E85: How To Actually Develop a Vision To Guide You In Life and Business

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You’re listening to Transcend the podcast. I’m Asha Wilkerson, a business coach helping service based entrepreneurs align their business goals with their personal goals to create a life they want to show up for. I will show you how to drop the expectations, thoughts and beliefs that weigh you down as a woman of color entrepreneur so that you can create and walk your own path with success, confidence, and joy.

00:00:29

Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of Transcend the podcast. I am super excited to have you here for another week, tuning in and sharing in wisdom together. And today I’m going to talk to you about creating a vision for your business. I’m going to tell you how your vision impacts your business journey, how to create a vision that serves you and what happens if you don’t have a vision.

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Your vision isn’t something that you should not pay attention to or dismiss too quickly. Like having a vision to just have a business just so you don’t have a boss anymore is not really a vision and it’s not going to serve you. But as you’re thinking about what you want your future to look like and what you want your business to look like, I want you to think about how you want to feel, how you want to be, and what you want to experience. Now, I know, I know there’s a lot of rhetoric out there and the tide is changing a little bit, but there’s a lot of rhetoric out there about feelings don’t belong in business. Just make a logical decision.

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But the reason why I’m talking to you about how you want to feel and why you should integrate it into your business or into your vision is because feeling is a part of the way that our brain works. We were created as humans with emotion and with a logical side, and we have to learn to marry the two to get the best that we can out of ourselves. Also, it should come as no surprise to you that our brains remember feelings and emotions. Have you ever been in a situation present day and it made you think about something that happened in childhood? What about hearing a song on the radio from your high school days?

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Or what about If You’re Like Me, that song that you used to play when you had your first crush? Doesn’t it just bring back all those emotions and those feelings to you? That’s because our brains are hardwired to remember emotions, and our brain wants to take us back to that space, to that emotional space, especially if it was a good time. But also sometimes it does that if it wasn’t such a good time, which is why we can become easily triggered in new situations. But enough about that part.

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Let me move forward and tell you a little bit about setting up a vision for your business. When you think about a vision for your future and you throw some emotion onto it or sprinkle some emotion into your vision, our brain will automatically look to find that feeling, to find that emotion, so we can repeat that same situation and have that same feeling, especially when it’s a feeling that creates safety within us. So as you are building your business, as you are building your dream life, add emotion, add a feeling about how you want to exist in the future as a part of your vision, and your brain will automatically seek to find those feelings that you have told it that you want to feel. And another little nugget of wisdom I have for you that I have endured or discovered even in my own life, and also that I learned in my neuro coach training, is to really focus on the journey and the feelings that come along with the journey rather than the end goal. Now, you need an end goal, but you also want to be thinking about how do you want to feel along the way as you get to that end goal, because there’s no point in creating this huge, massive goal at the end, but you’re miserable along the way trying to get there.

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And then you think that this end goal is going to give you everything that you’ve needed and everything that you’ve wanted. But you’ll find an emotional void if you haven’t taken the time to think about how you want to feel in the future. You hear people say it all the time. Money doesn’t buy happiness. And of course, money buys a lot of things, but you can have all the money in the world and still be unfulfilled.

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So what I want to help you to do today is to think about creating a vision for your future so that you don’t have those emotional lows, you don’t have those emotional voids, because you’ve peppered your vision with the feelings and the emotions that you want to feel along the way. Now, I know some of you are probably thinking, yeah, Asha, whatever. I still want to make a lot of money. I want to make a million dollars. I understand that.

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I get it. Let me just walk through this exercise with you. The goal is making a million dollars. But the next step is to ask the question, why do you want to make a million dollars? How will having a million dollars make you feel?

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And chances are you are looking for the feeling of safety, of security, of autonomy, of independence. So now the goal is, or the task is to write down those feelings safety, security, autonomy, independence, maybe being empowered and meditate on those feelings. Think about how you’re going to feel when you feel safe, secure, empowered, autonomous, right? Those are the things that you want to pull into your body from the vision. So you can start doing the things that will make you feel that way as you march on towards your goal because you want those feelings of safety and security to meet you at that end goal.

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But I promise you, if you don’t start building those feelings around you as you’re walking towards your end goal, they won’t be there when you get your money. Now, this exercise of adding the emotions to your vision is important for a number of reasons. Not just because it’s touchy feely, woo woo and sounds good, but because it’s also backed by science here’s. One of the things that I’ve noticed along the way as I’ve done my own goal setting and goal setting with my clients and friends as well, is that oftentimes we get so caught up on not meeting the goal. But if we are focusing on the feelings that we want to have, we can create those feelings as we move forward and the emphasis becomes placed on having that feeling in the journey instead of just marching on to the end goal.

00:06:15

So maybe the end goal, you thought you would accomplish it in one year, but it takes two years. But along the way, if you’ve created the feeling of safety and security along the way, it’s not the end goal, the amount of money that you want to make that’s actually giving you that feeling. It’s the steps that you’ve taken along the way to create those feelings that you’re hoping that money will give you. Oftentimes we say when we’re creating visions and goals is if I do X, then I will feel Y. When I do X, then I will feel y.

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But what if you could feel Y as you’re in pursuit of X? One doesn’t have to come after the other. You don’t have to wait to feel secure and empowered and autonomous. Once you’ve made a million dollars, you can feel those things along the way that will help you make that million dollars that you are seeking. The other reason why you should really add some emotion to your vision and to think about that along the way as you’re building is because you can start winning right away.

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If your goal is just to make a million dollars, but you’re at 100,000 or 10,000, let’s say that’s nothing to frown about. But if you don’t realize that you are creating safety for yourself as you are building, you will not celebrate that $10,000 or at least you won’t give it the celebration that it deserves. But you are empowering yourself as you make 10,000. You are giving yourself more autonomy as you make 10,000. And you can have freedom and success and autonomy and be empowered way before you get to a million dollars.

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But if you don’t think about the emotions, the security that you’re trying to create along the way, you will miss it all the way up to a million dollars because you haven’t taken the time to focus on the right things. So I want you to win right away. Another reason why you should add some emotion to your vision and focus on the journey instead of just the end goal is so you can take the pressure off the end goal. If you put all this pressure on the very end, then what happens if it takes longer than you want? What happens if you don’t get there?

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Being some emotion to the journey and putting some emphasis on the journey will make sure that you’re not putting undue pressure on the end goal because now you’re focusing on the process of becoming who you want to be and how you want to be instead of just focusing on the arrival. And lastly, your brain will get continuous hits of serotonin, knowing that it’s safe, knowing that you’re doing the daily tasks or the weekly tasks to help you get to your end goal as opposed to waiting to the end. And you’ve got this big dopamine hit and then dopamine comes down and now you’re feeling depressed. Have you ever done that? I’ve definitely done that.

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I remember even graduating law school. And of course, who doesn’t want to graduate? It’s a big thing, you’re excited. And I remember after I started working at the law firm, it was probably, I don’t know, two months in and I just deflated. I was like, what is happening?

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I’ve hit the goal. But because I was more focused on the actual graduation part and then getting the job, instead of thinking about what could I do as an attorney or this is another win on my journey, I felt like I needed another sort of dopamine hit. Of course, I didn’t have the language at that time to know what it was. So I enrolled in other classes and kept myself busy so I could say I achieved, I achieved, I achieved. But if I would have put more emphasis on just the journey of learning, on the journey of becoming, of being more present as I am growing and learning day by day, then I wouldn’t have continued to keep myself busy seeking more and more opportunities for dopamine because I would be building up that serotonin release in my brain on a regular basis.

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If you don’t have a vision for your business, it’s way too easy to get caught up feeling depressed, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like you’re an imposter because you’re not sure where you’re going or why you’re going there. You might easily forget why you started. And it’s really easy to quit the pursuit of your dreams because you haven’t actually written down your dreams or thought about the vision that you have for yourself in the future. I can give you a personal example from my own life. When I became an entrepreneur, when I opened up my own law practice, I did it because I said that I wanted to have more freedom, I wanted to travel, I wanted to spend more time with my family.

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And I lost track of that vision at some point. And I started taking on cases just for the money. And that was a miserable way to do law, right? Just to take on cases for the money. And I was going to say it hurt my relationship with my clients, but not that any of them realized.

00:11:01

But I would delay things. I would wait to call people back. I would be annoyed and irritated with the emails that came in because I wanted freedom. But I ended up curtailing my freedom in the pursuit of money that I may or may not have needed. But instead of filtering everything through the lens of, okay, is this next decision going to lead to more freedom?

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Is it going to allow me to open up my schedule? I was taking on more and more litigation cases just to have money in the bank. And when you’re litigating, you have to be in court, you have to be present, you have to be doing things on a regular basis to build up that case so that you can win. So because I had lost sight of my freedom, I ended up taking on more clients just for the money, instead of looking at the clients or the cases that I could take on that fit into my vision. I don’t want you to do the same thing that I did.

00:11:56

I want you to have a vision for your life and a vision for your business and use that as the filter through which you decide to take on or not take on work as it aligns or misaligns with your vision. Now, if you need a refresher for your vision, maybe you started your business six or seven years ago and you’re out there, you’re doing it, but you’re feeling like you’re not quite sure what direction you’re going in, or if you’re in the beginning of starting your business and haven’t quite thought about your vision. I created the Money Making Roadmap course to help you flesh out and fill in your vision. I’ve included a workbook, some guided meditations, and poignant questions to help you figure out exactly what you want to do with your future, how you want it to feel, how you want to be, and what you want to experience. I want you to embody your future self, meaning show up as that person.

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Feel that you are that person before you get there so you can make decisions as that person. Going back to the example. If you want to be a millionaire because you want to feel that security, that safety, you want to be autonomous, you want to feel empowered, you will, with my course, figure out exactly what that looks like. And you will start to put on the persona and start making decisions as the person who is secure, safe, empowered and autonomous. Not only will you walk away with a vision, but you’ll walk away with the numbers that’s important that it takes to make your vision come true.

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So if you want a house in Malibu and a house in Santorini, we’ll talk about what does that look like and how much does that cost. If you only want to work three days a week and you want to have 15 clients on your roster, we’ll look at what you have to charge those clients in order to make that vision come true. Whatever your dream is, you will be able to put numbers to your dream so that you actually know what it’s going to take to live out your dream life so your business actually supports the goals that you have instead of using your business to pull you away from your personal goals. So if you’re ready to either revamp your vision or to create a whole new vision, head to the Show Notes and click on the link for the money making roadmap course. Immediately you will get clarity on your vision, and then as you move through the course, you’ll be able to add numbers so you know exactly where you’re going.

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Thanks for tuning in and I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more on how you can align your business and your life with me as a coach, head to the Show Notes and sign up for the email list. See you next week.