How to navigate these times, these days? Are you thinking that we just have to adopt a survival mindset, just endure and be our resilient best until this pandemic is over?

Well, have I got a tool for you, dear Heroine!

What Is Intuitive Visioning?

I teach a process that helps you navigate how you want your life to be. It’s called Intuitive Visioning and it’s a tool for women to clarify the direction they want their lives to go in. It produces great results - often transformational. It invites women to clear a space, a stopping point on their Heroine’s Journey so they can step out of their “ordinary lives” to consider who they are and what they want. Then...attract it!

If this idea seems woo-woo to you, it shouldn’t. The business world spends a lot of time and money on this practice. I should know. I spent over twenty years facilitating corporate and not-for-profit leaders through the strategic planning process.

Intuitive Visioning came first from my organizational development career in the corporate world. I learned a lot in that world and got a first-hand view of how this kind of planning worked. I observed what happens when groups of people take time out from their everyday business for a day or two. When they agree on a common three-year vision for their organizations, when they all see and affirm the same picture of the future, then they more surely draw it to them, usually even more quickly than they expect - with often surprising results!

Leaders who were successful in this, who actually implemented their vision of the future, did so because all their energies were pulling together in the same direction. At these planning retreat days, I watched some groups get clear on what they wanted but then just sideline their vision on the shelf afterward, letting themselves be pulled back into life just as it was before their retreat. They just couldn’t get out of their old habit of being reactive and putting out “fires.” Then there were the organizations that made their retreat vision a reality, by staying focused on their priorities, and by continually checking on their “progress to the plan” or what I called, “watering it.” They were the successful ones, accomplishing what they said they were going to do - being proactive. I studied what worked and what didn’t at every step in the process.

How It Works 

I learned that the visioning process must produce a focus, a clear, (shared, if you’re doing it as a group) vision of what the group wants and its priorities. It needs to be a common, agreed-to vision so that everyone in the group is pulling in the same direction. They also have to develop a plan for implementing their vision or their habitual routines of everyday business will quickly pull them back into “things the way they’ve always been”.

Finally, they have to be optimistic about it and believe they can accomplish their vision. They need to quiet the nay-saying inner critic who’s ever ready to explain why things won’t work and how nothing ever really changes. There does need to be an element of belief... that, yes, this can happen.

This Is How You Do It

This all applies to you and your life, too, Heroine!

While still doing my organizational work, I had a thought—why can’t individuals go through this same process? Why can’t individuals take the time out to consider where they want to go over the next three years? Why wouldn’t they want to? Just as organizations can become less reactive and more intentional, so can individual people. As individuals, we plan by making a grocery list before we go shopping to ensure that we get the items we need and want. We plan for a summer vacation by blocking days out on our calendars way ahead of time to ensure that we actually go.

We can do the same with our one “wild and precious life” to quote poet, Mary Oliver. You can take the time to figure out what you want and how you want your life to be. You don’t have to just accept whatever comes at you, forever merely reacting and seldom acting - or asking. What works for business executives, grocery shoppers and vacation planners can ensure that what you want out of life doesn’t pass you by.

Women, too, can take a “time out” every now and then to assess their lives, figure out what they want to attract into it, and create a plan to make it happen.

I took that corporate planning process that I had used for so many years and tried it out with my friends and colleagues. A real turning point came when a colleague and I were complaining yet again about how things weren’t going well for us in our jobs at a large corporation and I got one of those flashes of insight...

Wait! I have a choice!

Instead of complaining about what I don’t want, I could get focused, instead, on the type of career I wanted and draw it to me.

At that moment it became clear to me that I didn’t have to just put up with what had happened.

I could choose to complain or I could be proactive and create what I wanted. So, I took the time to plan what I wanted to be doing and designed my way to the career of my dreams. This practice involved making time (that’s pretty key - you have to take the time to do this, just like those corporate leaders) to write out what I wanted, to get into the feeling place of the desired result, and vividly picture it in my mind’s eye - and then to spell out the steps that would make it happen.

If you’ve noticed some very non-business-like descriptors in there, you’re very astute. “Feeling place” “picture it in my mind’s eye”...that’s because my process for people, like you, is different than what I offered my corporate clients. This is mostly because the individual process invites in one’s intuition - and that moves the process into an entirely different arena. 

The Process

My process starts with a question, “Given ideal circumstances, what will my life look like, be like in three years (you fill in the date) from now? And then you see what comes up - and you allow the answers to come up no matter how strange some of the ideas sound to you. There’s no judging of your ideas. These are coming up from your wise inner self, from your intuition and you need to do them the honor of writing them down. And no need to worry about where the logic and practicality come into your plan. You can add that later, once you've realized what your true priorities are (what your wise inner self wants for you rather than what you think you should want), and develop the practical steps to achieve them.

No, I never talked about this to my corporate groups but I would be leaving out an important piece if I didn’t talk about it with you. My corporate clients offered up the idea that they’d always worked within business. Mostly coming from their left brains, their thoughts would center around management, finances, technology, employee welfare, benefits... If any of you have participated in a corporate strategic planning process, you’re familiar with all these topics. In my process, where we ask our intuitions to partner with us, we find the right-brain much more involved, and often participants are surprised by what comes up.

Intuitive Visioning Works! 

It works. When someone gets clear on what they want to focus on, when they hold the image of it in their consciousness, when they take some steps towards making it happen, they often draw to them what they want - or better! And I always tell people . . . don’t try to figure out how your vision will turn up or materialize. Usually, it comes by a circuitous route that you couldn’t have predicted. Just let it go and let it work.

“But what if I do it and then put it on the shelf and forget about it?” you ask.

Good question. There have been times that people don’t do any of the “watering” of their plan. They write down their ideas, put them in categories, come up with their top three priorities, then put them someplace and that’s it. They don’t do anything more - they forget about it, even - and then they’ll tell me. “A year later, I found it and looked at the stickies and was amazed that most of them have happened!”

How to explain this? Your focused intentions have power. Something gets into gear when you get intentional. Here’s my personal belief:

I believe that the Universe, Something Greater, God, Goddess, or whatever you want to call It is a loving type of consciousness that wants to give you what you desire. Sometimes we call it the “cook in the kitchen”. I tell my clients that it’s similar to the way you place a specific order in a restaurant to a waiter, you place a specific order to the universe every time you have an intention or a focused thought. You need to know what you want. You wouldn’t say to a waiter that you want “meat” and expect to get back filet mignon. How would the cook know what to prepare?

Similarly, you need to know what you don’t want. You wouldn’t order from the waiter braised liver if you hate braised liver because that’s what you would get back. But, how many times do you think about and dwell on what you don’t want (that complaining my colleague and I were doing!) and keep seeing it over and over again in your life and wonder why? Your thoughts and associated feelings are placing orders all the time to this loving consciousness and it keeps giving you back what you ask for. Once you are aware of this fact then you will make conscious choices about how you think to create your life just the way you want it. And now you have a tool to direct your thoughts.

Intuitive Visioning - Give It A Try

If you try this out, I recommend that at least you put the product of your personal retreat up somewhere (on the inside of your closet door is a commonly used spot) and look at it every now and then. Refreshing that vision gives it energy and keeps it in the forefront of your consciousness.

And please pat yourself on the back for treating your precious life with at least as much attention as you do your grocery list. You took the time. Now, you can let it go. Attend to the day-to-day, but pay attention, see what comes your way. It just might surprise you. Your dreams might just show up.

I’d love to be your fellow traveler on your road to conscious creation. I can teach you how to work hand in hand with a loving cook who can prepare for you what you want in ways that you can’t imagine. I know you have everything you need within you to take this journey. You’re like Dorothy, traveling with her fellow companions along the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz. The Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and Dorothy all thought that they lacked something (a heart, courage, a brain, the means to go home) and thought that they needed to search outside themselves for a guru, a wizard, who would give them what was missing.

They discovered on their journey that they had these things all along. The Tin Man was very loving, always crying real tears and rusting his joints. The Scarecrow thought up plots that obviously required thinking. The Cowardly Lion went bravely into the witch’s castle. Dorothy, from the very beginning of the story, had on her feet the slippers which could give her what she desired, a means to go home. They already had everything they needed.

You, too, have inside you everything you need to have a happy life. You have more power than you know and it’s time you start using it for your good and for the good of everyone around you. Use the power of your inner thoughts, feelings, and intentions to make your life better. You have everything you need.

Here’s how you can find out more about the Intuitive Visioning process:

• Get my book, You Are a Heroine: A Retelling of the Hero’s Journey, and read Chapter 8, “You Own the Perfect Compass.”

• Join me for a one-on-one retreat where I help you set the stage to create your own Intuitive Vision and walk you through the process personally - including a follow-up down the road. 

• Gather some of your friends together and we’ll do the process as a group. Contact me for group rates.