Most people can tell you in detail what they don't want. Ask them what they do want and the answer gets vague fast — something better, something different, more time maybe. If that sounds familiar, you're not short on ambition. You're short on a clear picture. And a vague picture is very hard to walk towards.
I sat down with Wayne Forrest, a life mastery consultant based in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, to work through the exercise he uses with clients to turn that fog into something specific. It takes about ten minutes and a bit of honesty.
Start by scoring the four areas of your life
Wayne breaks a life into four areas, and reckons the results you're getting in each one are a fairly accurate reflection of how much attention you've given it:
- Health and wellbeing
- Relationships
- Vocation — your career or business, but also your personal expression: the art, the music, the thing you'd make whether or not anyone paid you
- Time and money freedom
Give each one a score out of ten. A ten in health and wellbeing means you're jumping out of bed with energy you can't wait to spend. A ten in relationships means the people in your life leave you feeling lifted, not drained. A ten in vocation means you actually want to get started on a Monday. A ten in time and money freedom means you can take the trip, or help the person you want to help, without the logistics crushing the idea.
Be honest. Most of us land somewhere in the middle across the board, and that's the normal, useful place to start from.
Then pick your lowest score — and imagine it at ten
Here's the part people skip. Don't go straight to planning. Take your lowest-scoring area and ask: if I could wave a wand and make this a ten tomorrow, what would it actually look like?
Not "better". Specifically. What would you be doing on a Tuesday evening? Who's there? How does your body feel when you wake up? What's no longer in the picture? Wayne pushes clients to describe it in enough detail that they can feel it, because a goal you can feel behaves very differently from a goal you can only describe.
Once you've done one area, the others get easier. And now you've got the raw material for something much more useful than a resolution.
Write a vision statement in the present tense
The format Wayne uses with clients begins: "I am so happy and grateful now that I am…" and then the specific picture. Walking down the beach hand in hand with my partner. Finishing work at four to coach my kid's team. Waking up without needing the alarm.
The present tense is doing deliberate work here. It puts you inside the thing rather than outside it reaching for it. Wayne's observation is that the moment you shift into trying to get something, you're back in the feeling of not having it — the constriction, the envy, the lack. And the feeling of lack tends to produce more decisions that look like lack.
Wayne frames this in terms of vibration, energy and quantum physics — he's drawing on the law of attraction tradition, and he'd be the first to say he's offering a worldview rather than a lab result. You don't have to buy the metaphysics for the practice to work. Read it plainly and it's still powerful: if you want a better relationship, start behaving today like the partner in that picture would behave. Show up as that person now, while the circumstances still disagree with you. Facts about where you are right now are real — they're also changeable, and they tend to change in the direction of how you consistently act.
Everything gets created twice
Wayne offered an image I keep coming back to. Look around whatever room you're in. The chair, the window, the phone in your hand, the house itself, the street outside. Every single object started as a thought in somebody's head, and then somebody acted on it long enough for it to take physical form. A pen began as a feather and an idea. Flight began as a thought.
His point isn't mystical. It's that you are going to create something either way. Live from a feeling of lack and you'll build a life shaped by it. So you may as well build from a picture you'd love — by design, rather than by default.
Your "disability" might just be the thing in the way
Wayne lives with a physical disability following a spinal injury, and he's reframed it as the launching point for the work he now does. But he's careful to widen the definition. A disability, as he uses the word, is whatever currently stands between you and the life you'd love. For him it was physical. For you it might be a belief you absorbed at fourteen, a job that pays well and costs more, a habit you're tired of defending, or a pattern in how you do relationships.
The exercise works the same regardless. Name where you are, name where you'd love to be, and then close the gap by acting like the person in the picture.
Key takeaways
- Score your four life areas out of ten: health and wellbeing, relationships, vocation or personal expression, and time and money freedom.
- Take your lowest score and describe what a ten would look like in concrete, sensory detail — not just "better".
- Write it as a present-tense statement: "I am so happy and grateful now that I am…"
- Act like the person in the picture before the circumstances agree with you. Behaviour tends to lead conditions, not follow them.
- Remember that you're creating something either way — by design or by default. Choose design.
- Get curious rather than critical. Wayne's parting advice: ask yourself different questions and see what happens.
What I appreciate about this exercise is that it puts health where it belongs — as one of four areas, interlocking with the rest. I see it constantly in clinic: the nutrition plan that falls apart isn't usually a bad plan, it's a good plan attached to a life nobody designed. When you know what you're building and why, eating well and moving well stop being chores and start being obvious. That's the holistic approach I take at me&my wellness — we work on the food, the sleep and the stress, inside the context of the life you actually want.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au