The Christmas holidays and the turn of the year offer a great time for deep contemplation about your life and future. Three years ago, I got a vision planning workbook as a gift from my dear friend Inkatuuli, which served as a great support for this purpose.
The basic idea of vision planning is to build a vision of one’s own life for three different timings:
- 20 years from now
- 10 years from now
- 5 years from now
Vision areas
The exercise itself is a simple writing task. The task is to take the time to describe one’s own life for each point in time in the following areas:
- Relationships
- This is the relationship I live in
- My partner is
- Kids
- Other important relationships
- Housing and work
- This is where I live
- This is how I live
- This is how I earn my money
- This is how I approach my work
- Well-being
- This is how I enjoy life
- This is how I take care of my health
Tips for carrying out the exercise
It is essential to build the visions starting from the farthest point, the 20-year vision, in order to challenge yourself to think big enough. It helped me a lot to realize that “in 20 years, both of our children will have already moved out” and it was exciting to think about what is possible in the long run.
We did this exercise by first independently creating our own visions and then going through them together on a date. It was great to discuss our shared future vision and what things are particularly important to us. In addition to this, we had an inspiring evening with our friends Minna and Ilkka, where we also shared our visions as couples.
The Vision Planning workbook encourages doing a fact check for each vision, which means defining the specific goals for each vision and what one intends to do concretely to achieve them. However, since I already have a functioning excel of my life process, I didn’t feel like I needed it and instead focused specifically on building the future visions. Along the same principle, I skipped the financial planning partbecause I handle it through other processes, but I definitely recommend considering one’s own spending, saving, and investing in the long run too.
Results from the first 3 years
Of course, I read what I had written 3 years ago for this post, and it was actually really fun to realize that the majority of the things in the 5-year vision had already come true 🙂
- We still live in Lauttasaari and a year ago, we found our dream 4-room apartment with a balcony, which was designed with pragmatism in mind 🙂
- Already now, it is starting to feel like the worst years of the hustle and bustle with young children are slowly behind us, and we have more mental space and time for ourselves, as the children are 6.5 and 3.5 years old.
- We have both found new exciting professional challenges, and as I have always dreamed of, I am transitioning into leadership positions in a younger growth company.
I still haven’t started jogging, but luckily I still have two years left for that 😉