Visioning® For Families

One of our Visioning® Coach Training Program trainees, Claudia Jean Hill of Maryland (lower left in family photo), has been using the Visioning® process with her family for the past three years. She was also Certified by me several years ago as a Creative Journal Expressive Arts instructor. Here is how she describes her experience with familyVisioning®.

Our family of children, including married kids with spouses, have met to create collages of our "Hopes and Dreams for the Coming Year". At first when several family members were reluctant, I made it my birthday party -- they felt a little obligation. But they loved it, and now it is an annual tradition.




Now we have a family (adult) collage session usually on New Year's Day. (The winter holiday makes it easier to include students home on break.) I have work spaces and "mood music" set up ahead of time.

We start with a non-dominant hand scribble/coloring, out of which I ask them to create a phrase that defines, "What is the desire of my heart for the coming year?" We go through the 10-steps of the Visioning® process, including right & left hand dialog with the Inner Critic. Then we have a sharing time before people split up to go home. It's wonderful to share with the people you love so deeply in this very different and personal way. It has brought us a lot closer, to understand what each is seeking in his/her life, along with what each struggles with.

Now that we have done this for 3 years, we have added some sharing time at the beginning, to review or tell what happened with our last year's collage. Last year my son in law had some very dramatic lifestyle and job changes that were right there in his collage long before they began to precipitate in his work! I invite the family to journal with the images on the collage with the non-dominant hand, which they sometimes do on their own or later with me. They all hang the collages somewhere they will see every day. Some of them simply let the collage incubate in their minds and others actively journal with it for the year. We have been amazed at how it affirms and guides our personal and family progress!

In my book Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams there
is a chapter entitled "Visioning & Relationship." There you can read more stories about how people found their mates, planned their weddings and honeymoons, adopted children, and planned their empty nest years in later life.
For more information on the process go to: www.visioningcoach.org.
Books and audios are available at www.LuciaC.com

The family that plays together, stays together. Family Visioning® is just plain fun, and it works!