How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Journaling and Visioning

photo by L_Joy

This is the third part in a series about making your own creative mini-retreat. Today we’ll explore another exercise you can try during your retreat — journaling and visioning projects.

1. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Introduction

2. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Exploring a New Medium

3. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Journaling and Visioning

4. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Creating Tangible Inspiration

Although many of us keep journals when we’re young, we sometimes ignore the therapeutic power of journaling. Sometimes it’s because we’re struggling just to keep up with all the things we have to write. Or maybe we forget that allowing your thoughts to form on the page has a surprisingly strong power to clarify. Whatever the reasons, if you haven’t indulged your journaling and visioning forces lately, this creative mini-retreat might be the time.

What is Visioning, Anyway?

Visioning is imagining. It’s imagining what you can create and where you can go. We tend to discredit the realm of imagination as we shed youth in favor of being “grown-ups.” And As Richard suggested in this insightful post on the imaginal, our society has not always subscribed to this discrediting.

Visioning allows you to imagine the future you want, and thereby create a foundation for later building a strategy. Visioning is also useful for understanding your values, which is crucial in accessing what truly matters to you. Instead of focusing on what is wrong with the present or what you lack, visioning puts you in an abundant mindset where you can imagine what could and can be.

What can I get out of this?

There are many areas you can explore with journaling and visioning. Some people prefer to start with no goal in mind, and some prefer to dive into a specific question. These questions are often seemingly simple, yet they are questions that many of us never ask ourselves directly — instead, we assume that we know that answers. It’s actually quite true that we often know the answers, but the problem is that they can be so buried that we never quite have a hold on them. Being aware of these answers is the point of journaling and visioning.

Now, I want to make a little disclaimer before I give you some question ideas. I hesitated to use the word “answers” in the paragraph above, because answers imply final, “right” answers — truths. I think the value in these exercises is to be constantly asking and challenging “truths,” because that is how we remain intensely aware of the directions we need to take. Through journaling and visioning, we can be honest with ourselves. When I say “answers,” I mean our strong, honest perspectives on that question. Instead of focusing on divine truths, we can focus on being aware of what matters most to us.

How to Imagine

Journaling and visioning don’t have fixed rules. It’s most important that you choose a mode of expression that feels organic, so there is no blockage when you’re trying to let those honest perspectives flood out. You can choose to do journaling, which simply means writing in a journal. Another option is Extreme Journaling, which is a no-holds-barred freewriting approach to journaling.

Visioning can take on a variety of forms. Today we’ll talk about forms that are conducive to accessing your visions and allowing your imagination to create freely. Although many of you may be thinking about “vision boards,” we’ll cover that tomorrow in a post about creating tangible inspiration. Today we’ll cover the organic process that allows you to create raw visioning.

Here are some ways to start visioning:

- Do a brainstorm of words and ideas: fill up a page or two just scribbling whatever comes to mind in response to your questions. You don’t have to write in sentences — feel free to scatter words all over the page.

- Make a mindmap (more on that here).

- Sketch out the visions that come to mind. Don’t worry about what the sketch looks like — if this medium feels natural, just go for it.

- Make lists: write as fast as you can, not stopping to censor the ideas and words you write. The editing can come later.

Questions You Can Ask Yourself

- What are my values? Not to go to an obvious source, but Steve Pavlina has straightforward exercises on this.

- If I were on the cover of a magazine one day, what would I want the feature article to say? Who would I be?

- How do I want to be remembered when I die? (Morbid and effective, but you can thank Jonathan Mead for that one, in Reclaim Your Dreams!)

- Who do I want to be deeply connected with?

- What drives me crazy — in the best possible way? What can I talk about for 45 minutes straight without running out of things to say?

- What could put me into a state of flow? What makes me forget about time?

- How do I define success?

- What deserves my focus and energy?

This list is by no means exhaustive, but these are some pretty big questions that can keep you going for a while. Ultimately, these exercises are about imagining and creating through vision. Tomorrow I’ll talk about different ways to create tangible, accessible reminders of your inspiration and visions.

When is the last time you appreciated your imagination? What are some hard, valuable questions you ask yourself?

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