?

4.    If you did not create the change you desire in the past year, why? What held you back?

5.    What were your biggest distractions in this past year? How can you adjust those in the year ahead?

6. What did you prioritize over the past year? Did you prioritize yourself and your personal goals?

7.    When you reflect on this past year, what are you most grateful for?

8.    What is one area of your life that you’d most like to improve upon in the year ahead?

9. How will you ensure that you make these improvements that you desire?

10. What are the challenges that may present themselves as you attempt to create these improvements?

Spend time reflecting on your answers and then move into the next step.

Step Two: Setting Goals

When you set goals, you want them to be measurable, doable and desirable. If you can measure your progress you will know when you’ve achieved your goal. When your goal is doable, it will be something that you can fit into your current schedule and lifestyle without any major disruption. And the big kicker is, your goal has to be desirable—meaning you have to actually want it. When you know what you want (goal) and begin to create a plan for making it happen (doable) you can remain focused on why you want it (desirable) to ensure that you make it happen.

The biggest element of follow through is creating small action steps. When you have the baby steps outlined that will lead you to the bigger outcome of achieving your goal, you can get there. This leads us to step three!

Step Three: Create a Life You Love Through Consistent Action and a Determined Mindset

Taking action consistently is how you will ensure that you meet your goals and live out your vision for your life. Without a plan to take action it will most likely remain a dream, a fantasy, a simple wish. With a plan that you commit to taking action on consistently, your vision will fall into place with time. When you have a determined mindset that you have to do these action steps daily, you can do these action steps, that you WILL do these action steps NO MATTER WHAT, you will make it happen.

I know this is all easy to talk about however putting the plan together and creating consistent action is not always so simple...Over the next ten blogs, I’ll be outlining TEN steps to help create the change you desire over time and through a series of supportive suggestions that will help you create a life that you love. When it comes to living your vision, it is ultimately YOU that has to make the choice and the daily consistent work to make it happen. The 10-steps will offer the support to help get you where you want to go and continue to create clear vision for 2020!

I hope these three steps are helpful in your search for greatness this year. If you struggle to stay motivated feel free to reach out, having support is an essential element to growth!

Growing Your Inner Strengths to Transform Your Life

Now that we’ve covered the six primary inner strengths, it’s time to integrate them into the fabric of our being so we are more able to live in a space of happiness, contentment and peacefulness. Let’s examine how to use these six inner strengths to help grow out of and overcome our weaknesses. 

Growing internal strengths is work—l mean, sometimes really hard work. Growing inner strength requires self-awareness, a desire to change, and putting in effort consistently to make it happen. Let’s face it, change is hard, demanding and often painful. However, is change even more painful than living in space of discomfort, avoidance and struggle? What is the real cost to you within your life to NOT change? If you desire to transform your life, change is necessary.

Of these six inner strengths (remember that there are a whole lot of other inner strengths—these are just the primary ones that I’ve focused on over the last several posts), did any stand out to you that you’d like to build? Did you notice if each already exist within your being and how you approach your life? I know the desire to possess each of them is strong for me, however, I did notice how some of them were not as super solid within me as I applied them to myself! One of the ways that I most live within my personal authenticity is when I am practicing self care and growing on all levels. Examining these inner strengths made me come face to face with how complacent I can be with my weaknesses—which then causes me to not live within my authenticity—yikes! An opportunity to grow is exciting and scary at the same time, right? 

Spend some time examining your current life a bit. Reflect on the following thought questions and journal out your answers if you like:

• Where do you hold yourself back from your dreams?

• If you applied these inner strengths to how you approach your relationship with food, what did you notice in relation to each of the strengths and how they could help improve this relationship?

• Where do you feel the most struggle within your life?

• Where are you hiding or what are you hiding from?

• What limiting beliefs do you hold onto about yourself and/or your life?

When you allow yourself to really answer these questions, you will find valuable information about where you are ready to grow and evolve into you…only better! This is where your true self is longing to level-up, to create greater consciousness. When you do this, you first will go through the temporary discomfort of stepping out of your comfort zone. Once you pass this temporary discomfort, you are able to experience the freedom of living within the authenticity of your true self and ultimately create more comfort and pleasure.

Begin by selecting one area within yourself that you might consider to be a weakness. One of my primary weakness—as I perceive it anyway—is impatience…(my husband verified this for me.) Then determine which inner strength would help to manage that weakness and ultimately build it into an inner strength. For me, in order to help improve my impatience, I’d like to build temperance (along with all of the others!) Check within yourself and go into any areas where you might avoid noticing your perceived weakness(es). Awareness is always the first step!

Just as a reminder, the six inner strengths we’ve been exploring are:

1.    Curiosity: Allowing continued growth of knowledge and wisdom

2.    Vitality: Allowing continued growth of courage as well as mind & body wellbeing

3.    Giving and Receiving Love: Allowing continued growth of love, trust, openness and affirmation for yourself and others 

4.    Temperance: Allowing continued growth of acceptance, forgiveness & compassion

5.    Gratitude: Allowing for continued growth to release the state of wanting and desire and creating a grateful perspective that what you have is enough. This creates transcendence and deeply releases anxiety.

6.    Hope & Faith: An inner belief that all will be well without having to control your circumstances. This is the experience of surrender, which is deeply personal and spiritual.

Once you’ve selected one area that needs work (identified a weakness)—and one area to build (identified useful inner strength)—let yourself dive into it. Spend time in reflection about your perception of your weakness and how growing this particular inner strength can help to improve your internal experience and your interaction within your own life. Spend time journaling and talking to others about their perceptions of you (yes, get some—at times hard to hear—feedback!) Begin incorporating daily practices to build this particular inner strength starting today. Give yourself time. Be patient (note to self!) and allow yourself to grow with effort, determination and a focus on why you want to create this strength within.

How will you know when the inner strength has become integrated? It will become evident to you in how you communicate with yourself and others, the choices you make and how others respond to you. Leveling up your consciousness and your life is a lifelong journey and worth the effort. You always have the choice to change or remain right where you are…what will you choose?

Inner Strength Focus: Growing Hope to Heal Emotional Eating

Over the past several blogs I have been talking about building six specific inner strengths to help you create more contentment and happiness in your life—specifically related to your relationship with food. The final inner strength that I will cover here of the six inner strengths is hope. Hope is linked to faith and it’s an inner belief that all will be well without having to feel as though you need to control every aspect of your circumstances. This is an experience of surrender. Hope allows a surrendering to an inner belief and trust which is deeply personal and a spiritual endeavor.

If you attempt to control every aspect of your life, you will become exhausted. When you find the elements that are controllable and connect that to the hope and belief that all will be well, you can lean into the process of surrendering, the process of letting go. When you lean into surrendering and letting go, you create an experience of happiness, inner peace and contentment. Hope provides optimism and optimism ultimately keeps you moving forward with a positive and determined mindset.

When you apply the inner strength of hope to healing emotional eating, you are able to remain in a more positive mindset when it comes to challenges, emotions and trusting yourself—and trusting the process. Shifting from the dieting trap of restriction (and then the inevitable over eating) into a more mindful and intuitive eating space, you will need to access an inner hope and belief that you can truly free yourself from emotional eating and create a healthy and peaceful relationship with food.

Food is pleasurable and nourishing. The purpose of feeding ourselves is to remain healthy while also providing your life with pleasure that you derive from cooking, tasting, eating and even sharing a meal with others. When food becomes your primary (or only) source of pleasure—or your tool for managing stress—you may not have much hope that your life can be different. The cycle of emotional and stress eating is hard to disrupt. Change is difficult. Not changing is even harder because you remain stuck in that negative cycle. Building the inner strength of hope is a process of surrendering to the awareness that your relationship with food has derailed and needs support to get back on track. Hope keeps you connected to the possibility of change and creates effort.

To begin to build the inner strength of hope, it will be helpful to create a vision for what a peaceful relationship with food means to you. Understanding why you want this change to occur makes it even more powerful. When you have your vision established and connect with it regularly, you create an inner hope, a belief and faith in yourself that why you want what you want will allow you to put the effort into creating your vision as your reality. When you have faith in yourself you are more likely to be kind to yourself, to handle challenges and be more proactive.

To begin to connect with your vision in order to build hope as an inner strength, spend time journaling about the following questions:

·      What is your vision for your relationship with food?

·      Why do you want this vision?

·      What are the challenges you can foresee as you set forth to put your vision into action?

·      How can you stay connected to your vision?

·      What does hope mean to you?

·      What does having hope look like within your life, how might it change your current life?

·      What do you need to do to increase your faith in yourself?

Once you have your vision established, create 3-5 action steps that you can take daily or weekly to move you in the direction of living your vision. Find where you can access hope daily and build faith in yourself to take the action needed to create a peaceful relationship with food. Connect with your vision daily, fine tune your action steps regularly, bring on support like a friend, coach or therapist to help you stay the course.

When you connect with hope, you create more inner happiness, peace and contentment. Always remember that you deserve to live the life of your dreams.