Housecraft : Lesson 2: Visualize an Ideal Day

Lesson Overview

Objective

Draw on the life plan outlined in the previous lesson to create a vision of an ideal weekday
Keep growing your BOPO

Assignment Summary

Create a “Routines” section in your BOPO
Optional: Create a “vision” section in your BOPO
In your BOPO, record answers to questions provided at the end of the lesson
Look for trends or themes in your answers
Based on the trends or themes you notice, pick one small thing to start doing routinely to achieve your ideal day.

Lesson

“Imagine yourself as a happy, successful homemaker. Let your creative imagination give you some ideal experiences—if you haven’t had enough actual ones—and you’ll become a happy, effective homemaker.”

--Daryl V. Hoole, The Art of Homemaking, page 27. 1969.

Congratulations! You’ve made it through our first three lessons. You’re probably already noticing some changes in yourself and your home by now. Isn't it exciting? I hope we can keep that momentum going.

Our last lesson was focused on introspectively identifying our life roles and the purposes and goals we have within those roles. Now we’re going to take these thoughts to the next level and use the power of visualization to watch our desired roles play out in an ideal day.

If you’ve never learned about or tried the power of visualization, get excited. This is potent material. I strongly recommend reading at least the first two articles in the reading list for this lesson. If you’re really excited about the power of the mind in creating our reality, I recommend the classic book As a Man Thinketh by James Allen. It's available for free online, but it's possibly worth owning a hard copy (I have a copy on my shelf—it’s that good).

Once we have visualized and recorded our thoughts on an ideal day, we’ll be able to draw on those ideas as you create personal routines for your life and home in lessons to come.

We’ll also draw on those ideas for another visualization exercise we’ll do in unit 4: seeing your home in its ideal state.

Build BOPO

So, let’s get started. Grab your BOPO and make some space in the "Personal" section you made in our last lesson, or create a new section called “Vision” or “Goals” or something. The point is to make a space for notes will take on the visualizations and ideas we’ll be generating and mark the space clearly so that you can come back to it later.

Make another section called “Routines.” We’ll use this section a little bit with this lesson, and more in later lessons. Make a space to write down morning, evening, and afternoon routines. For me this was just some headings on a page that I filled in and re-worked and I developed my routines.

Visualize your ideal day using a time-based approach

In thinking about an ideal day, we’re not trying to visualize your ideal day on vacation. We’re trying to visualize your ideal working weekday. I recommend doing this exercise for your weekend as well, but for the purposes of this lesson, focus on seeing a regular weekday turned perfect.

The questions listed at the end of this lesson will guide you through this visualization exercise. You don’t have to answer all the questions: just work through as many as you need to get a clear and thorough picture of an ideal day from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you fall asleep at night. You can include specific hours and minutes if you want to, but it’s probably easier if you just work through an overall chronology of your ideal day rather than assigning exact times things happen (with perhaps the exception of a wake-up and bed time). This constitutes the “time based” approach to visualizing your ideal day.

Include as much detail as possible. I find it helpful to think about the senses involved in each aspect of the day: what I’m seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling (including both tactile and emotional).

Here’s an excerpt of visualization of an ideal day as an example of what we’re going for in this exercise:

Can you visualize yourself just as your husband is coming home for dinner? You greet him at door with a smile and a kiss. You look pert, attractive and well-groomed. The kitchen presents a well-set table, and the aroma of a delicious dinner is tantalizing to the appetite. The children are happy and are playing or studying contentedly. The house is orderly and is sparkling clean. You feel at peace with yourself because today’s work has been done today. The stage is set for an ideal dinner hour and a pleasant evening to follow.

From The Art of Homemaking by Daryl V. Hoole in 1969, page 26

Notice the attention to sensory detail. Smells, sights, emotional states, and so forth are all described. It makes for a very beautiful and desirable image doesn’t it?

Once you have visualized your day, step back and notice any trends or themes in your ideal day. Is your ideal day consistent with the roles and purposes you clarified for yourself in our last lesson? Note anything that seems inconsistent. It either means you aren’t visualizing what’s really important to you, or you’ve discovered, by visualizing your ideal day, something very important that should be tied to a key role in your life. You may want to adjust your vision and goals.

Visualize your ideal day using an objectives-based approach

Now, some people love to think through their day in great detail as shown in the previous section. Others don’t like to be so meticulous in their visualization of an ideal day, feeling it’s too confining and actually doesn’t capture the root of what brings them satisfaction in a day. If that’s the case, embrace this truth about yourself and take another approach to outlining an ideal day by focusing on objectives which, if met, will constitute an ideal day. I have included another list of questions to guide you through a less detailed, more objectives-based outline of an ideal day at the end of this lesson.

Here’s an example of an objectives-based approach to an ideal day from my dad, who clearly favors this approach to visualizing and achieving his ideal day:

Perfect Day

Have a quiet half hour for my spirit
Be happy
Take care of my body
Strengthen my mind

Learn something useful
Read something that requires effort, thought
Do a good turn
Do two things I don’t want to do

Be agreeable

Dress well
Talk courteously
Not critical

Write down what I expect to do

Notice that while this lacks sensory details, it focuses on action-based objectives for the day. As long as these objectives are met, it’s been a “perfect” day.

You may find it helpful to try both approaches to visualizing and outlining your ideal day. The detailed approach can be more motivating and provide more insight into what you want in a day, while objective-based approach can be easier to remember and adapt to any day.

In following either or both approaches, you’ll meet this lesson’s objective, which is to figure out what you would like to get out of each day so that we can build on that foundation throughout this course.

Look for Trends and Do One Thing

Once you have an ideal day visualized and recorded, look for themes or trends in your vision. These indicate areas where you can immediately take action to achieve your ideal day. I appreciated what Danielle Nelson says in the article “How to Create Your Ideal Day in Work and Play":

After I completed the exercise [of visualizing an ideal day], I set out to incorporate just one thing—one feeling—into my “normal” everyday life. I chose space, because it was a predominant theme for me and the thing I felt the most drawn to.
Everything in my current world had felt very crammed together—work, friends, family, downtime; it all felt rushed. Deep inside, I craved breathing room.
When I sat down to incorporate space into my schedule, I was surprised at what I found: that I had the “room” to incorporate so much of my ideal day into my life right now. . . . I could have not just space, but balance, self-care, and excitement, too.
Not five years from now, or even two—right now.”

Based on what you see as a trend in your ideal day (or based on what would be really easy to do), try putting one small thing into practice right away. In the “Routines” section of your BOPO, write this action down. If you want to, you can write it down along with other aspects of your routine; just know that we’ll be doing a more guided approach to building routines later.

What one thing are you going start doing to make your ideal day a reality? Post your goal on our Facebook page!

Questions for time-based visualization:

Tip: As you answer these questions, try to include as much sensory and emotional detail as possible—what do you see, hear, smell, feel, taste, etc. Only answer as many questions as you need to get a complete picture of your ideal day.

Morning:

What time to you wake up?

How many hours did you sleep?

How did you wake? Did you wake up with an alarm or on your own?

Where are you and what do you see when you wake up?

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?

What do you do after that?

What tasks do you ideally complete in the morning?

Who else is waking up? What do you envision them doing? How do you interact with/help them?

How do you look?

How do you feel?

Afternoon:

How do you spend your time?

What are you eating during the day?

What tasks are you completing?

Who are you working with/helping?

Where are you going?

What are you seeing and experiencing around you?

How do you look?

How do you feel?

Evening:

What are you eating?

Who is coming home? How are they feeling? How are you feeling? How do you greet each other?

What have you accomplished at this point in your day?

How do you look? How do you feel?

What are you and your family seeing around you?

How do you prepare for bed?

What’s the last thing you do before bed?

What’s the last thing you see?

What time are you asleep?

Questions for objectives-based visualization:

What are a few of the top roles you listed from our previous lesson? What do you need to do each day to meet your desired purposes in these roles? List your answers. These points become your main objectives for the day.

In what ways can you go about achieving your main objectives? List these as sub points to your main objectives.

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Saturday, September 24, 2016

Lesson 2: Visualize an Ideal Day