Creation Voyage – A Path To The Best Version Of You

The Discovery Voyage took you on a journey into your own self. You went deep into your past, into your mind, you got in touch with your feelings and your emotions. It may have been painful at times, and at the end of it, you might still not be certain that you’ve got it all covered. Let me make it easy for you: you haven’t. The journey of discovery is infinite, because what’s at the base of it—you—will keep unfolding as you grow older and wiser. Once you step into your Creation Voyage, that very base will reshape and adapt, giving opportunities to make more discoveries about yourself.

Understanding where you stand today, including your roles in life, your resources, and the people around you, gives you an anchor. It tethers you to the present. Now you know who you are. This is you. Today. That first step was massive. Now, it’s time to leap forward.

If you know who you are, you can decide who you want to be. To me, this is the most exciting step of all. That’s because you are genuinely creating a mold of your future self. This is not just a theoretical exercise. As you’ll see, this step will connect to your discovery phase and will lead you into the third and final leg of your journey—action.

But while you are at this creation step, you will feel a sense of freedom and excitement. Opening up your mind and heart and truly dreaming about the possibilities is empowering. You’ll feel like you’re getting wings. Enjoy it. Lean into it, and don’t hold back. It’s your time to look into the future and tap into your purpose. Really define what it means to be you.

During this phase, you will look at six concepts:

1. Vision — how does your future look like?
2. Purpose — why are you alive?
3. Mission — what is your legacy and contribution?
4. Goals — what do you want to accomplish in life?
5. Alignment — do you have adequate resources?
6. Learning Plan — how are you growing?

Let’s look at what each of them will do for you before you jump into the work.

1 Vision — Your Amazing and Exciting Life

A vision is a cohesive, big-picture image of who and where you will be in the future. Note that I didn’t say who you’d like to be, but who you will be. This is a particular state of mind and a change of mentality. By deciding who you want to be in all the areas of your life, and changing the language to who you will be, you condition your brain to accept that reality, no matter how far-fetched it might seem.

Creating your vision is the most pleasurable part of this entire exercise. You get to put your child hat on and let your dreams take shape. Because these are your dreams and aspirations, there are no limits. Let your mind and heart flow together to create a vision for how you want your future life to unfold.

2 Purpose — Why Do You Do What You Do?

Many people have dreams, and I know you do, too. Those dreams translate into goals, and you know you must put gas behind those goals through massive action. There’s only one major issue, though: without understanding why you have these goals, you might take actions that won’t get you where you want to be. Or it will lead you there, but you will still find yourself unfulfilled and miserable.

Therefore having a sense of the why behind your vision is a critical step before you begin to set your goals. As you will see, purpose (or why) is a very elusive concept, but please don’t skip this step, as you will set yourself up for potential failure, or for gambling it all on pure luck.

3 Mission — Your Place In Life Is Bigger Than You

Up to this point, we have spoken about you. You navigated the discovery voyage to find out who you are. You connected to your identity and life roles, and also considered all the people important to you. Now, armed with a vision and purpose, it’s time to look beyond yourself.

To challenge your limits, you need a higher purpose that will act as a driver and fire you up. You need a bigger scope, much larger than you, much bigger than your family or your community. It sounds scary, but trust me: setting up a mission that is way bigger than you will be the push you need to extend your horizon beyond your immediate self.

4 Goals — What Do You Want To Accomplish?

Once you establish a vision and a purpose and connect them to a broader mission, it’s time to set up goals. At the end of the day, achieving anything requires a series of small steps. Any big goal in history has been achieved by first breaking it down into smaller parts and conquering each part one by one. That’s how you eat the elephant, they say: one bite at a time.

In your personal life, it’s no different. At this point in your voyage, you have to design goals in a way that helps you advance your life toward the vision. You will need to design the goals in alignment with your personal values and beliefs and in support of your purpose. As you complete your tasks and close the gap between where you are today and the end of the line, you work toward your mission. It’s all connected.

5 Alignment — Is Present-You Ready For Future-You?

Now that you have all the pieces in place—the items from your Discovery, and those from the Creation Voyage—it’s time to do two more things before you leap into action. The first one is critical, and it involves making sure that your values and beliefs align with your goals. Any misalignment or, worse, a complete conflict, will make it impossible for you to design an action plan that will lead to those goals’ achievement.

You need to make sure that you design a robust system of values, and this is where discovery turns into creation. That’s because, much like how you have learned your current values and beliefs, you can unlearn them, upgrade them, or change them. This is where your plan, your vision, your mission, and your goals come in. If your values and beliefs do not support them, you must change them.

6 Learning Plan — Continuous Improvement In All Areas

During the Discovery Voyage, we delved into your strengths, weaknesses, skills, and passions. These four concepts are closely related, and together, they represent the set of resources that you have at your disposal to tackle your vision and goals. At this point, with your vision and goals in sight, you need to be self-aware enough to recognize if your resources are at par with your goals. If they’re not, you must fix that.

Note that you must not wait until you are perfectly prepared. Absolutely not. You can use what you have, but you will also need to weave in a learning plan along the way. This means you recognize that you can improve your skills and strengths through learning and practice, and that you acknowledge that there are many things you don’t know, but that you should know, to be successful. Therefore, you will design a learning plan that will ensure that you sharpen those skills and strengths you will need going forward.

Here’s Your Ticket!

With this in mind, once again I recommend you go through all the creation steps in order. Each of them builds upon the previous one in a natural progression.

Some of these steps might take longer than others. Don’t worry; this process represents the canvas whereon you are painting your future life. Soon you’ll start working toward it, and the road will be tough. Spend the time now to design your life with intent, and the voyage to action will be smoother. Not easier, but smoother.

The idea is to take the guesswork out of it, and to set yourself up to have the best chance of success. That doesn’t mean you will mitigate all the risks of failure, or that you won’t hit hurdles and that it won’t be hard as hell—because it will be—but at least you can give yourself that extra edge and chance by setting up the plan the right way.

Each step in this process will have an associated downloadable PDF worksheet, with detailed step-by-step instructions. I recommend that you first read the theory and examples given in each sub-section and then download the work files and do the work.

Because your life is very dynamic, you may need to create short- and medium-term plans many times in your life. Although your big moonshot vision and plan might stay somewhat constant, shorter-term plans change often. So you may need to go through the creation phase several times, maybe even once a year, at least to validate that you are still in alignment.

Without further ado, head on to the first destination in your Creation Voyage — Create Your Vision.

If you want to check any of the other steps in the Creation Voyage, use the navigation table below.