Life Vision: Why Your Compass Matters More as You Age

This week, we're going to be talking about your life vision. This is one of those topics that's influenced by all of our Five Pillars. You may recall the Five Pillars: we have our identity, mind, body, curiosity, and contribution. And of course, as I'll mention again later, you can go to 7EveryMinute.com/five-pillars-freebie, where we have a short introduction course on what the Five Pillars are about and how they influence our lives as we get older.

Your life vision includes all five areas, all five pillars of identity, mind, body, curiosity, and contribution. A life vision is kind of an overarching compass or guide in your life. It really isn't giving you specifics on what to do, but it gives you a target of where to aim in your life.

This is actually a really large topic, and we're just going to cover it briefly tonight, but I hope it'll give you a feel for why your life vision is so important.

But first, let's talk about what a vision is not. It's not a complex, or even simple, lifelong plan. It's not a plan per se. It's not a series of steps you need to take to achieve what you think will bring you happiness. And it's not something that you have to check against society's guidelines of what constitutes a good life. It's something quite different.

A life vision is an overarching concept of what, and how, you want to live your life. Because it's the guiding concept, it's quite different from a detailed plan. A plan is how you reach the next step on your journey, while a life vision is the destination, or the path, that you're heading towards.

Even if your vision is that you ultimately want to live near a beach and teach yoga all day in the sun, the reality is that the next step in your plan might be that you have to live in a Midwest city and teach yoga at a small studio in a basement to build your experience. Right? At first blush, you may think that's totally unaligned with your life vision. But upon review, you realize it's only a stepping stone, and not the overall goal itself. That overall goal is your life vision.

Which is why we say things like, life is always doing things for us, not to us. Because although the immediate situation may not seem ideal, and it may even be somewhat uncomfortable, it's but one step in the learning process and in the journey towards that overall goal.

Also, a vision is not some cut-in-stone, immutable concept in every detail. If your vision is too detailed, it may actually be a goal masquerading as a vision. Even if we look at our earlier example of a vision of living near a beach and teaching yoga in the sun, that's already almost too detailed. Perhaps it's better stated as: "Living where you can be at one with the earth and the sea, helping people find health and inner strength by restoring balance between body, mind, and the natural world." Very broad and general. If that vision involves yoga, it fits. But if you find another practice that moves in the same direction from a different perspective, your vision doesn't have to change at all. You're still completely aligned with what it said.

The reason you don't want to keep changing your vision statement, and instead keep it as a guide, is that if you keep changing it every short period of time, then it's no longer a guiding compass but just another short-term goal. Your vision should be something that you can always refer back to when you need to check if your current path is taking you where you expected.

So, revisiting our earlier situation, when you're working in that small yoga studio in the Midwest, now it's easy to see a number of positive possibilities. You could be gaining experience in running your own yoga studio. You might meet someone who's practicing a different type of meditative practice that you feel is more aligned with you. You might meet someone who was just transferred to Hawaii or Australia and knows someone there looking for a teacher, and so on.

You realize that the goal, that compass, that vision, is way in the distance, and you're taking little steps towards it. It's not that every single step has to be perfect, but they're all moving you in the same direction. The specific action is not as important as the fact that it's always moving along that same aligned path.

And this all sounds great when you're 20 or 30, but what about when we move into our later adult years? It's still exactly the same, and perhaps a life vision is even more important as we age. Every day, we still wake up, look at the day ahead of us, and decide what to do with it.

We talk about this in terms of the identity gap and feeling invisible. If you have nothing to look forward to, then there's little reason to try to move forward at all. And that lack of purpose quickly leads to feeling useless or invisible. The operative word there is "feeling." You, I, we haven't changed. What has changed is how we perceive ourselves. Fortunately, we have a lot of control over that.

And how are we able to judge our self-perception? One big tool can be asking ourselves, "Are we still living towards our life vision?"

Frankly, this may sound a bit odd if you've never done it, but I ask a variation of that question to myself every morning and every night, every single day. This isn't some sort of brow-beating session or criticizing question, but just a simple review or planning exercise to see if I'm still moving in a direction that seems consistent with my vision. And by doing this, I'm less likely to get totally off course, which also means I'm less likely to be really annoyed or disappointed with myself. We've often talked in the past about the damage from negative self-talk, so I can avoid that whole downward spiral. Instead, I'm able to update my to-do list if needed, or maybe write myself a little reminder, and then keep moving forward.

Nowhere is there the opportunity to perceive myself as invisible, useless, expired, or any of the other negative self-perceptions that are too common as we age. Because those negative self-perceptions tend to arise when we compare ourselves to our remembrance of the past.

There are a few ways to pretty much guarantee you'll be unhappy in life. First and foremost, and we've talked about this before, is to compare yourself to others, especially by comparing yourself to people you don't know and judging their success by what they put on social media. Pretty much guaranteed to make yourself miserable. Don't do this.

A very close second is to compare ourselves to how we remember our past. This is almost worse in some ways, because we can convince ourselves that what we remember must be true, since it was us who lived that experience. Modern neuroscience has pretty much embraced the likelihood that most of what we remember is, ready for this? Total fabrication.

You say, "Yikes! But I was there!" Yes, you remember certain important facts about some particular situation 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. But for memory storage efficiency, less important facts are often represented by placeholders, generalizations of the concept, but often with different details.

We talked about this in another episode many, many weeks ago. Everybody remembers when Mom burned the chicken roast on the grill outside. One person remembers it was a red grill, somebody else says, "No, no, it was a green grill," and someone else says it wasn't a chicken roast, it was a pot roast. The details change. People remember the concepts: that we were having a cookout, the people were together, and there was a calamity with the food preparation. But everybody's details are a little bit different.

There are exceptions for some brains, such as people with photographic memory. But most of us are able to remember tons of concepts but struggle to remember the minutiae of the details.

Why this matters is because unless we take the time to dig those details out of our memory, which we can often do, we tend to get a low-resolution version of that memory instead. Which means that our current perspective gets to help fill in all those missing details, which is where the problem really starts to manifest itself.

Because if we're sitting around thinking about how great that old job was, and how everyone respected us, and everyone in town knew who we were, and, and, and... what's happening in the background of your mind is that you recall some good times at work. You remember the one time the CEO actually remembered your name and told you how good you did. And the guy at the dry cleaner said his uncle worked with you and that you seemed really smart. And your brain weaves all that together and, if it's like most brains, it then tells itself (which is telling you), "And this is just one of many examples!" And you come up with this idealized version of history that was amazingly wonderful, especially compared to how you're living now, and almost completely false.

Don't do this either.

As we have said, with thanks to Dr. Benjamin Hardy and others: the past is behind you, and it's only good for learning from. The future is just your imagination. The only thing that's real is the present. But since you can imagine any future you want, don't define and limit yourself by your past. Don't get stuck in the present. Instead, live into being the future self that you want to be. And how do you define that future self? By your life vision.

Imagine you wanted to start a little group to help your friends get better at using computers and AI, for example. But it doesn't have to be technology. Any example works just as well.

Now, imagine you get this idea one evening. The next morning, you get up and you're ready to start on your plan. The first thing that comes to mind is that you don't have anyone in IT anymore to help you with questions, and actually, you really aren't that good with AI, and you don't have your secretary anymore to find information for you. And you keep focusing on everything that won't work and that you don't have. Does that sound like a formula for success?

How about instead, you wake up and check in with your vision? Remember, I literally do this every morning and evening. You say, "I wanted to help others. That was my vision, and this seems like it fits my vision. Let's make it work!"

So you get up and you start doing it. You come up with an IT question, and you say, "Heck, I'm trying to teach AI, so I'll ask AI the IT question and use that as an example." Then you ask AI to help you write a one-hour course outline with a worksheet, and you decide you can use that as another example. And while you're doing that, you remember that person you met at the meetup the other night, who said they used to do course design. So you write to them and ask if they can look at your outline and give you some feedback, and so on.

The only difference is that in the second scenario, you are thinking from the perspective of your future self, the person who is going to make it happen, because it was consistent with your vision. And that sounds a lot more empowering, doesn't it?

We're actually putting together a Life Vision course right now, but even today, you can still take the first steps. Our free course on the Five Pillars is at 7EveryMinute.com/five-pillars-freebie. Go there, sign up, and get on our email list, and we'll notify you when the course becomes available. The freebie will give you a core introduction to the Five Pillars and help get you started on learning the steps toward really developing a life vision.

But there's another thing you can do right now as well, and that is just write down two or three things that describe how you'd like to live your life. These aren't goals, just concepts or ideals. High-level things. Things like help others, make friends, teach, learn, whatever it is. But again, try to keep that list short and very high-level, and that will become the basis for how we can develop those into a life vision.

But most of all, start looking forward in life. Because you're still fully capable. You still have all the skills and personality you always had. Remember, the only thing that changed was the title. You're still absolutely awesome.

So that's it for the evening. Again, our little introductory course goes over the Five Pillars of Life and Aging. In it, I talk about how those five pillars influence us throughout our lives, and how, as we age, sometimes we want to rebalance things a little bit. But the core things that are there are pretty much consistent throughout our whole life. If you sign up for email there, you'll be on our email list, and we'll notify you when the course comes out, if you want to be involved in that too. You can always opt out of the email list as well. That's 7EveryMinute.com/five-pillars-freebie.

And as always, remember: the best way to care for yourself is to care for others. Visit UKR7.com for links to help the people in Ukraine, and WCK.org, which is World Central Kitchen. Both are international sites, but local charities can always use a hand, and even something as simple as a smile can change someone else's day for the better in ways you can't even imagine.