5 Powerful Questions to Create a Vision for Your Life

January 7, 2019 Sarah Thacker

Last week, I offered a webinar on The Five Powerful Questions to Create a Vision for Your Life and I thought I’d share the questions with you all here as well! Often at the beginning of the new year, we all spend time evaluating the past year and looking ahead to what we might want to change in the year to come. These 5 questions will help you connect to the belief that what you want is possible.

Developing a vision for your life can be hard. Without a vision for your life you end up remaining stuck in the routine of what you already know, with just the way things have always been. Desiring fulfillment is just a desire without a vision. Without direction, you are left with a dream without belief.

The truth is, you can live your vision. You deserve to live your vision. You are meant to live a life you love, a life of passion and purpose. If this all sounds good, but you have no idea where to begin, use these five questions to help organize your vision and guide you towards living your best life, a life that you LOVE. Once you work through these questions, give yourself the time and space to write out your vision, to reflect on it, and decide how to take action in order to align your life with your vision. Once you go through this process of searching within and creating a plan for how to make it happen, you will begin living an inspired, directed and passionate life.

1. What do you want?

This question may seem simple enough, but it is often a difficult question to answer. Try to think beyond material items, however, those are certainly valid to consider as well but are often more of a result of living your vision. Do think about qualities in your life that you want. Be as specific as possible around what is important to you. As you spend time thinking specifically about what you want within your life, you will begin to bring your dreams out of the clouds of your daydreams and into your mindset. When you can create goals based on what you want you can take active steps towards creating the opportunities in life that you want to achieve.

2. What do you value most?

Maybe you value time, recognition, financial abundance, travel, adventure, relationships. Whatever it is, consider what you value and why. Determining your values will help you sort through what you want in order to connect with why you want it. When you know why you want to live your vision you will be more likely to take consistent action towards your goals because your values and desires creates focus on your deeper purpose and intention. You can read more about knowing your WHY here.

3. How do you want to feel?

When you live your life according to how you want to feel, you are more likely to make choices that support what you want. Do you want to feel happy, successful, confident, empowered, accomplished, free, peaceful, content? If you make choices and decisions in your life based on how you want to feel you will often have to choose between aspects in life that are easy versus aspects in life that are more difficult. However, the payoff of the positive feelings of making progress will feel rewarding and help you maintain your determination to continue to take action. This is one of the most valuable questions to consider as you prepare to develop your vision and to maintain your focus on your vision.

4. If you were living your ideal life in one year from today, what exactly would it look like?

This is an important question as it creates an opportunity to see the possibilities of your vision in action. Be as specific as possible with this question. Consider the details of how you would be spending your time, who you would be with, elements of your life you’d like to change or resolve. How much would change from your current circumstances to this ideal life that is just one year away?

5. What do you need to do in order to feel engaged and active in achieving what you want?

This final question is a vitally important to ask as you begin to create your vision. It gets you into action mode. Without action, your vision remains a dream. With decisive, consistent action, you discover that your vision is your life and you are living a life that YOU have created. You will find that you are living a life that YOU love.

Now that you have considered these questions, your vision will begin to write itself. Spend time reflecting on your responses and write out your vision for your life. Be specific, consider time lines and how to move forward.

Once you have your vision you can determine the specific goals that will move you in the direction of living your vision. Give your goals specific action steps that you will take consistently. These steps may be small, but when taken regularly you will reach your goals. Visualize what you want and believe in the possibility that it is on its way. This will keep you motivated as you continue to move forward.

Every day, ask yourself: What action step will I take towards my goals in order to live my vision? With each choice you make, ask yourself: Does this choice support my vision? Does this choice move me forward towards my vision? By remaining focused on your vision, maintaining an active mindset, and setting daily intentions, you will create a life of passion and the life you are meant to live.

7 Day Cravings Challenge + 2018 Blog Highlights

January 3, 2019 Sarah Thacker

_7 DAY KICK YOUR CRAVINGS CHALLENGE no sugar.png

Food cravings continue to be the number one concern for so many of us, especially when wrapping up the holiday season and moving into the cold, winter months. Food cravings can be triggered for so many reasons, the most troubling and difficult to manage being emotional food cravings.

I recently put together a 7-Day Food Cravings Challenge that offers information on a daily basis with action steps to take to help you kick your food cravings to the curb—once and for all!

The challenge begins with learning the difference between a General Food Craving and an Emotional Food Craving. You then will work through how to manage either type of craving you may be experiencing. If you feel as though this would be useful for you, you can sign up here! (Unless you already have!) It is 7 days of self-reflection, empowerment and awareness to kick start your journey towards making peace with food.

Just a quick reminder that TODAY I am offering a free webinar: 5 Powerful Questions to Create Your Vision for 2019. It is at 6 pm EST, however, if you can’t make it live, you can still register and I’ll send you the replay! It is intended to help you identify a vision for the year to come, while creating a specific goal and a PLAN to achieve your goal. I hope you will join me!

I also want to say thank you for reading my blog post articles over the past year. I sincerely appreciate you! I hope to create useful content that is relevant to health and wellness, emotional eating, mindfulness and mindful eating, intuitive eating and helping you remain motivated and focused along your own personal wellness journey. I have some new ideas in the pipeline—so keep reading! If there are any topics you’d like to read about, feel free to reach out and let me know!

In case you missed it, here are the top 5 blogs from 2018:

Don’t forget to sign up for the 7-Day Food Cravings Challenge!!

Here’s to a Healthy, Happy 2019!

Ditch the Resolutions: How to Create Real Change in the Year Ahead

December 31, 2018 Sarah Thacker

Has there ever been a new year’s resolution that you stuck with all throughout the year? A resolution that you made that is still impacting your life today? For most of us, the answer is NO. New year’s resolutions typically don’t last—but know that it is not your fault!

A new year’s resolution of considering what you want to shed from the past year and what you want to grow into throughout the new year is a healthy exercise to do. Unfortunately, these resolutions are usually implemented by the “fantasy and dream” approach. This approach is usually done by thinking of things you would like to do and then just waiting for them to happen. This “fantasy and dream” approach does not address the harsh reality that our internal resistance and challenges to change will still be there. Without any direction or plan on how to make the resolution happen, there will never be any action. Without action, there can be no progress and without progress you ultimately end up feeling like a failure.

This is where creating a vision for your year can offer you the opportunity to connect with the positive feelings elicited by believing in your ability to change while tapping into the specific goals and action steps that will help you create and deliver the change you desire.

Believe in yourself: You have the capability to grow, change and evolve.

Creating a clear vision allows you to connect with what you want—and super importantly—to believe in the possibility that what you want is attainable. When you have a vision for your life, you can create movement, direction and ACTION towards creating and living a life that you love.

To begin, you will need to spend time reflecting, writing, drawing or collaging your vision. Visioning is a fun, creative process and increases right brain activity. The right side of the brain is where your creative, imaginative and dreamy energy flows. Once you create your vision you can begin to extract out the specific goals. Goal setting activates the left brain, which is the logical, reasoning and evaluating side of the brain. Visioning and goal setting allow the right and left side of the brain to work together.

It is ideal to start with one or two goals so as not to feel overwhelmed. Prioritizing is extremely important. Once you have selected which goal to focus on first, it is important to make your goal is measurable, doable, and desirable. A measurable goal is one where you can gauge your progress consistently. The goal also needs to be doable, if it won’t realistically fit into your life you will most likely not follow through. And lastly, it needs to be desirable, you have to WANT it. This is connecting to and knowing deeply within your WHY behind the goal. You can read more about that here!

The next phase is creating action steps, which are the actions you will commit to taking daily that move you in the direction of achieving your goal. You will want to have five action steps that create movement and direction and are just that: actionable. Without action there is no movement forward, and this is where the good ole new year’s resolutions often let us down.

Once you have your action steps, there is one final step. You have to have a PLAN! Without a plan, no progress will be made and your vision will continue to be a thought or desire swimming around in your head. When you create a plan and place your intentions into your mindset to take action you offer the ability to act, grow and change. This creates progress and progress feels so good. It is inherently rewarding!

To start your plan, take the time to write down your action steps in your planner or create a list of when you will complete your action steps. This will allow your action steps to transform over time into a new healthy habit. Once you’ve created a new habit, you will find that you no longer have to force yourself to take action, actions will simply become engrained into your routines. Once you feel that this goal has been met and you no longer feel any resistance to taking action, you can move on to your next goal and approach it in exactly the same manner.

This process creates real, sustainable progress and change, moving deliberately and consistently in the direction of your vision. Continue with this process and you will create a life you LOVE as you live your VISION.