Happy New Year! Are you still feeling the excitement of the New Year? Or has some of the glitz and glitter dimmed? Either way, let’s talk about lighting up your vision for the year and how you can accelerate those dreams, goals and soulful visions.
Settle in with a favorite beverage☕ 🍷 🥤 and give yourself permission to take your time taking in this message, the visuals, the possibilities and your most desired, soulful vision for 2023.
One of my favorite, and most effective, tools that I’ve used year after year to accomplish my goals, dreams, desired life and vision is to create a vision board. I’ve shared some of them with you below, so keep reading! 😉
A vision board contains a visual representation of what is important in your life and those items that you want to have in your life, but have not YET created.
A vision board can be designed for dreams, goals, vacations, fitness, hobbies, your ideal life, your dream business – anything you can envision that you want to create in your life.
One of the benefits of a vision board is it serves as a daily, powerful visual reminder of what you desire which keeps it energized.
It keeps you focused and reminds you why your vision is important. It can include photos, empowering statements, words, quotes, designs – any representation of what you are creating. It can be a physical vision board or you can use Pinterest, Canva or any electronic app you use to gather images.
Vision boards are not to be dismissed as merely a creative process (although the creativity is fun!). In case you need convincing, here’s why a vision board is so effective and some of the science that ties into its success.
First, a vision board requires you to be crystal clear on what you desire in life so you can create it.
It’s a thoughtful process to clearly define, refine and create a visual representation of what matters most to you at this time. If you don’t have clarity of vision for your life or business, you can’t create it. Period.
Second, it keeps the vision in front of you to keep you engaged and motivated to go after what you’ve declared is important.
If you’ve truly created the vision you want to birth into form, this gives you the juice to deliver and act on it. It is a springboard to create meaningful, actionable goals to support it.
Third, the visual representation helps train your brain and subconscious mind to go after the vision and get it. It helps in two very important ways.
First, let me ask you a question: do you love change? Be honest. Most people want something new and different in their lives, but they don’t like change. Can you see how this can be a problem if you want to breathe life into new goals, dreams or visions?
Our subconscious is tasked with trying to protect us, so it is resistant to change. When we give our brain and subconscious mind a visual of the change we desire, it becomes less scary. Suddenly, our mind can see the end result so it lets down its guard and feels less of a need to protect and rail against the change. We can start to see how we can bring life to the vision so the process is less daunting and becomes more exciting. The vision board gives the brain a puzzle to put together rather than big, scary change to process.
Yes, vision boards are a powerful jedi mind trick!
Additionally, the brain has this powerful filter called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The function of RAS is to filter the billions of pieces of data that bombard us all day, every day. Its job is to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information and only share with you the filtered, relevant information.
RAS decides what’s relevant based on what you most think about and then happily provides you with evidence to support it.
For instance, you decide you want to buy a red Lexus or adopt a new German Shepherd dog and suddenly you see them everywhere. They were always there, they were just filtered out of your awareness and something else took precedence. Since you’ve decided they are now important, RAS looks for them and points them out to you.
When you put the visual of what you desire in front of you and let your brain know it is important, RAS will go to work for you to find what you’re focusing on and help you get it.
Hint – this also works in the negative. If you constantly focus on lack, struggle, debt, etc., you’ve trained your RAS to find it and RAS is only too happy to show you evidence of it in your life. And it will keep it there until you choose a better filter.
This was a topic of a previous blog post. In case you missed it, here’s the post with more info on how you can harness the power of your RAS – check it out here
I’ve also created a blog post where I share my process for creating vision boards and vision scrap books and some of the AMAZING results that I’ve created – check it out here 👉 Power of Vision Board Blog Post
For the critics and curious, here are some sneak peaks at what I Vision Boarded into reality:
My Vision for my Ideal Location – I was living in Arizona and I wanted to live among the vineyards in Napa with rolling hills, beautiful, bold colors, full seasons, beautiful trees. Within months of creating the vision board page on the top left, and with no plans in the works, I moved to Napa and savored the landscape I desired as you can see from the top right and bottom images.
My vision for my Ideal Life included painting, volunteering with horses, and being part of a wholehearted community. I ended up manifesting an art studio that I designed from scratch to create art, community and a gathering place for workshops, retreats and special experiences. I also volunteered with horses when I was in Napa and when I returned to AZ.
My Vision for my Ideal Fitness is pushing my limits to create a finely tuned, healthy body, mind and spirit with weight training, running trails, yoga, meditating and massage. Meditation showed me the way to move to Napa which resulted in moving within 30 days of the meditation.
After I created this vision board, I ran my first 7 mile trail race around Angel Island outside of San Francisco. Then I upped my game and ran half marathons on mountain trails all over northern California – even placed 1st and 2nd in my age bracket in some races – and competed in a Spartan race for fun.
Since my health took a huge hit last year, I’m looking forward to creating a new fitness vision board to skyrocket my health and fitness in 2023.
So what’s your vision for 2023? How are you going to keep it in front of you to guide the way and keep you motivated? I’d love to hear your plans and any tips and tricks you use that lead to your success! Share in a comment below!
My entire life has been in the pursuit of what stirs my heart, daring to follow it and having the unstoppable conviction to achieve it. Purpose, passion and values aligned to create my path while audacity nudged my courage to help me excel at taking on big change to go after it.
I am here to help you find your way and learn how to confidently use your authentic voice, unlock your potential and courageously build a purposeful life you love!
Carpe Diem!
- My #1 Tool To Design I Life I Love – Vision Boards! - January 18, 2023
- Processing the Old to Launch into the New Year with Downloadable Resources! - January 1, 2023
- Merry Christmas Friends! - December 24, 2022