I’m often shocked how few people use vision boards to achieve their goals, or even understand exactly what a vision board is. In this episode you’ll learn what they are, why to use them and most importantly the process to create one. If you’ve never made one, you’re about to learn everything you need to know. If you have dabbled in the past, then get ready to learn some fresh tips to step up your manifestation game and digitize your creation. So, get out of your head, into your heart and let’s reveal the strategy behind vision boards.
INTRO:
Hey, it’s Julie and welcome to the Corporate Yogi podcast.
I’m curious, do you have a vision board?
Do you know what a vision board is?
Well, last week on a coaching call I had a client admit she didn’t know what a vision board was.
And this, I have to tell you, is not an isolated incident. This has happened a few times over the last couple years, and every time it does, I am shocked.
What do you mean you don’t know what a vision board is, have you never seen, The Secret?
And this is a perfect reminder that sometimes when things are in our comfort zone and we know how to do them easily, we just assume everyone else knows what we know. But that’s not the case.
I first learned about vision boards about 20 years ago and then I dove into using them and I’ve used them ever since. They’ve evolved over time and right now I have them down to a science, of how I create them, how I use them and when I update them
Often when I explain to a client what it is and how it works, they next logical question they have is, for instructions on how to create one.
So a Big shout out to Emily in New York, who just last week asked me for instructions to create a vision board.
She was the inspiration to finally create this episode on vision boarding.
If you’ve never made one, you’re about to learn how
If you have made one, you’ll learn some tips for how to step up your manifestation and even digitize your masterpiece.
So here’s a look at what you’re going to learn today:
1) First, I’m going to explain what a vision board is
2) In the 2nd segment I’ll explain why you’ll want to create one.
3) In the 3rd segment I’ll share how to build one
4) and in the 4th segment, I’ll teach you how to create a specialized one AND I’ll reveal which celebrity is on MY vision board
So get out of your head and into your heart and let’s dive right in shall we.
SEGMENT 1:
Let’s start at the beginning and explain what a vision board is.
And similar to the last episode on building a daily practice, you’re going to hear a lot more from the end of the spectrum of the Yogi Julie today, rather than the Corporate Julie for this episode. It’s all good though, we need to have a balance of both in our life, right?
A vision board is a collage of aspirational images that represent what you want your future life to contain,
to look like and to feel like.
It can include literal images like a specific car, a house, a trip or adventure.
Or it can be more metaphorical images that represent themes to you like success, health, balance and relationships.
Sometimes people get wrapped up thinking only about material objects and so their vision board becomes one dimensional. And it’s great to own things, but we have to make sure that the things don’t own us.
Yes, have some material objects and toys, but don’t stop there.
Think lifestyle. What do you want your lifestyle to be like. How do you want to feel?
Who do you want in your life.
There’s really no limit of what you can put on your vision board, but the key is to think into the future, and what do you want to manifest or bring into your life in the future, that isn’t here today
Vision boards should be inspirational, and they should evoke our emotions.
Think Big hairy audacious goals, think Bucket list goals
This is the time and the place to think BIG.
Do you have to know how and when you will go on that trip to the Galapagos Islands? Or how you plan to pay for it. Nope. This isn’t a strategic planning document, this isn’t a budget.
Think of it as a veritable playground for your biggest dreams and desires.
Once it’s created, the key is to put it up someone in your home where you’ll see if every day, which will be a reminder to your subconscious mind that this is where you’re heading.
It’s typically something that is private, so it would go up in the office or your bedroom, not necessarily in your living room. But hey, this is your vision board and you can post it up anywhere you want it to be.
SEGMENT 2:
Let’s start at the beginning with the law of attraction. The law of attraction states that like attracts like, and what we focus on and give our attention to will come about.
If we have positive thoughts, then we bring positive experiences into our life, and the same goes for negative thoughts.
And most of us have experienced this at difft points in our life. We find ourselves thinking about a person and then boom – they send us a text message. Or we contact someone and they say, Oh I was literally just thinking about calling you. Does this ever happen to you? So the Law of Attraction is a big reason why we want to use Vision Boards as a tool.
Let’s also understand the Neuroscience behind tools like visualization and vision boards.
Have you ever heard of the Reticular Activating System? Or RAS?
It is a bundle of nerves at our brainstem that filters out unnecessary information so the important and relevant information gets through to us.
Think of it as a filtering that helps us sort all the information we encounter each day, into relevant and necessary and irrelevant.
The RAS is the reason you learn a new word and then start hearing it everywhere.
The things we need to know are stored, and things we don’t need to know are discarded.
A great example is when you’re doing research to buy a new car, you’ve decided on a white Tesla, and because this is now top of mind for you, or “on the brain” so to speak, you start to see white Teslas everywhere.
And you think to yourself, wow White Teslas are really common now aren’t they, everyone is buying them.
But are they, really?
Did the Universe change suddenly overnight to instantly put a bunch of white Teslas on the road, when they weren’t there yesterday? No. No it didn’t.
You didn’t manifest them into existence, but you did manifest the noticing of them.
What happened, is that your reticular activating system or RAS, is filtering your reality differently now. As soon as you started doing research, your brain logged white Tesla as something relevant and that is why you notice them from all the other cars on the road, whereas one month earlier it wasn’t even relevant to you.
This is what happens when you look at your vision board
You’re telling your brain to look out for opportunities to see these things and bring them to your reality.
We have to understand the power of the subconscious mind, bc it has an intense amount of power over us.
The more you interact with your vision board, and see these images every day and connect the emotion around having them, the greater chance you will bring them into your life and believe that they are part of your reality and your identity. And it’s important to be specific.
If you’ve ever read, think and grow rich, by napoleon hill he explains very clearly that you have to have a specific goal of how much money you want to make, then you need to write that number out every day, look at it first thing in the morning and then at the end of the day before you go to bed. I would suggest you also post that number somewhere near your office or computer, so you can see it every darn day and remind yourself of it.
You can’t say, I want to make more money, you have to say I want to make xxx amount of money.
With the LOA and RAS, the law of attraction and the reticular activating system, you are intentionally decision what you are putting your energy and focus on.
Would you rather give your energy to looking at your bank balance and complaining how much you don’t have, or complaining how many bills you have to pay every month, or looking at your debt.
OR, would you prefer to redirect that attention into your pipeline of how much money you’re planning on making this month, or what your net worth is, or watching your savings account or investments grow.
I want to pause here and share a story about my business, and focusing on revenue. My first year in business, was pretty lack lustre. I did ok, but didn’t quite replace my salary from my corporate job, and I had a reality check conversation with someone after that first year and she asked me, “Are you gonna keep going”.
Give a girl a break, c’mon this is my first year in a brand new career, industry and city where I have zero network. I knew it was going to take a while to get things going.
But here’s the ONE thing that completely shifted the revenue in my business.
Do you know what it is? If you’ve been listening carefully, you should be able to predict where this is going.
It’s when I created an excel spreadsheet to track all of my revenue coming in, every single dime. You see in the past, I had a rough idea in my head of what I was making and when I would book something, I’d add it to that monthly tally for the month. I thought the actual admin of tracking everything coming in would be a waste of my time.
WRONG, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
And as soon as I popped everything into a spreadsheet, and I would spend time in that spreadsheet every single week, nurturing it, adding in estimates, forcecasts…. Everything changed.
And if you’re on a fixed income like a salary, you can absolutely do this too, not just with your income everyone month or bi-weekly, but also track what you do with that each month. Are you saving, investing. AND also tracking your expenses each month and making sure you don’t get lifestyle creep when you get that big raise. Lifestyle creep is when your expenses go up relative to your your income. We are technically making more, but if our expenses go up at the same percentage…. We’re not actually getting ahead, are wel.
This is why money gurus like David Chilton, whose estimated net worth is $20M who wrote the Wealthy Barber lives in a 1,300 foot bungalow outside Waterloo. He never bought or built a big mansion..
OK, that was a long tangent about revenue, and tracking income and expenses but it was also a perfect example of law of attraction, and as soon as I put my energy and attention into tracking exactly how much I was making, my revenue started to expand exponentially.
And one more random tip while I’m here, and talking about money, income and expenses. I’ve given this tip to clients who are dealing with any amount of debt and they feel like it’s weighing them down and they’ll never get out of it.
Debt is often the reflection of our mindset and money beliefs we’ve developed early on. Many financial planners will tell you to pay off all your debt, specifically high-interest debt like credit cards, before you start building up your savings.
BUT, the mindset and beliefs that you’ll always BE in debt will also keep you in debt bc this is what you know and is what is familiar to you.
So, the key here is to create a separate savings account, or high interest savings account and I don’t care if you only tuck away $20/month, start seeing that money go in their and grow, little bit over time and what you are doing is rescripting that belief that you actually CAN save up money, and you are building trust and integrity with yourself as you see that money grow. And then. You won’t believe me when I tell you this, BUT a tipping point in your life will happen and you will become addicted to saving, and that, my friend is a fantastic addiction to have.
OK, let’s recap this segement
You just learned reasons WHY to create a vision board.
The law of attraction, helps you attract what you want to you
It is combined with the RAS, the reticular activating system, where you start to sort through the data and SEE things you’ve been thinking about.
These two reasons combine to make vision boards a VERY powerful tool.
SEGMENT 3:
I’m going to teach you how to create a vision board in two different ways
First, the old school way, like a collage you maybe created in school
Then the 2nd way is digital.
The first way
This is the original way, with scissors and magazines. This is how I learned to create them, and I have done vision board workshops many times, and there’s always someone who has access to a large stockpile of magazines, somewhere. Travel magazines, especially travel agencies who stock large displays of magazines was always a great resource for images.
You also need scissiors, a glue stick, and some large piece of sturdy construction paper or bulletin board as your background.
Put on some great music,
do a grounding exercise,
and then spend time visualizing what you want your future to look like,
Then you dive in and start searching for images that appeal to you, start flipping through magazines to find images and Cut them out
Arrange them onto your background, and play around with them, move them around, trim them down and fit them onto the background so it displays with a really cool visual
Some people like to have so many images on there that they cover all the white space behind. Others like to just pick a few key images and have white space behind. Either is ok, whatever appeals to you.
This is still a valid method for building visions boards, there’s something about the glossy pages of a magazine and flipping endlessly through the pages to find what you really want.
but quite frankly I don’t have access to magazines, and I’m not going to buy a $7 magazine in the hopes that it will have what I want.
So you can just google for images that you want, print them out and trim them down. Also a totally valid approach
But these days, I prefer to do it all completely DIGITAL.
So here’s how this works.
You want to use a vector-based program that allows you to drag and drop, resize and rearrange images in the document. MS word would be difficult, but Canva is great (and free) and also PPT or keynote, or whatever you use to work with images.
Then you just search for images online, then drag and drop them onto a canvas online, or save them to your desktop.
So you might search Dream kitchen, or home office water view, then save the images as they come up.
Once you’ve searched for images in all the categories, then the fun begins, you start to drag and drop and through process of elimination arrange the images on the canvas in a way that is appealing (just like with the magazine clippings) until you feel like you have the perfect combo of your inspirational vision board.
Then I like to save that vision board to my desktop so I see it every day when I log in, or you could print it out and put it up somewhere at home.
The only limitation of doing it fully digitally, is that most printers just do letter or legal size paper, so you’re limited in how big your final product can be. Traditionally vision boards were done quite large on big sheets of poster paper. But I don’t believe this is a hard and fast rule these days.
I love to save the vision board, and when I update it for next year I am not starting from scratch.
What images do I search for?
The best place to start when looking for images, is to come back to your 5 goals for the year. From those goals you should be able to come up with types of images to search for. If being more confident was one of your goals, What does that look like as a scene? Are you front of the room giving a presentation, are you power posing and looking out at a cityscapte. What does that look like as an image, then seek that out online.
If you have a beautiful new house you want to own in the future, then you can start search for images online that capture what you want. And don’t limit yourself to the outside of the house, I have a gorgeous picture of a sunroom on my board, with a giant comfy chair, overlooking the water, and the sun is streaming in, and it’s full of books and big comfy pillows. I also have an image of a massive front porch, with a big hanging swing, full of comfy pillows, again the sun is just streaming through the porch. We’re trying to capture emotion here, what do these images make you feel when you look at them. Do you feel inspired and excited? That should be important.
Do they have to be obtainable and realistic? Heck NO. What we’re doing is creating something that you can bring into your life in the future, that you can dream about and put your energy towards attracting.
Remember, the how is the domain of the universe
Your job is to do the big dreaming and match it with the feeling
And the universe is the courier company that will bring it to you. YOU are not the fedex driver. I mean, some of you might actually work at fedex, so, YOU are not the dream delivery driver, you are the dream creator.
we are literally creating miracles out of your dreams here, this is powerful stuff.
As Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
That’s what we’re doing with this vision board, we are making miracles, and bringing your dreams to life. Isn’t that awesome?
Here’s examples of other images you could search
We’ve talked about your dream home, think about things on your bucket list
It could also be a vacation home, tiny house or property, or investment property
You might be wondering, should my whole vision board be just all images?
Well, it absolutely can be, if that feels right to you.
I add a few other juicy things to mine to really make it impactful and reflect my vision.
Here’s a list of things, aside from pictures you can add to your vision board
OK to recap this segment, you learned how vision boards are typically created with magazine clippings and arranged onto poster paper
But today baby, technology is your friend and the internet will deliver you anything you want, so consider doing a digital vision board, then you can update and add or subtract from it.
And what goes on your board? Anything that is inspirational and motivation and that you want in the future to have, do, feel or become. Big hairy audacious goals.
SEGMENT 4:
OK now I want to share some advanced tips to specialize your vision boards.
I often have clients who are in transition with their career, either changing jobs or starting a new business. And this is a big undertaking for their life.
So I have them do a Dream Job reflection exercise, which is really powerful, then I have them create a vision board specifically for this new dream job that they want.
Now all the standard process of creation applies, but we make all the images and words and content dedicate to this theme of Dream jobs.
For example, what does the office look like
What kinds of work will you be doing?
What types of companies will you work for
And here, we can be specific, pick your top 5 or 10 dream companies you’d work for and put their logos in a collage on your vision board.
Maybe mock up a business card with their logo and your name and new title on it, and include that in your vision board. There is YOUR vision board, you can have anything you want.
This is a powerful way to bring about what you want.
I remember a client I worked with years ago would tell me how he dreamed of working at a company that had a great culture and sold a product he believed in. at the time he was working at a big blue chip computer company, and after getting clarity of where he wanted to work, and creating that vision, he has worked at some amazing companies including adidas and lululemon.
It’s right there for you, you have to name it to claim it.
Name it to claim it.
The universe loves clarity, it’s not going to read your mind about what you really want, you have to get clear and name it, bring it to life in the real world.
OK so this theme-based approach for a vision board was described for a new job, but it can also be used for a dream house, travelling the world or meeting your perfect partner.
Anything you want.
This way you can have more than one vision board running in the house. Currently I’m running about 4 different ones around my home. I have a main one on my desktop, then I have other theme ones around the office and bedroom. That’s definitely a pro move though
If you’re just starting out, you can start with just one board that features all your goals.
AND, I should definitely tell you WHO the celebrity is that’s on my vision board.
It might surprise you. And to be honest, it isn’t actually her that I’m trying to manifest, Its her pet. So I am obsessed with Taylor swift’s cat, she used it as a prop in one of her music videos, then she fell in love with it and adopted it. She carried it around with her when she travels in this little space kitty backback travelller, which is 100% adorable. So the picture that I have is of her, holding the cat, but you can’t really tell that it’s her, bc her head’s cropped off. But frankly I have no shame having her on there. Her bad ass move to re-record all her music, so that she would own it. Respect. That is a total boss move and I approve.
WRAP UP:
OK it’s time to start wrapping up this episode on vision boards
You learned a lot today
Law of attraction
Reticular Activating system
You can bring your goals to life through a vision board
You can search, copy and paste with paper, scissors and glue, OR do it all digital.
Start simple with one, and then, you might want to branch off into specialized ones later on
And yes, I’m in love with Taylor Swift’s cat.
OK, that’s a recap on what you just learned. I would LOVE you to do me a favour and pick ONE person who you know LOVES this stuff, just totally eats all this stuff up like you do, and I want you to share this episode with them today.
Maybe even use it as inspiration to arrange a zoom meet to create some new visions boards together!
And If you want to talk to me about vision boards, or any other big hairy audacious goals in your life, and you need some direction or support to bring them to life, Then head over to my website and book a free consult with me, you can find me at thecorporateyogi.com
I am a dream keeper, and I would encourage you to dream even bigger than you are today, Nothing is too big or too outrageous for you, as far as I’m concerned.
I know you have big goals and dreams, so what are you waiting for?
That’s all for now.
Thank YOU for tuning in.
Remember that knowing and growing who you are, is the BEST business investment you can ever make.
So go out there and create yourself an amazing day!
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