Edward E. Wilson

Visioning and Review is, in my opinion, one of the most useful habit structures you could make for yourself. It takes ideas from what is called Well-Formed Outcomes in NLP and from The Law of Attraction. The idea is to habitually create a vision of what you want out of life situations and to review your progress towards that vision. This habit has additional benefits to learning.

Building a Vision

What do you want? What would you see, hear, feel, taste and smell if you had it? What would it look like if you were watching yourself now that you’ve achieved it? What would it look like if you were looking out your own eyes having achieved this for yourself? Who would be there with you? Where would you be? What does this feeling of enjoying what you have already achieved, feel like? What would happen if you made the sounds louder, the vision bigger and brighter and the feelings more intense?

Having built this vision, having been there, is this still what you want? If not make any necessary changes and repeat the above. Stop when you have it perfect. Give this vision a name, and make a gesture to go with the name. This grounds it in a real-time visual, auditory and kinesthetic anchor.

Motivational Structure

So… this is what you want. Now, why do you want it? What does getting this get you? What does getting that get you? What does moving towards the vision above move you away from? Why do you want to move away from that? Repeat these questions as far as you can. Can you see the reasons that you are moving toward pulling you forward and the things you are moving away from pushing you forward? Can you feel both of these forces helping you move in the direction of you vision? What does it sound like to be moved like this?

Actioning

Thinking back on your vision, how does the version of you who achieved what you want to achieve differ in their behaviour from what you have been doing until now? How are their habits different? How do they look at the world differently than how you have been? If you were the you that achieved what you want, what would they decide needed to be done next? What the smallest, easiest, simplest thing that could start your path towards being that you? Now… dive in! Start doing those things.

Review and Re-Vision

Time has past. You’ve been acting on your vision, working towards it. Maybe it’s been a day, maybe a week, maybe a whole month. Time to review your progress. What has happened in relation to your vision? What has gone well? What hasn’t gone as well? What kinds of actions and styles of action on your part lead to things going well? What lead to things not going as well? Knowing what you know now, how would you change your behaviour? Where and when are you likely to be in a situation where this new understanding is going to be useful? What would happen if you applied this there?

Given your new life experiences, do you need to make any changes to your vision?

Building Habits

There are a variety of ways to build habits. One is to build the strategy of the action and then anchor it to the context where it will be useful. Another way to build a habit is simply… to do simple actions consistently and slowly add more parts later. I’d like you to do both of those with the Visioning and Review Process.

What would happen if every day when you get up you remembered and tweaked your vision? What would happen if every night before you go to bed you did a quick review of your progress? Try it for two weeks and find out.