Exercise 6 - Creating Milestones

Once you have done the Vision Quest exercise and you are happy with your vision statements you need to take some time out and 'sit' in that ideal future. When you can see, feel and touch the ideal future look backwards in time to the present and think about what the key milestones were that showed you things were changing.

The reason we do this exercise is because the Vision itself may be so big that it is daunting – so big that you can’t get ‘into action’ around it – so big that you have a constant little voice inside your head saying ‘you’ll never be able to do that so why even try?’

When mountain climbers attempt to reach the top of Mt Everest they don’t simply start climbing and keep plodding until they get to the top. No – there are about 5 steps along the way – Base camp, Camp 1, 2, 3 and 4. The climb to the top doesn’t just go Base Camp, 1, 2, 3, 4 – summit, either. It goes more like Base Camp to Camp 1 then back to Base Camp then up to 1 then down to Base Camp then up to 2 then back to Base Camp etc. The reason is that climbers need to acclimatise to each new level of altitude. Until they have completed each individual step they can’t even begin to think about the next step. But they know each time they get to a new camp they are making progress.

Your Vision is the same. You need to develop specific Milestones along the way – stepping stones to your final destination. Then instead of focussing on the overwhelming vision, you can simply focus on the first step – which is a much more manageable goal.
 
Depending on what your Vision is you may need to do this for every one of the five key issues or you may be able to just develop milestones for the overall Vision.

Now the hard part – see if you can put some dates next to the milestones.

And finally ask – how are you going to reward yourself when you reach these milestones?
 
When you have completed this exercise, stick the sheet up on the wall underneath your life Vision. Now you should be able to see at a glance what you are doing here and how you are trying to do it.