Below are a few ways to approach this visioning session. No matter which format you choose, the key is to let your authentic Self reveal itself to you, as opposed to letting your conscious mind dictate what’s “right for you” or let your ego derail you. To do this, practice dropping into your body throughout the experience rather than staying in your mind. Rely on your emotional responses and physical sensations to cue your level of alignment to each possibility – sensing for expansion vs. contraction. Take intermittent pauses to ask yourself how you feel about what’s being written, as opposed to hearing what your inner voice thinks of it. Follow the breadcrumbs of anything that feels expansive.

Start here:

Select a format that feels most intriguing to you:

• Journal Entry
• Mind Map
• Vision Board

Each format is detailed below and broken up into two parts, as guided by our Visioning Session Prompts:

• Part One: Brain Dump 
• Part Two: Your Why  

Journal entry:

You can find Part One & Part Two for journaling in our Visioning Session Prompts. Reminder, a journal entry can use full sentences, bullet points, doodles, etc. — write however suits you!

Mind map:

Refer to page 3 of our Visioning Session Prompts.

Part One

• Draw a small circle in the middle of a piece of paper, and write within it: “what makes me feel alive?”
• Now start brainstorming answers to that question, jotting down anything that comes to mind in all the empty space around the circle. List anything and everything of interest, even if it’s fleeting – nothing is off the table! You can use our Visioning Session Prompts to help guide you.
• Once everything is on the page, revisit each item one by one, doing a self-inventory to notice how you feel when you actually consider it – do I actually feel alive with this thing? Or is it because the world tells me I’m good at it or need to do it in order to be/receive what I want? Anything that feels unaligned (constricting) – cross it out. Anything that feels intriguing (expansive) – circle it.

Part Two

• Now on a second sheet of paper, draw the same small circle in the middle of the page with “what makes me feel alive?”, and copy over everything you circled on the first page brainstorm. Scatter them around the center circle, and draw lines from them connecting to the center circle (like a web). 
• Now get more specific about why each item helps you feel alive, and jot that down in the smaller, outer circles connecting to it. Really try them on for size in your imagination, experimenting with them to notice how you feel. 
• Can you spot any patterns or similarities amongst them? Do any surprise you? Do any remind you of a childhood dream, even just a little? Are any of them a part of your life now? 

Optional: If you want to focus more on discovering your “purpose,” you can reference an Ikigai diagram for a more structured format. Ikigai is a Japanese phrase meaning “a reason to live.” In this format you look for the overlap of your passion, mission, vocation, and profession – incorporating what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you’re good at.

Vision Board:

Before Starting

• Let the visuals call to you, not you to them! What we mean is, oftentimes we go into vision board sessions with a set plan of what we want to put on our board. We spend our time hunting down the right images and words in magazines to show what we want to do, be, or have — this is not that kind of vision boarding. This is about discovering your soul’s authentic desires by letting your subconscious take the wheel. Toss your preconceived notions about what you think your life needs to look like, and go into this without a set intention. Give yourself a chance to discover what truly feels right to you now, in this moment. You may not be aware of what your truest desires are yet, so let the images and the words jump out at you. Let yourself be surprised by what ultimately lands on the board.

Part One

• To set the tone for this visual brainstorming session, start by contemplating the question: What makes me feel alive? You can reference our Visioning Session Prompts. 
• Then begin looking through magazines, Pinterest, social media, etc. and print/cut out anything & everything that evokes an expansive emotional or sensational response from within you. Don’t overthink it, just cut it ALL out.

Part Two

• Go through all the cutouts and start laying them on your board – selecting only those that you feel called towards, trusting your body to guide you (not your mind). Don’t think about what’s being selected or how it could possibly come true or even why you’re placing it there. Feel free to adjust/swap out selections as many times as you need, noticing how your body feels when you place one cutout on the board vs another. Keep only what feels most authentic to you at this moment in time.
• Now step back and take a look at the finished board. How does the big picture make you feel? Can you identify why each item was selected? What does it show you? Are there things on there that you didn’t expect? Are there things that didn’t make the cut that you thought would have? What clarity does it provide about what you want and who you want to be – at your current phase in life?
• If you made a physical board, we suggest waiting a week or so before gluing everything down so you can make adjustments as your energy settles into itself.