"It is easy to go nowhere. It requires no energy and has no risk except that of being left behind. To go forward and run ahead is a supreme test." - Alan Newhouse, NASA

Last week I was at a meeting of people in the coaching business. The speaker asked who in the room had a clear vision for their business. Only 3 people raised their hands! This was pretty sad since most of them encourage their coaching clients to have a vision. But in my experience this lack of one is more common than not. Most people have no clear vision at all. The result is - they go nowhere. The speaker commented that 90% of the people in the coaching business will never make more than $20K per year. That's going nowhere.

So how do we create a clear vision for ourselves? Vision is the grand image of your life and business as you would like to see it when it is fully developed. It is the biggest, most exciting picture of your life you can imagine. It is the image of HOW you are going to create your success. But it's not enough. You need to know WHY. Why are you doing whatever you are doing? Why?

When you find the WHY you will have found your purpose! Purpose is what makes your heart sing, it's what keeps you going when work is tough or boring. Without purpose you'll be tempted to quit. Without purpose you'll have a tough time writing out your vision and it won't have any real emotional power. That's why these coaches didn't have a vision - they hadn't gotten in touch with their purpose and they didn't know WHY they were coaching.

When Albert Einstein was asked how he could maintain the rigorous concentration that he did for over 30 years, he simply said, "In the state of mind which enables a person to do work of this kind the daily activities come straight from the heart." Purpose always comes from the heart, not the head. Your purpose will make you come alive and it will tell you what kind of a difference you want to make in the world.

Don't wait for your purpose to be "revealed" to you, either. You get to choose it! Look for what makes you enthusiastic and find your purpose in that. Then creating a vision is pretty easy. If you're a coach, for example, figure out what there is in coaching that brings you real joy. Get in touch with that and run with it. If you can't find anything, then maybe you're in the wrong business.

Whever you discover, put it in writing. You want your purpose and vision to be so clear, so distinct, that someone can read your description and know exactly what you mean. A clear vision, backed by a powerful WHY, will get you everything you want, and make the world better at the same time.

One thing that may get in the way of dicovering a strong purpose is your belief system. Your inner critic starts to chatter about the impossibliity of "little ol' you" doing anything so grand. It's important that you find ways to quiet this chatter, so here are some suggestions that have worked for me. The first is to keep a Success Journal. Every day write down a list of successes. They don't have to be big, just something important that you got done. Seeing your accomplishments gives you confidence that you can do more.

Then, just concentrate on the next step so that you don't get overwhelmed by the whole project. You get to your big goals one step at a time. Keep your vision in your mind, but your eyes on the next step. You can also work with affirmations to create the new beliefs that you want. State positively in the present tense what you want and expect. "Most people say YES to me." "Money flows to me easily from multiple sources." You want to condition your mind to expect the best.

I like to play games with my mind using quantum physics. One of the theories in physics is called "many worlds" and proposes that there are an infinite number of parallel universes. When we make a choice or decision, we are in effect choosing between alternate futures. So if my mind is giving me trouble with believing that I can actually achieve my purpose, I simply tell it, "Hey, look, I'm choosing to move into a parallel universe where this is true!" It's funny, but it really seems to work.

Transforming our beliefs is important because in life we don't get what we want, we get what we expect. So we want to be very careful to expect what we want, to see it as a reality in our life.

So have you figured out your WHY yet? If not, get working on it. With a clear purpose, life is very, very good!

Wes Hopper is the founder of Create Success Seminars and an author, trainer and motivational speaker who is dedicated to assisting sales people and business owners in finding their purpose and living their dreams. http://www.CreateSuccessSeminars.com