Tag: vision

Tips on Honing your Creative Vision Plan

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Suzanne Valadon, 1930

Bonjour creatives!

How is your Creative Vision PlanTM evolving? Are  you pleased with your vision statement and your mission statement? Are you feeding your creativity?

Remember that your vision statement is futuristic and imaginative. Your mission statement is more practical—what you are actually doing or what you want to be doing. 

I am happy with both my vision and mission statements, but it did take me some time and tweaking to get there. I even cut pictures out of magazines to create a “vision collage” to make my vision concrete and real. Are you a visual artist or visual learner? This approach may help you.

Finally, with journaling and collaging, I honed my vision statement as follows:

My Vision Statement: To feed my creativity in all genres and mediums. Keep writing and publishing while nurturing streams of income. Work to insure my legacy remains for future generations.

Clearly, my vision is futuristic, even beyond my lifetime—to my legacy. Also, it’s quite general which leaves me lots of leeway with anything I wish to do that “feeds my creativity.”

Next, you have the challenge of writing your personal mission statement. I find this step a bit more difficult as it involves the doing! What am I doing? What do I want to do? Our mission statements guide our everyday life and what we plan to do as well as what we are doing.

Next step, once you have settled on your mission statement, break it into achievable goals and tasks. If you missed my blog on creating your plan, check it out here on July 31, 2023, “Five Steps to Your Creative Vision Plan” for more on this process.

Next steps: Here is the real challenge (at least for me): Staying true to your goals. Good news! They aren’t carved in stone! Adjust as necessary.  I am finding that I need to trim my goals a bit and also confession: I did not complete a detailed timeline though I did focus on short term goals through the end of the year. As I refine my plan, I am going to add more detailed tasks and a timeline to keep me on track. 

My first goal is the most fun: “Do something creative everyday!”

One of my large watercolors evolving-do something creative everyday!

My second goal is to keep Rainbow Warrior (my latest book of poetry launched in May, 2023) alive and visible. So, I will read a poem or two tonight at the local open mic and share a few lines here with my readers.

Photo & words by poet; lines from “Myth of the Infinite Sea”

And finally, dear readers, please feel free to make comments below about how my suggestions on a creative vision plan worked with your own process.

Sharing the process can be empowering for all!

Happy Visioning!

Five Steps to Your Creative Vision Plan

Poet Voice2 Comments
photo by the poet

And I/like the moth orchid/

open my petals to the moon

tides swell in me/I wax/I wane

She gives birth/The orchid blooms

My child-self takes form/Ink flows like blood

“Full Moon” by Jacquelyn Markham, from Rainbow Warrior (2023 Finishing Line Press, reprinted with permission)

The waxing moon is in Capricorn until around midnight, July 31, ET (NY) and slides into Aquarius on August 1, Lunar Lammas, a super full moon, the first of two August supermoons! So, wow! lunar energy in abundance as we wind down the summer in full Leo season (in the western hemisphere.)

A new moon rises in Leo on August 16, great energy for focusing on implementing your vision for yourself.

Before we spin around August and enter the moon in Aquarius though, we have a little time to finalize tasks of the Capricorn moon, including setting clear short-term goals (astrological guidance from the We’Moon calendar, learn more here: We’Moon). So, how about a plan for yourself and your creativity?

Does this sound dreary to you creatives out there? Does the phrase Strategic Plan make your eyes glaze over? I understand, but it’s really more rewarding & creative than you might think.  Some years ago as an arts consultant for Kentucky Peer Advisory Network (KPAN), I traveled to arts organizations large and small and assisted them with grants, board development, marketing, and yes, strategic planning! That was a great gig except for the driving on mountain roads without guard rails and the long roads to western Kentucky (I was living in Lexington at the time). But, I digress. As an arts consultant, however, I did learn the importance of having a plan to focus your creativity.

My way of making this process of creating a Strategic Plan more fun is to think of it as a *Vision* for my creative life. So, still in the middle of moon in Capricorn, I set about to work on my Vision Plan and finished the details as the clock slipped into today, July 31, while the moon is still in Capricorn.

What about  you, dear readers? Want to give it a try? I focused my plan on short term goals from now until December 2023. Here’s the step-by-step process:

Step 1: Write your vision statement. Your vision statement is futuristic and should inspire you. Mine is only three sentences long and I’ve written it in gold ink at the top of a new page in my journal.

Step 2: Next, write your mission statement which differs from but grows out of your vision statement. There are many resources on this process of writing a mission statement (search Strategic Plan) but think simply. What is it you do or want to do everyday? Focus on the present. Keep it brief.

Step 3: Now, short term goals that fit within your vision and your mission. I settled on five, but worked through several pages of writing to see the difference in the goals and the tasks it would take to accomplish them. You could focus on three (a nice number) or more if you are energetic, but I suggest no more than seven. Can some of the short term goals be moved to long term goals, for example?

Step 4: The details, the tasks, the baby steps! What tasks will be needed to meet these goals? (You can break up tasks to smaller baby steps, too.)

Step 5:  Create a timeline and in January 2024, review and revise for the new year!

Now that  you have carved out the details of your Vision Plan, enjoy the three lunations of August and start to collaborate and network while the moon is full in Aquarius.  And always, always, celebrate the fullness and beauty of the full moon and your own accomplishments coming to fruition. 

            And remember to celebrate your vision plan for the creativity in your life!