Have you ever wondered why two people will both learn “whatever you can capture in your mind you can achieve” and both capture a vision for their futures? Then one will go on to achieve what they have envisioned and the other will only look back after his life with despair and remember the plans he had that never came to pass.
What separates the dreamer from the one who goes on to achieve his dream?
Here are 10 simple steps that anyone, from any place, can practice to turn their visions into reality.
How To Achieve Your Vision by Dr. Myles Munroe
1. Identify your vision
This is almost just logical for everyone; you cannot arrive at a future you cannot see. The first step to fulfilling your vision is to capture that vision. When you don’t know where you are going, everywhere will look like it.
Your vision for your life should be something that represents your deepest desires and gives you the most feeling of fulfillment. It should be those dreams that never leave your heart, what you are passionate about, and what you would do if there was no possibility of failure. Your vision should be your individual contribution to humanity.
Many assume they know where they are going (they have visions for their lives), but if your vision isn’t clear enough, missing it is almost natural. For you to do any meaningful activity that will lead to the achievement of your vision, you need to fully understand what the vision is and what it requires for fulfillment.
For instance, you might have all the ingredients for baking cake, but if you don’t understand exactly what it is you want, you might end up baking bread, since it’s almost the same ingredients. A clear definition and understanding of what you want will determine how you mix the ingredients to get your desired result.
3. Refine your vision
Visions come in crude forms. Because your level of exposure determines what your mind can grasp, if you aren’t exposed to the realities that exist around you, you might get visions that can’t be practically fulfilled in your environment or context.
For every vision you receive, you must sit back to “envision” how it can be applied to your context. How can your vision of starting a library be realized in a generation where everyone is going digitalized? What adjustments can you make to make that vision relevant to your specific generation? These kinds of questions will help you refine your vision.
4. Document your vision
Study has shown that people who document their goals or visions are 42 times more likely to achieve them than those who don’t have written down goals and visions. Writing your goals helps you know what the thoughts on your mind really are when you try to turn the pictures into words.
Apart from the clarity you get, writing helps you remember better, and even when you forget, you have an ‘external storage’ you can easily go back to. The Forgetfulness Curve reveals that we naturally forget 70% of all we hear by 24 hours and 90% by 1 week. If you don’t write down your vision (that you are meant to pursue for your lifetime), you no longer have what to fulfill or pursue after one week.
God, the giver of vision, commands that we “write the vision”
This is taking your documentation even further. Not just writing the vision, but now, breaking it into simple actionable steps. Articulating your vision requires you to include time-frames for achievements, milestones that will be reached, and requirements needed for achieving them.
You can also call articulation planning. This is where you come up with a blueprint of how you can move from where you are to where you should be (the fulfillment of that vision). There is no achievement without a plan.
Your vision should be broken into goals– SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound goals.
6. Communicate your vision
Visions are not created to be fulfilled by just an individual. You might have received your vision alone, but you can’t achieve it in isolation. For you to empower the right team that will truly contribute to the fulfillment of your vision, you must communicate the vision to them.
Take them through the process of identification, clarification, and articulation the same way you did for yourself. Let them truly “see” the vision you are seeing; that’s the only way they can give in all the resources they possess towards the fulfillment of that vision.
If no one sees the vision except you, you will have to continually prompt them on what to do, or call them back from taking wrong steps which will slow down or totally hinder achievement. Learn how to lead people to your vision.
However, you must take caution to only share your vision with people who can really see what you are showing. Some people are dream killers and can’t make any contribution to the fulfillment of your vision. Identify and avoid such people: people who discourage and talk you out of it, people who only see impossibilities and inadequacies.
This is where the real achievement of your vision takes place. Take action. All you have done so far will be meaningless if you don’t take action. Identification, clarification, refining, documentation, articulation, and communication are all setting the stage for your action to be productive.
If you don’t take action, it’s like expecting a washed, fueled and serviced car to take you to work without driving it. Visions only get achieved when you work. You should read this article to understand the full place of work.
8. Reevaluate your vision
As you continue to take action towards achieving your visions, take breaks to reevaluate your vision. Check if it is still the representation of your deepest desires, check if it still gives you fulfillment, and check if you are actually following the path that will lead to the fulfillment of that vision.
One major reason why people don’t fulfill their vision is that they get distracted on the way, but like the missionary Archippus, you must “take heed (pay attention, give care, reevaluate, commit) to your vision, that you fulfill it.”
If you don’t constantly reevaluate your vision, you might get lost in the activities around fulfilling that vision that you leave the vision itself: the activities and busyness become the goal and not the vision itself.
9. Revise your vision
There is no rule that says you must continue to run with the same blueprint you articulated at the beginning. In fact, if you are truly advancing towards the fulfillment of your vision, you should make changes as time goes by. You are not changing the goal, but the method.
Society is always changing; for your vision to remain relevant to the changes that society brings, you must constantly adapt it to the needs of the time.
As you work, your clarity concerning your vision should increase; your desires, passion, and definition of fulfillment will change over time too, so revising your vision is inevitable. As your vision expands and becomes clearer, you might discover that you have been focusing on just peripheries or even the wrong things. Don’t hesitate to change when necessary.
That’s the nature of vision, you only understand it as you move into it. If you stick to just what you started with, without any changes, you might reach the end of your life and not have any fulfillment because you didn’t embrace the new phases of the vision as they unfold.
10. Repeat the process
This talks of the place of consistency in fulfilling your vision. You might have the right plan, maybe taking the right steps, and moving at the right pace, but if you don’t keep at it, you won’t get there. Nobody grows a tree by uprooting it and replanting it in more “fertile” soil yearly. Keep at your vision. Stick to it till it produces.
Conclusion
To fulfill your vision, you can’t just take haphazard steps. You need to take conscious and calculated steps towards achieving it. From the place of identification to clarification, action, and revision, you can see your vision for your life is achieved. This is the secret that helped Myles Munroe fulfill his vision for his life.
Because you read this far, I want to give you Lifetime Access to over $1,000 worth of mentorship materials from Dr. Myles Munroe on vision, purpose, leadership, success, wealth, and the Kingdom. Get instant access to all life-changing materials now!
Olusegun Iyejare is a career coach and certified counselor. He helps individuals discover and maximize their potential to live satisfying lives regardless of obvious limitations holding them back.
