Stage 3: Vision & Direction | Life Vision

Every exercise you've completed in Stage 3 gave you a different angle on the same question: what do you actually want? Your bucket list showed you what you want to experience, your anti-vision showed you what you refuse to tolerate, your ideal lifestyle described how you want your days to feel, your Odyssey plan tested which version of your future pulls you hardest.

Your rocking chair exercise showed you what you want to feel at the end, your eulogy showed you how you want to be remembered, your future self letter told you who you're becoming, and, finally, your purpose exercise gave you the why.

Each exercise was a single lens. Useful on its own, but incomplete. This step is where you pull all eight lenses together and build one coherent picture of your life vision.

A life vision is a written description of the life you're designing toward. It's specific enough to guide real decisions, broad enough to leave room for surprises, and honest enough that reading it back makes you feel something. Think of it as a north star document. Every choice, every prototype, every trade-off in the next phase of this course gets tested against what you write here.

The reason this comes almost last in Stage 3 (and not first) is that most people can't write a good vision from scratch. They default to what sounds impressive, what their parents want for them, or what culture has trained them to aim for. The previous exercises were designed to strip all of that away, layer by layer, until what's left is actually yours.

That the research says

Goal-setting theory

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent decades studying how goals affect performance. Their core finding, published across hundreds of studies: specific, challenging goals consistently produce better outcomes than vague intentions like "do your best." The effect size is large and reliable. A written life vision is, at its core, a specific goal. The act of writing it down forces you to commit to concrete language, which is exactly the mechanism Locke and Latham found to be effective.

Personal strivings and well-being

Robert Emmons (1986, 1999) studied what he called "personal strivings," the ongoing goals that characterise what a person is typically trying to do. His research found that people whose strivings were coherent with each other (pointing in the same general direction) reported higher wellbeing than those whose strivings conflicted. A life vision is an exercise in making your strivings coherent. When your work goals, relationship goals, health goals, and growth goals all pull in a compatible direction, you stop fighting yourself.

Self-concordance

Kennon Sheldon's self-concordance model explains why some goals stick and others don't. Goals that match your authentic interests and core values produce more sustained effort, more progress, and more wellbeing when achieved. Goals adopted because of guilt, pressure, or external expectations produce less effort and less satisfaction even when you hit them. The implication for this exercise is direct: a life vision written to impress other people will fail you. One written from genuine self-knowledge will carry you forward.

A note on visualisation

You've probably heard of vision boards. The research on pure visualisation is mixed, and some of it is discouraging. Gabriele Oettingen's work showed that simply fantasising about a positive future can actually reduce motivation, because the brain treats the fantasy as already achieved. The energy drops.

What does work is combining a clear written vision with what Peter Gollwitzer (1999) called "implementation intentions": if-then plans that connect your vision to specific actions. "If it's Monday morning, then I spend the first hour on my creative project." The vision gives direction while the implementation intention gives traction. You'll build the implementation side in Stage 4. Right now, your job is to get the direction right.

The exercises

Access your Notion workbook here.

Exercise 1: The synthesis

Before you write anything new, pull the threads from every exercise you've already completed so far. Go back through your previous work and write down the single most important insight from each one. Pay close attention - if two exercises pointed to the same thing, notice that. If two exercises contradicted each other, notice that too.

Take your time with this. The quality of your life vision depends on how honestly you summarise what you've already discovered.

Bucket List
What you want to experience:

Anti-Vision
What you refuse to accept:

Ideal Lifestyle
How you want to live day to day:

Odyssey Plan
Which path calls you most:

Rocking Chair
What you want to feel looking back:

Eulogy
How you want to be remembered:

Future Self Letter
Who you're becoming:

Purpose
Why you're here:

Now look at the list as a whole and highlight anything that appeared more than once across different exercises. Those recurring themes are the load-bearing walls of your vision. They're the things that keep showing up because they're truly yours.

Make sure you note the recurring themes notive notice clearly.

Exercise 2: Vision by domain

A life vision that only covers your career is incomplete. So is one that only covers relationships, or health, or money. The whole point of this exercise is to look at your life as a connected system, where progress in one area supports progress in every other area.

For each domain below, write a short paragraph describing what that part of your life looks like when it's working well. Be specific. "Good health" is too vague; "I run 3 times a week, sleep 7 hours, cook most of my own meals, and feel physically strong" is a vision you can actually use.

Write in the present tense, as if you're already living this. That's the format Locke and Latham's research supports: specific and concrete.

Work and purpose
What does your work look like? What kind of problems do you solve? How does your work connect to your purpose?

Relationships and love
What do your closest relationships feel like? Who is around you? How do you show up for the people you care about?

Health and body
How does your body feel? What physical habits do you keep? What's your relationship with energy, sleep, and food?

Home and environment
Where do you live? What does your space look like? What feeling does it give you when you walk in?

Finances and freedom
What does financial security look like for you? How much is enough? What does money give you the freedom to do?

Hobbies, projects, and fun
What hobbies do you engage in to have fun? What projects do you have (if any) to feel whole or to self-express? How do you spend your spare time just to have fun?

Contribution and community
How do you give back? What communities are you part of? What do you contribute that goes beyond your own life?

After you've written all eight, read them together. Do they fit? Does progress in one area support the others, or does something clash? If your work vision requires 70-hour weeks and your health vision requires daily exercise and 8 hours of sleep, you've found a conflict that needs resolving before you move on.

Make sure you note conflicts or tensions you notice between domains clearly.

Exercise 3: The one-page life vision

This is the document that matters most. Everything before this was preparation. Now you're going to write a single page that captures the whole vision: who you are, what you're building, how you want to feel, what you refuse to accept, and why any of it matters.

Write freely. You can revise later. The first version will be imperfect, and that's fine. A rough but honest vision is worth more than a polished one you don't believe.

Who your are
Draw from Stage 1 (values, strengths, personality, identity). In 2 to 3 sentences, who are you at your core?

What you're building
Draw from Stages 2 and 3 (purpose, Odyssey plan, ideal lifestyle, bucket list). What does the life you're building actually look like?

How you want to feel
This is where most visions miss. We chase achievements, titles, numbers, but forget to ask how we actually want to feel when we wake up on a regular day. Peace of mind is a valid answer here, and for many people, the most important one, too - just that a deep, settled sense that your life is yours and you're spending it well.

What you refuse to accept
Draw from your anti-vision. What are the non-negotiables? What will you walk away from, even if it means less money, less status, or less approval?

Your purpose
Draw from your purpose exercise. In one or two sentences, why are you here? What's the through-line that connects everything above?

Your life vision
Now rewrite the sections above into a single continuous piece of text. This is the document you'll come back to when you need to make a hard decision, when you feel lost, or when someone offers you something shiny that doesn't fit.

Exercise 4: The reality check

A vision that lives in a notebook and never guides a real decision is not very useful. below list of questions is designed to stress-test what you've written. Answer them - if the answer to any of them is no, go back and revise your vision before moving on.

• Is it specific enough to guide a real decision? (Could you use it to choose between two job offers, or two cities, or two ways to spend a Saturday?) - Yes/No - if no, what needs to change?

• Does it excite you? (When you read it back, do you feel energy, pull, wanting?) - Yes/No - if no, what needs to change?

• Does it scare you a little? (A vision that feels completely safe is probably too small.) - Yes/No - if no, what needs to change?

• Is it yours? (Not your parents' vision for you, not your partner's expectations, not what your culture or social media has trained you to want.) - Yes/No - if no, what needs to change?

• Would achieving it give you peace of mind? (Not just success or comfort, but a deep, settled sense that you're living the right life for you.) - Yes/No - if no, what needs to change?

If you answered "no" to any of these, go back to the vision and revise. A vision with a weak spot will crack under pressure. Better to find it now than six months in when you're making real trade-offs. :)

Reflection

This about these after you've written your vision. They're designed to surface anything the exercises missed.

• If I read this vision to someone who knows me well, would they recognise me in it? Or would they say I'm performing?

• What did I leave out of the vision because it felt too vulnerable, too strange, or too impractical to include? Should it be in there?

• Which part of the vision am I most resistant to acting on? What does that resistance tell me?

• If I achieved everything in this vision except peace of mind, would it be enough? If not, what needs to shift?

• What's the smallest decision I could make this week that would be consistent with this vision?

• Five years from now, if I've been living according to this vision, what's different about my life? Be specific.

AI companion (optional)

How to use: Share your completed one-page life vision from Exercise 3. The AI will help you spot blind spots, contradictions, and places where the writing is too vague to be useful. It will also check whether your vision is genuinely yours or borrowed from external expectations. Use the feedback to revise, then come back and run it through again.

Copy and paste the prompt below into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI assistant:

I've just written a life vision as part of a life design course. I'm going to share the full text with you. I'd like you to help me pressure-test it. Specifically:
(1) Point out any parts that sound generic or borrowed rather than genuinely mine.
(2) Identify any contradictions between different sections.
(3) Ask me questions about anything that feels vague or underspecified.
(4) Check whether the vision is specific enough to actually guide a real decision, like choosing between two job offers.
(5) Notice if peace of mind appears as a genuine priority or if I've buried it under achievement goals. Don't rewrite the vision for me. Ask questions and point out gaps so I can rewrite it myself.