Designing Your Life … Just a Dream?

Lead a life of your own design, on your own terms.  Not one that others or the environment have scripted for you.
~ Tony Robbins ~

Picture this. — (Yeah, just starting and already sounding like Sophia from Golden Girls.)

It’s late 2009, I am in Florida with my recently turned ten-year-old daughter.  It’s early morning, just when the sun is rising, mostly everything around me is still deep in slumber.  I am alone on a third-floor balcony gazing at the beautiful emerald Gulf Coast waters.

And all I can think about at that moment is, “What the heck am I supposed to do now?”

That moment was the culmination of months of turmoil and angst.  I finally had a chance to stop in stillness, feeling the tremendous weight of what had just happened land straight on my shoulders and I could barely breathe.

You see, I finally put myself first, leaving my difficult marriage in search of a new beginning for myself and my daughter.

When I left, I didn’t have a job, per se.  I had only recently started pursuing online coaching and it was nowhere near what was needed to live on.

I was scared.  I was confused.  Quite frankly, I was overwhelmed.

When I get into that state of mind, I have a default action.  I look for support.  Family, friends, whatever … in this case, I turned to the internet.  ::giggle::

In retrospect, I don’t remember how I started looking at vision boards, but that is where I landed.  In the 80s I attended a retreat which focused a lot on visualization.  Additionally, I am a huge Brian Tracy fan, who enthusiastically promotes visualizing one’s future — so I thought to myself, it couldn’t hurt, let me see what it’s all about.

When I research anything, I delve into it—the WHY’s something works (or doesn’t work.)  The next few days were spent immersing myself in the power of visualization and I realized in order to move forward, some sort of direction was needed.

Time and time again, my research found numerous studies proving visualization works; however, one in particular amazed me.

Australian Psychologist Alan Richardson conducted a little experiment with a group of basketball players.  He divided them in three groups and tested each player’s ability to make free throws.

• Group One would practice 20 minutes every day.
• Group Two would only visualize themselves making free throws, but no real practice was allowed.
• Group Three (control group) would neither practice nor visualize.

Not surprisingly the third group showed no improvement. However, the results for group one and two were amazing.  Group One improved by 24% and Group two by 23%.  His results were astounding given the players who did not practice but only visualized improved significantly and nearly to the same degree as the players who practiced physically every day.

That was powerful.  I became convinced visualization works and began planning my own future with this new tool in mind.

Since money was tight and I couldn’t afford vision board supplies, I discovered a creative process that took nothing but time and a computer.  I would make myself a mind movie giving me an added edge to sync music with pictures. Music has always been is a HUGE memory anchor for me.

I set to task, creating the movie over the next few days until it came to fruition.  Watching it every morning was key as I fashioned life as a single mom.  Over the next couple years, the events taking place were miraculous to say the least.  Almost everything included in that mind movie became my reality.

It was almost as if I planned it.  Ha!  I did!  I had one of the best years ever in 2011/12 in so many different areas (financial, travel, connection, etc.)  All things I put into my mind movie.

Over time; however, my home life became challenging with added responsibilities of care-giving my mother and homeschooling my daughter.  Overwhelm has a funny way of making you forget tools that have worked in the past.  I moved away from watching my mind movie daily until I didn’t watch it at all.  Plus, I didn’t take the time to create another visualization which took into account my new obligations.

Why do we do that to ourselves?  Why do we forget what works?

Believe it or not, it has to do with building neural pathways.  When we do things, we build habits, both good and bad, and neural pathways are created.  If we spend more time on a bad habit than a good, then the brain finds it easier to go back to an established path rather than take the newer one.

In other words, it’s important to never let down our guard when we are working towards rewiring those pathways into good habits we want to inculcate into our lives.

The good thing is —it doesn’t take hours each day to establish those new habits.  All it takes is awareness and consistency.  Even after all the success I had, I let go of daily watching my mind movie.  Thus, the new path was slowly forgotten, and my brain fell back into old, comfortable, and counterproductive habits.

As I became aware of this undoing, I decided to become trained as a vision board workshop facilitator.  This not only will help others empower themselves in building wholehearted lives, but also help myself stay focused on working this tool to its fullest potential!

Stay tuned … I will be facilitating a CREATE YOUR LIFE VIRTUAL VISION BOARD WORKSHOP on February 23, 2019 starting at 10am Central … if you would like more information, please feel free to either leave a comment on this post, or you can contact me here.

P.S. If you have any experiences with Vision Boards, I sure would love to hear about them … please leave a comment below.