One of the most recent changes to my daily writing practice is to include writing by hand the ten-year-vision statement I created for my ideal life in the future.  

I think of my vision statement as a ten-year-plan that is similar to a written vision board.

Here’s another thought: I think it would be a great idea for you to try it, too.

Before you turn away, please hear me out. There are numerous reasons I thought making this vision plan sounded crazy. I collected even more reasons it was irrelevant and a stupid way to invest my precious time.

1. Ten years sounds like an extremely long time to someone who is my age. Seriously – I know how old I will be in ten years.
2. Ten years seems slightly outlandish considering I almost died a few months ago. Since then, I have been living much more day-to-day. I rarely commit to invitations more than a week in the future, much less a month or a season or a year away.
3. I’ve spent the last ten years focused very intensely on educational advocacy, especially for my son, and caretaking for other people. I am way out of practice in “creating my dream” or “manifesting my heart’s desires” so doing an exercise like quickly got stamped in my head as ridiculous.

I did it anyway.

This simple yet visionary exercise has made a huge difference in my attitude and my confidence. I am feeling a shift into getting more done right now, today, in more than one aspect of my life. All because I took the time to think about what my life would be like, ideally, in ten years.

I realized as I wrote out my ten-year-vision, I was reconnecting to many of my past hopes and dreams, the ones I buried while I was focused on educational advocacy and serving others not in an intentional way but mostly because needs appeared and I leaped in.

It felt good to take out my old intentions, like rediscovering an old pair of jeans a size smaller than your usual size and they fit and you even look surprisingly good in them!

Here’s a suggestion for you, right now, to connect more with yourself in the here and now if the ten-year-vision feels like too much.

Consider a month from now. Just a month from now.

Consider what you have going on in your life, on your calendar.

Consider what you would most love to see on your calendar if you were living your ideal life.

One example of how this works is when I made a list of my ideal life and I wrote, “lunch with a friend at least once a month.” At the time it seemed like a huge stretch and then it became a lunch and a couple dinners and some coffee with all different friends.

I manifested that ideal and more.

So it doesn’t have to be huge at first.

If you had this as part of your ideal it would be one meal, shared this month. And when you go to that meal, be intentional with your friend.

Talk about subjects that matter to you. (If you would like guidance with that, check out the writing prompts on my blog or the Transformational Questions on my Instagram account and use them to launch into conversational topics).

Maybe the person you would most like to take time with this month is yourself. You may do the same with yourself as I suggested with your friend. “Converse” through writing in your journal or writing a blog post or making a quick video. For the bold among us, I challenge you to make a 5 minute video and share it on facebook, Instagram or youtube or perhaps even go live.

One month from now, what do you want to look back and say, “I did that?” and “I felt that!” and “I am so grateful I did that and I felt that way.”

Julie JordanScott is a multi-creative who lives in Bakersfield with her daughter, Emma, in an eighty-year-old house with two palm trees in her yard. She loves writing and reading poetry, sitting by the Kern River and learning new quirky facts about literary grannies and what makes people tick. Her current project is finding ways to end the secret epidemic facing the US – with 60% of Americans affected by it. This love poetry project is another way she is working to eradicate loneliness – more information may be found on how you may be involved in the cause at EradicateLoneliness.com