Your vision isn’t just a dream; it’s the blueprint of the life you’re crafting. Nurture it, protect it, and align every action with its design. In this episode, Mimi Nartey joins us to talk about crafting and sustaining a powerful vision for your life. She helps us understand how to bring our dreams to life, from the beginning to our daily actions. Mimi dissects the essence of creating a vision that’s not just a fleeting idea but a compelling force that propels you forward. She shares how our life experiences, both tangible and emotional, intertwine to shape the canvas of our envisioned future. But it doesn’t stop at visualization – holding onto that vision requires intentionality and dedication. Mimi talks about the significance of nurturing your dream, feeding it with knowledge and mentorship, and aligning your environment to reflect the future you’re striving to achieve. Tune in now and start holding a vision for your life!
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Creating And Holding A Vision For Your Life With Mimi Nartey
I have a big topic, but we’re going to try to keep it concise, fun, and light. I said we because guess who is back? It’s my wife, Dr. Mimi Nartey.
Thanks for having me again.
We are talking about creating a vision for your life. There’s no better person for me to do this with than the person I’m creating a life with, and that’s my wife. We wanted to break this down into a few categories for you. Do you want to give them the category we’re thinking about?
As we were sketching this out, we were talking about why we wanted to talk about this and what we wanted to talk about. Creating a vision for your life is important because you need to have a vision for your life to feel a sense of purpose, have some passion, make an impact, and have some enjoyment in your life. There are two parts to this. There’s creating the vision and holding the vision. Once it’s created, you need to hold it. What does it look like? What does it entail to develop this picture of what you want? Once you have some ideas of the pictures that you want to create or manifest, how do you hold fast to that vision for your life while you’re in the process of achieving it?
As we always do, we have our general ideas and concepts. We never compare notes until we get here in the booth.
We’ll see how it all reconciles.
This is a critical topic because, in challenging economic times and challenging times in life and business, it’s more important than ever to be able to create an actual vision or hold the vision that you’ve already had for yourself. Why don’t we start with that first concept of creating the vision? Jump right in.
As I was reflecting on this idea of creating a vision for your life, I realized that creating that vision either starts with a push or a pull. There’s something that you want to leave behind or a new reality that you’re inspired towards. I was thinking about this. When there’s something that you want to leave behind, you don’t necessarily have a clear idea of what could be next. You know you don’t want this anymore.
That is true because that push is usually away from pain, discomfort, and people who are causing pain and discomfort or a job. You’re right. It’s more about you feeling the fire, burn, pain, and disappointment. You know that something else is better than this.
Something has to be better than this. This is often the case if you’re part of the first generation of instituting something new in your family lineage. You could be creating a family business. You want to be the first generation to have a healthy marriage or constructive parenting. You want to break negative cycles that existed before in your family. You might want to be the first millionaire in your family. These are away from experiences that you have found as pain points before towards something else, but it’s a little bit obscure of what that something else is completely.
You may have grown up where there was a lot of negative energy or fighting in your household in the marriage. You’re like, “I want my marriage to be different than that, but I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know how to get there, but I want to start thinking about a different vision from what I’ve experienced.”
That’s heavy and deep. We hear people talk about breaking generational curses. Sometimes, it boils down to, “I am going to be the one to change the legacy of my family from this point moving forward.”
Both of our fathers are immigrants from West Africa. They came here in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I sometimes marvel at what dreams they were able to hold coming from one part of the world in such a difficult set of circumstances, relatively speaking, and how they were able to decide that they were going to leave that behind and create a new future for an entire lineage in a place that they had never even seen before. It’s a different context.
Creating a vision for your life can start with that push away from something that has been a part of your family before part of your family lineage. You’re saying, “I want to break that intergenerational curse.” The other piece is the pull. You could be inspired towards a reality that you have been exposed to in real life or through divine communication with God.
It ties into a couple of notes that I had. One of my notes was one of my Kofi-isms. One of my Kofi-ism is we have a responsibility during our lifetime to realize all of our God-given gifts and share them with the world. That is a pull. For me, it’s one of my strongest pulls. It’s knowing that I have the potential to do certain things and share those gifts with the world. It motivates me on a daily basis. It motivates me to motivate others to help realize their potential.
When you talk about divine gifts, it reminds me of the religious concept of SHAPE. We hear it in church. I’ve heard it from other religious leaders of other faiths around your SHAPE. The SHAPE is an acronym for your Spiritual Gifts, Heart’s Passion, Abilities, Personality, and Experience. You’re guided by this SHAPE towards what your potential is and what you want to leave and share with the world.
Even as we’re starting off and we’re talking about creating this vision and it’s going to be initiated by this push for this pull, it’s important because as you’re going to move towards holding your vision later, and that’s something that we’re going to talk about in the second half of this. If you are motivated by the push, it’s important that you focus on feeding your vision. If you’re motivated by the pull, it’s important that you focus on protecting your vision.
I’m going to go ahead and explain this for one second because if you are being pushed, you know that your current circumstances are not what you want for your future, but you may not know what that future vision is. That requires research and exposure. If you are being pulled because you are inspired by some other reality or divine communication with God or the universe and if you’re internally inspired, you have to protect that because other people may not understand the call that’s on your life. Those are the two different juxtapositions, but that’s getting into the holding. I wanted to explain how it’s going to relate to what we’re talking about later. First, it’s creating this vision and thinking about how you start to visualize and how you start to apply structure to your vision.
As you’re visualizing, there are two components to what you’re visualizing. You’re visualizing your life and how you experience your life. I was thinking about it. To break that down a little bit further, your life and the tangible aspects of your life are things like where you live, the car you drive, the food you eat, the places you frequently visit, how you travel, and how you experience life.
What is your experience in the place where you live? What is your experience with your friends? What is your experience when you travel? What is your experience when you go out for fine dining? There are a couple of different aspects that are important to get detailed with in terms of what you’re visualizing for your outcomes. It’s because when we start to transition into holding the vision, the vision has to be specific for us to be able to hold it, be pulled towards it, and be inspired by it.
This is powerful because I do think that many people start to think, “I would like this and that.” They don’t necessarily spend enough time on the emotional piece, which is what I’m hearing you say. How will I feel when I have that thing? That is the important hack to manifesting the thing that you want. When it comes to visualization, after you have that initial inspiration, you want to be intentional with how you’re visualizing what it is that you want. Imagination takes intention and practice. People don’t respect that creativity, imagination, and visualization. It takes time. You have to honor that it is a process that needs intention and practice. Journaling, meditation, prayer, talking out loud, and running simulations for yourself are ways that you can start to get more clarity and specificity in your vision.
When it comes to visualization, after you have that initial inspiration, you want to be intentional. Share on XYou’re hitting on some critical things because you think about this idea of your big why. People talk about it all the time. Simon Sinek made it popular. You have to be able to sit still and think about what it is that you want. Sit still and analyze that process of curating this life and this vision of this life and how you want to live it. It does take daily visualization, a vision board, and prompting with certain cues, experiences, and tools to help you think beyond what you can see at the moment.
There’s so much to be said about creating that space and that time for that visualization. Do you realize that it’s possible to build certain skills simply through the process of visualization? I was sharing this with some of the girls that I coach on my soccer team. You could spend time every night working through some technical things in your imagination that would create the connections in your brain synapses that would help you build the skills. That is huge. If you think about that, there’s so much to be said for this process of visualizing, imagining how much time you could invest into those things, and how that could be translated into major differences and improvements in skillsets in your life.
You’re saying, and I believe it because I’ve seen it, that you can program your brain to do things or better prepare you to do things without even doing them. It’s through mindset work visualization of what it is and the different aspects of doing those things.
That’s what I’m saying. This is such powerful insight, in my own opinion. I don’t play basketball. I want to go and learn some skills in basketball and how to make a shot. I could go and practice, but in my imagination, my practice could even be better than my actual practice. Physically, it could be.
The brain doesn’t know any different. This is where we have to lean into programming our brain and what we feed our brain. The brain doesn’t know if you’re joking, telling the truth, or lying. The brain will put together those synopses to put that action in place and make it an actionable thing.
This is why you have to be protective of what you feed yourself, what you say, and what you do because your brain is like a sponge. They always say that amongst children. You are absorbing all of these things. Your subconscious mind does not know the difference. You have to be careful. I’m passionate about what we tell children and what we instill in them because you have to be thoughtful and intentional about what you share with them.
Because of this reality, your subconscious mind does not know the difference between truth, what’s fact, or what’s fiction. Whatever information you overlay on your mind is what gets absorbed. We can use this to our tremendous advantage in a metaphysical sense, or we can see this as a point source for our challenges.
I love the time that we spent on creating the visualization, the structuring of it, your push, your pull, and the shape. Is there anything else on the creation piece before we transition to holding the vision?
As far as structuring your vision, because that’s an important thing too, there are two pieces to structuring it. There are some highly disciplined components to structuring your vision. It’s something that needs to be organized and intentional. There’s also some highly creative component to your vision. Once you have this idea for your life, it’s like, “I want to have this business.” In terms of the highly disciplined component, you are going to have to work diligently on the steps to achieve that goal. There’s another component that’s more creative, where you’re going to have to think through the unique application of your skills and shape that are going to create your signature style that is going to unlock the best parts of your vision.
What I’m hearing in there is you have to be able to tap into your gifts, talents, shape, and divine inspiration that will help you execute this vision or lay out even the vision.
That will help your vision grow, expand, and get more specific and attainable. The thing that is interesting is the more specific your vision is to you, interestingly, that’s how it becomes more achievable and attainable.
I have a question on that. I want to get philosophical here for a second. I don’t think we have it in our notes so we’ll see where this goes. How much of the vision do you think needs to be dialed in before you can commit to it? Sometimes, we limit our visions based on what we can see in front of us and what we know is possible versus I have these exponential goals that I don’t even know are possible, but that’s the actual vision that I want to hold. How much of it has to be set and laid out before we can say, “I know this is a ten-step vision. I see steps 1 through 7. With the last three, I’m going to go for it?”
I think that last bit about going for it is exactly it because I didn’t have notes on that specifically. What I did have a little note here was on what makes it hard to create a vision. What makes it hard? What are the barriers we’re facing? One of them is complacency or lack of ambition. That makes it hard to create a vision. Usually, your network is the problem. If you are feeling complacent and you can’t seem to find a motivation for something bigger, that means that the environment around you is not stimulating you enough. The people you’re talking to aren’t full of different kinds of ideas to break you out of the stagnant pattern that you’re in.
If you are feeling complacent, and you can't seem to find a motivation for something bigger, that means that the surrounding environment is not stimulating you enough. Share on XYou’re right because the people who are in your circle, like your five closest friends, as they always say, the things that they talk about and they’re fighting for, working towards, trying to aspire to, or income goals become yours. It rubs off on you. It influences you and impacts you on a daily basis, even as it relates to this visualization process.
The other two things that make it hard to create a vision are low self-esteem and low self-efficacy. It’s not feeling like you can do it. That’s some self-internal work that you have to do. Finally, to your previous point, your dream or your vision isn’t quite big enough. That makes it hard to create a vision and much harder to even sustain that vision. If your vision isn’t big enough or the scope of what you’re thinking about isn’t big enough, it’s going to be hard.
Sometimes, it’s better and even easier to think bigger. I was listening to both Sharran Srivatsaa, our good friend and the President of Real, and also Alex Hormozi. He had a podcast where he touched on this and this whole idea of, “I want to double my income. I want to do twice as much as I’m doing.” Usually, that thought process evokes the idea of working twice as hard versus saying, “I want to 100X what I’m doing.” It means that you’re going to have to rethink your whole infrastructure, game plan, and model in a way that’s going to make you more creative and resourceful than ever.
That’s where your motivation and creativity are going to be kicked up into high gear and where you’re probably going to focus on what aspects of this vision are amplified by your specific shape.
We’ve touched on creating the vision, why you created it, how you created it, and your SHAPE. Let’s talk about once you have the vision, how do you hold the vision? How do you protect the vision? How do you feed the vision? What’s next in the process?
Feeding your vision is important, especially if there’s something that you know you’re trying to leave behind or eliminate. It could be a weight loss goal. It’s like, “I have never been in shape. I want to be fit. I don’t know completely what I’m going to look like, what that’s going to feel like, and how I’m going to get there, but it requires research and exposure.” The outcome may not be clear or the pathway may be a black box. In order to feed your vision, you need to soak yourself in information about that and find good mentorship.
If you can find someone who has been along the same or similar path to help guide you. I know that whenever I’ve been in a process that seemed to me to be a black box, I turn to a trusted mentor to ask, “I’m at this point. I want to be at that point. You are at that point. Tell me, what was your process like? Even though I know it may not be the same, at least it’s starting to give me some clues about the direction that I need to go.”
We have to be even more abstract when we think about mentorship. I have been in real estate for many years. When I started, I didn’t have mentors and access directly to mentors. My mentors became books and Google. I had to research these things. Now you have everything from autobiographies to biographies to books on tape, to podcasts, all this access to information from people who’ve done what you want to do, who are living the way you want to live, who are now open to, willing, and sharing their process on how they got there.
Even if you don’t have direct access to somebody, you have access to people’s journeys and their information. This is why that feeding part of it can come through direct access and actual conversations with people. It can come through podcasts. I love reading books, but I also think it’s more important to reread books. You own the information and hold that vision board that you’ve created. All of these things will help you feed that vision.
The next thing in relationship to that is integrating more in your life that aligns with that ultimate vision. That includes people, things, and experiences. You need to integrate more into your life that is lining up with that final outcome.
I didn’t know you had that in your notes, but I will attest to you guys. She is living this truth, even in our household. She’s constantly upgrading and changing. She’s changing this mirror, bureau, dining table, and chairs. If I disappear, you know what happened. She changed me one day. It’s always realigning with the next version and a big vision of ourselves. It does fuel your mind. It feeds and fuels that vision. It helps you hold the vision.
One of the barriers is often low self-esteem or low self-efficacy. The idea that you don’t believe in your own heart and mind that you belong at that next yourself. The more that you can do to line yourself up with that in your lived experiences, the more you will convince your own subconscious mind that is who you truly are. You will start to make more decisions and exercise more actions in alignment with that final outcome.
Exercise more actions in alignment with that final outcome. I had to say it twice for the people in the back and the people in the front. When we look at the examples that are out there and we look at where people have arrived, people want to mimic where they’ve arrived, but they don’t want to mimic the actions that that person took to get there.
We talk about adjectives and nouns. You can feed your environment with nouns that’ll help you visualize. You can also feed your adjectives. You look at the adjectives that it’s taken somebody else to get their perseverance, hard work, attention to detail, and professionalism. You can emulate the adjectives that it takes. That becomes your hard wiring. This takes us back to what you said about the brain. The brain doesn’t know any better. If you start programming the brain with those adjectives, that’s who you now are.
The word programming is important. All of this whole idea of creating a vision and leveling is about reprogramming. It’s reprogramming your mind to reprogram your life. The final thing I have for feeding your vision is to document your advancement. That’s an important part of the process because, as you start to see yourself make progress, you will become more of a believer in yourself.
On top of that, and these are your techniques, revisit the documentation. We talk about how we document things and sometimes forget that we’ve done them. It’s important to go back and say, “I did that. I accomplished that. I persevere through this to get to that.” It’s good to remind yourself of your adjectives.
Commend yourself. It’s an issue of faith. It feeds your faith and what’s possible beyond where you are because you can look at how far you’ve come. There’s that beautiful old church thing that’s like, “I’m not where I want to be, but I’m sure glad I’m not where I used to be.” That’s the idea of continuing to document your progress and look back with a grateful heart on how far you’ve come.
Documenting your progress feeds your faith and what's possible beyond where you are because you can look at how far you've come. Share on XAnother great way to help hold your vision is to define the right accountability partners for the different aspects of your vision. We talk about the full mogul journey. The full mogul journey is the highest and best version of yourself across all aspects of yourself. When we look at those different aspects, those are different buckets of your life. The different buckets of your life might require slightly different visions.
Your overall vision is your whole life, but you might have a vision for fitness, work, as a spouse, or a parent. I look at my own life. I have my little brother, Lamine. We text each other when we work out. I’ve got a good buddy, Joe. He’s a wrestling coach. We text each other when we work out. I’m like, “I got a good one this week.” He’ll text me, “I got two in this week.” I’ve got Bill Pipes and Sharran Srivatsaa, my business coaches. They help me with my business accountability. I have you, who’s my overall accountability partner. It’s important to find those people who can help you hold the vision for the specific things that you’re working on.
That relates a little bit to the protecting your vision piece. As we’re talking about, there’s feeding your vision, especially when you’re trying to leave something behind. That’s important. As you’re being pulled towards something, it’s great to have coaches and mentors, but on the protecting your vision part, sometimes you may have that inspiration. There’s something that has been put on your heart that you know it’s for you to do. It’s a conversation between you and God.
If I could take a moment to digress, there’s a statue that was being carved by Michelangelo. It was never completed. What I think is interesting and powerful is it wasn’t completed before he died. It was never completed after because, as I was telling our children in our European art history homeschool class, the vision was between the creator and the subject. There’s no one else who can execute the vision that the creator held for them.
This is why protecting your own vision, especially when it comes from that divine inspiration, that still quiet voice inside you, you are the main keeper of that specific message on what your purpose is and who you can be. Nobody else knows fully. You know what that call is on your life except you. You have to find, if possible, a trusted friend or partner that you can share that dream with.
On the flip side, keep it private from those who can’t understand because there’s also that quote, “A prophet is never respected in their own hometown.” When you have that call in your life that may be bigger than what has ever been seen in generations of your family before and what people generally do in the hometown that you come from, you may have to protect that vision until you get to a certain place of stability with it.
You hit on many important things. We can’t announce and share everything. We can’t create vulnerability for things that are forming. I refer to it as even a castle building. That’s why castles have a moat around them. It’s to protect them. While they continue to build the castle, the cement has to dry before it gets introduced to the world.
You are building on something that was inspired within you, but it’s a seedling when it starts. It’s the mustard seed. We know what can happen with the faith in the mustard seed. If you are able to protect that and protect it from the haters, I’m going to use the word haters because if you haven’t read it, read our episode on haters. We’ve got a whole episode on haters and when you have to protect yourself from the haters, but this is one of those things to think about as it relates to protecting your vision.
With that special call in your life, honor it and understand that it’s not for everybody. When you find the right people, person, or mastermind group, you can share that with them. They will be encouraging. They will be supportive of you right away. They’ll have good insights to help refine and hone the direction you can go to manifest that vision.
We talked about the people that you surround yourself with. If you are surrounded and have outgrown the people that you’ve surrounded yourself with, they become those crabs in a barrel who want to pull you back to where they’re comfortable seeing you, not to release you to be this new person that you’ve evolved into. Sometimes, it’s time to jump barrels, jump ship, find a new tribe, and find a new group that aligns with this new version of yourself, this new vision for yourself, and the outcomes that you desire that they are already living and experiencing or can give you access to.
In this protecting your vision conversation, you also have to swiftly and gradually eliminate things that don’t align with the ultimate vision. That is also a challenge because sometimes, there are things that are obvious. There are things that are less obvious as you make a lot of progress. You don’t realize, “This is something that seemed benign, but it’s holding me back in some way.”
This is a funny story. I had a professional coaching call with a client before. The most random thing is she was asking whether or not she should continue shopping at the Dollar Tree. This is a woman who’s successful. As we talked, what I told her was that she may need to take a break, not because there’s anything wrong with the Dollar Tree. If you need to get some tape or staples, there is no problem, but it was what it meant psychologically to her because she was connecting it to her past and growing up in challenging circumstances. That was the only place her family could afford to shop.
There was this baggage and this negative psychological hold on her that was connected to this place. Until your mindset is over the hump and you feel confident and fully aligned with the next version of yourself, you may have to eliminate this for a while. It’s a funny little random example. Hopefully, it’s a metaphor that people can leverage into other aspects of their lives.
I’m loving this content. It’s setting a new bar for yourself. When you set a new bar, you have to leave certain things behind. In leaving certain things behind and in making certain declarations, you’re holding the bar to keep that vision of yourself that is above and beyond the bar. You can’t digress. The other thing that it does for you is it creates discipline in the new shoes, steps, and walk of this new journey that you’re on. It requires discipline to get to your vision. Part of the discipline requires letting go of certain things and saying no to certain things. That is the hardest thing to do.
It’s in those small actions that your identity lies. That’s where your identity is. If you are trying to transform your identity, it’s not necessarily going to be in big, sweeping things. It’s going to be in the nuances of the decisions that you make. If you decide that you’re going to go here or there for lunch, those kinds of small choices are the ones that line up with your identity. It’s funny because I know you talk about this a lot with acting and the choices that the character would make. It’s like thinking through what choices this character would make if that character is the next or the highest and best version of myself.
Transforming your identity is not necessarily going to be in big sweeping things. It's going to be in the nuances of the decisions that you make. Share on XThis has been great. I love the energy. I’m ready to log off and get back to work on the vision. Why don’t we bring this home with a quick recap? Is there anything you want to leave everyone with or any points we didn’t get a chance to make?
It’s thinking about what makes it hard to hold the vision. I talked a little bit about what makes it hard to create the vision. Something that makes it hard to hold the vision is not having daily irregular habits that are connected with the ultimate vision and not seeing sustained progress in your life, which is why it’s important to document because we are making progress. It’s like that MLK quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Even though the arc of our self-actualization is long, it is getting there. Finally, what makes it hard to hold division are our present circumstances or challenges. You have to learn to believe in the truth and not be confused by the way things appear in a moment of challenge.
This is true. You are not your current or your challenging circumstances. You are the vision of yourself that you’re holding. You touched on it right there at the end. It is finding yourself in the spaces that align with who you are. The last quote that comes to mind that I’m making up right now is you need to get accustomed to being you.
You are the vision that you’re holding for yourself. Make sure that your environment, peers, clothes, diet, workouts, conversations, and mental conversations align with you. This was a great conversation and energy. Holding and creating that vision is something that we often have to revisit. Sometimes, we have to redefine. Hopefully, these tools are helpful for you guys along the way.
Thanks again for having me.
Please reach out to us if this is helpful. DM us on social media. As we always say, share this with somebody else who needs to hear it and can benefit from revamping or holding their vision or protecting their vision. Use this as part of your full mogul journeys. On with your day, moguls.
Important Links
- Dr. Mimi Nartey
- Haters – Past Episode