
Dreamboard to success with Leanne Bier
Tonight, we will explore all things related to dream boards. I’ve invited to join me in the studio Leanne Bier, a dream board consultant from Brisbane.
Leanne has an Honours degree in Psychology that she got more than 20 years ago, but she says that fear held her back from doing what she really wanted to do. To me, it was fascinating to hear how Leanne did what so many of us do: just kept piling on more and more qualifications instead of taking the plunge.
Use dream board to overcome the fear of failure, the fear of the unknown.
Leanne: I did corporate training and finance banking. I just kept excelling and achieving more, getting more qualifications and certifications. Inside, I kept having this dream that I want to work with people and help people. I held myself back from doing that for such a long time that after I had my child and she was five, I was ready to go back to work.
I discovered making a Vision Board about 15 years ago.
Leanne used her own dream board to overcome the fear of failure, the fear of the unknown. She ended up starting her own business and she has been running her dream board workshops for over 2 years.
Today, I want to get to the bottom of this thing called dream boards. If we put the esoteric aside, what is it? Why does it work?
Vision board is not a list of goals to tick off or a to-do list Click To TweetLeanne: A dream board or a vision board – whatever you prefer to call it – is a poster board full of pictures, phrases, and ideas that have come from the heart of things you would like to achieve in your life. This is not a list of goals to tick off or a to-do list. This is really coming from a place of inspiration: this is what I would like to achieve. I like that you asked about taking the esoteric things out of it because I think the law of attraction has been very helpful for people, but it’s also kept a lot of people stuck, thinking, “Wow this is hocus pocus. How does this ever work?”
Visual board reminding you daily of the things that you’d like to have in your life.
When you look at them, you get excited. You don’t look at something that feels like a goal or something you should be doing to beat yourself up about it. You look at it and get excited, and then what you want to do is actually take a little step towards that.
I’m going to share some tips on how to make that vision board really inspirational for the listeners so that they can feel that inspired action that they would like to take where you start to become open to ideas that possibly were always there – what you didn’t see before and ideas that you haven’t really noticed that have been in front of you, like when you’re looking for a new Toyota and all of a sudden, you see white Toyotas everywhere.
Sia: What we’ll do right now is to go through the process. This is what you need to do before you start putting your vision board together. For our listeners, listen to this episode in its entirety. Every time we think, in real life, that you should sit down, relax, think, do something – we will say so. So once you listen to this episode once, come back and use that as a guide to actually do things. Don’t try to do them now. You might be driving, you might be doing something else – just listen to what the whole process entails and then use it again as a guide to actually create that dream board.
What are the things we need to do before we start putting the dream board together?
Leanne: So before we start putting the vision board or the dream board together, we need to look at three things and we’ll talk about the coming year.
Sia: Let’s take an example. I want to become a freelancer, so I’m creating a dream board that would visualize why it is I want to become it, what I’m trying to achieve, what it is, potentially, I’m trying to escape. I want to use this vision board to help me through the first year of freelancing.

Leanne: So what you’re going to do is:
Write down three headings on a piece of paper. The first one will be “BE”; the second one will be “DO” and the third one will be “HAVE”.
BE
When it comes to creating a vision board, a lot of people think it’s about having stuff: the business, the money, the success – but we all know people who have the stuff and are not fulfilled. So if you’re looking at starting a freelancing business or a business of any kind, or growing your business, the first thing we would look at is “BE”.
Who do I want to be over the coming year? How do I want to be? What qualities do I want to have in the world? Just write down three to five bullet points – we’re not writing poetry here.
Sia: For example, saying I want to be happy. Is that something I could put on there?
Leanne: It could be. I’ll give you some examples, and remember to write it as “I am…”, as if you are already even though you may not be. “I am confident,”, “I am happy,”, “I am fulfilled,”, “I am running my own freelancing business.”
Sia: Can I write, “I am rich,” – could that go there? Is it just the feelings, the personality traits, or is it a physical thing? What does go into the “be”?
Leanne: It can be absolutely anything that you feel is going to be helpful for you over the coming year. Even though we’re talking about starting or running your own business, you – as a business owner – are your business.
So “I am rich” – in what kind of ways? That could come possibly in the “have”, like “I want to have lots of money coming into my business.” But we first start with “being” – at a healthy weight, energetic to run my own business.
Sia: So the first one is “be”, where every sentence starts with “I am…”. And the second one?
DO
Leanne: This will be the things that you want to do. Once again, we’re not looking at a to-do list of things that you need to tick off that make you feel like you should be doing these. These are really coming from a place of inspiration. So the things that would be “do” would be what you would write if you don’t have your own business yet, like “I’ll start my own freelancing business”.
Sia: So is a “do” to achieve what I want to be and have, or is a “do” in 12 months time after I am already whatever I want to be and I have what I want to have? Where’s that “do” coming from?
Leanne: The “do” would be the things that you want to experience over this time so it could even be something you physically do, and it could be as simple as something that you’ve been holding yourself back from. For example, start my own website, or start my own online shop. A lot of women I’ve worked with have had a dream to start their own online shop and now they’re actually doing it. When they first wrote the “be”, “do”, and “have” list, they didn’t have it, so they wrote: “That’s what I want to do.”
Some people might want to travel: I’ll travel to France,”, “I’ll start a new online course for my clients.” Whatever it is that comes to your heart that you want to experience and do over the coming year.
Sia: So just for example, what if I want to provide for my family, I want to be able to travel wherever I want, I want to be content and stop worrying about the future, I want to see my family happy or my child happy. But none of that says “I want to be a freelancer”. For a lot of people, becoming a freelancer is a vehicle to achieving something totally different. At what stage do I put freelancing in that mix?
Leanne: Well you could start in the “be”, saying “I am a freelancer”. If you’re thinking of things that you want to “do” that relate to that, it could even get down to the nitty-gritty of the actual thing you need to do to start finding out about how that works. And then when getting into the list of to-do’s, when talking about something like a vision board we’re looking at infinite possibilities.
Let me share the last thing on the list and then I think it will come together a lot clearer for you.
HAVE
So you’ve got your “be”: how you want to be, and you’ll “do” the things you want to do. Now, you’ve got “have”.
When we’re talking about something like a vision board, we’re not looking at keeping ourselves small. If you want to have your own amazing online business or freelancing business, put that in there – describe it and actually feel how it would feel, and write down what you want to have in this. If you’re starting your online business or your freelance business because you want to have certain other things in your life, like free time for your family, write it in there: “I have free time for my family,” and “I work the hours that I want to work.”
Sia: So what if my motivation is not “have” something so I’m not motivated towards the positive outcome, but rather I want to escape something so my motivation is away from something. Let’s say I want to escape unemployment or the lack of opportunities around where I live; I want to escape the 9 to 5 job. I’m not necessarily seeing the bright future but what motivates me is not to have something, not to continue to do something that I do at the moment. How can I represent that bit in the dream board?
Leanne: That’s a great question. Moving away from something that you don’t want is a great motivator, however, it’s always good to then decide and visualize what you want to replace this with; moving away from something towards something that’s more exciting, more prosperous, and more fulfilling, even if you don’t know what that looks like. You can then say, “I am doing work that is fulfilling for me. I’m doing work that I love. I’m working with people that are happy to see me. I’m earning great money. I’m always looked after,” even if you don’t know what that looks like straight away. If you do know what that looks like, then you’re moving away from unemployment, not enough money or a job that you really dislike.
Sia: At the end of the day, a dream board and vision board will combine all the positive and desired states of being, experiencing and having. Even though I am initially motivated to move away from something that’s really painful, on the vision board I will have the end result. When I moved away, this is where I arrived.
Leanne: Yes, you’ve described that beautifully. The other thing I would like to also mention is now that you have the “be”, “do”, and “have”, a lot of times when we are writing these things down or thinking about these things, our mind can come in and say, “Well how would that ever be? How could that ever be? I don’t know.”
“I encourage you to think beyond what you already know.”
If you draw a circle on a piece of paper and you put yourself in the middle, imagine inside that circle is everything you already know: all your experiences, all your fears, your hopes, your beliefs, the things you’ve grown up with, the jobs you’ve had, the people you know. When you dream a big dream, like starting your own business or venturing out into something new, you tend to revert back to that circle and go, “Okay, this is what I already know. How will I figure that out? Okay, I know this person – I could phone that person. I could open this bank account. I could drive there. I could research this.”
However, outside of that circle are a million other possibilities and synchronicities that you don’t know – that’s where the vision board comes into play. See, when you’re going through things such as magazines, you’re not scrolling through Pinterest. When you scroll through Pinterest, you’re getting ideas of things you already know. You can grab magazines from your local doctor, dentist, put an update on Facebook saying, ”Hey guys, I’m doing a project and I’d like some free magazines,” – now you have a stack of 20 magazines that you wouldn’t normally have bought. When you’re going through a bunch of magazines, you get yourself into a beautiful state; you can do a relaxing meditation and really go outside of the circle of what you already know. Pictures will come to you that you might not have thought of before.
Sia: You said we’re not going through Pinterest, and the reason we’re not doing it is that the algorithm is so clever that they will continue to serve us images that we looked and searched for previously. So if you go through Pinterest or anything else that you used to pin images that you like, you’ll create that circle of ‘this is what I know’ and stay there. Then your vision board will represent your current state of “This is what I know, this is what I can. This is how I perceive the world,” and you will miss the opportunity to open it up to something you didn’t even know existed.
Leanne: Absolutely. I would like to give just a simple, practical story.
When I started my business, I was a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t know people in the community, so I set an intention to meet people in the community and I didn’t know what this looked like. I found a “Coffee Morning” in my neighbourhood and I said, “Okay, I’m going to go to the Coffee Morning and see what comes of it.” When I arrived, it was about 20 pensioners. My heart sank initially because I thought, “I really would love to meet other people who are going out there and doing their business.” But then I thought, “That’s okay, I’ll just go. I’m here now – I’ll share, I’ll listen and I’ll just interact.”
After about half an hour a little old lady came up to me. She looked like my Gran and she actually had my Gran’s sister’s name. She just chatted with me and she gave me a big warm hug – it was like I’d known her forever and she asked what I do. I thought, “Oh okay, I’ve just started but now is my chance to tell her what I do.” I told her and she said, “Wow, there’s a meditation group that meets tomorrow at 9:30. Every Thursday, come with me and I’ll introduce you to the ladies. You’ll love them; they’ll love you!” She took out her phone – this is a lady in her 70s – went on Facebook, sent the meditation lady (who is now my friend)a message saying she’s bringing a friend tomorrow, and she said, “There we are, it’s done. I’ll meet you there tomorrow.”
So the next day I went along and she introduced me to a world of new women that were all my age. All like-minded; all going after what they wanted. The point of the story is that if I hadn’t stepped out of my house that day and gone to that Coffee Morning, if I had looked at the bunch of pensioners sitting at the table and left, I wouldn’t have been open to receiving the next step or the next path to open my world up to meet these new people.
What Happens Next?
Sia: So now we have the three columns: “be”, “do”, and “have”. We sit down, surrounded by magazines. What are we looking for?
Leanne: What we’re going to do now – and to the people who are listening, I really encourage you to give yourself a time limit of one hour – is:
Go through the images and tear out anything that calls to you.
Sia: Okay, so I’m not thinking or looking at my list. I wrote it down before and it’s just there, but I’m looking at the pictures without trying to find a visual representation of what I’ve written on the list. At that moment in time, I don’t connect them.
Leanne: You do connect them. You’ve got your list now – your “be”, “do”, and “have” – and what you’re going to do is go through the magazines. What the person usually notices is that other things come up that they didn’t think of. You’ll find who you are, who you want to be, what you want to have; you might find lots of images related to business.
Sia: My goal when I open the magazine is to find pictures that represent what’s written down and in the process, I may discover other pictures that speak to me.
Leanne: Absolutely, and that’s the beauty about going through these magazines: finding other things and thinking, “Oh wow, I never thought of that.” All you’re really doing is tearing out the pages and making a pile, and give yourself about 45 minutes to one hour.
The reason I say put a limit on it is because a lot of us like to go for perfection and this is what holds a lot of people back from even starting their own business. Perfection. Looking for the perfect picture, the perfect phrase, the perfect something or other. So just make a pile of everything that delights you and notice as well the things that come up that feel like a “should”. A lot of us have spent so much of our lives doing what we should be doing. We’ve done this course because we should be doing it; we’ve done this job; we’ve done lots of things we should.
Sia: If deep in my heart I actually don’t want to stay with the baby at home – I actually want to work in the office. Yes, I want to work for me but not with the baby in my lap. So I see a beautiful picture of a woman with a child and working at the same time, and it feels like this is what I should go for. Is that what you mean?
Leanne: Absolutely, yes. Someone might look at that picture and it might spur the feeling of, “Oh wow, I can have both. I don’t need to choose,” or it might confirm, “Actually, I would love to be in the office.” Then look at what society is telling us – as women or as people – that we should be doing and have the courage to step out of that and be true to what’s really inside your heart and say, ”Is this what I really would love to do or is this what everyone’s telling me I should be doing?”
Sia: So now we have 60 minutes or we have a pile of pictures and phrases. What’s next?
Make a pile of your YESes and NOs.
Leanne: So in the next step, you need to really go with your intuition. Take your pile, put it in front of you, and start to make a pile of the absolute yeses that you want on your vision board. Notice if it came up because it was a “should”, and just cast it out. If something else comes up and you think, “No, that isn’t really cool to me anymore,”, just make a pile of no’s and throw those away – put them in the recycling. When that’s done, you’ll have a pile of your yeses – the pile of all the pictures and the images that you want.
Sia: Does it have to be more or less balanced across all three areas?
Leanne: It doesn’t need to be. What a lot of the people who have come through the workshops have noticed is that they’re rarely surprised about what came up for them. They’re in such an amazing space that they think, “Oh actually, I had a lot of things that I wanted to have and now I’m looking at all these other things that came up.”
The most important thing when looking at the vision board is that it feels good.
There is no need to be balanced; no need to be more of this, more of that. It needs to feel good – the person needs to look at it and be inspired to move forward with that dream that they have.
Put the YES pile up on your vision board.
Sia: Do I arrange them into three parts, or there’s just my general yes pile, and I start pasting it on a piece of paper?
Leanne: You can have a great big poster board – the size doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that you can see it. Some people don’t like to stick a board next to their desk, but you can stick it on your wardrobe, instead.
Sia: What if I don’t want anyone to see it, but I want it to work for me – what do I do then?
Leanne: I’ve had women who’ve created vision journals, where you can get a scrapbook and on each couple of pages you can have things related to business, health, and family – your “be”, your “do”, and your “have”. You can create a beautiful vision journal and every night before you go to bed, or every morning when you wake up, you can look through it and get that inspiration.
Sia: Can I create whatever kind of board it is, take a photo and make it a digital board, like a screensaver? Or is that taking it away to space where it stops working?
Leanne: I think that’s a great idea! I do encourage you to take a picture with your cell phone and put it on your screensaver; put it on your phone, look at it and sometimes you’ll notice one part of the vision board and sometimes you’ll notice a different side. Make it the size that’s comfortable – as long as you can get on everything that you need. I’ve had people ask, “Can we make it bigger and bigger and bigger?” The problem with that is when it gets too big, we lose the focus; we become very splattered and then we procrastinate because we have all these different things and we can’t focus on that one thing that we’ve decided we want to move forward with.
Sia: I need to ask: what’s the maximum amount of images? We’d just given ourselves 60 minutes so we don’t lose ourselves in trying to find the perfect quote and the perfect picture. We probably then have to limit the number of pictures so that only the most important ones make the cut.
Leanne: The size of the board that I use with my participants and that I use myself is about 50 centimetres by 70 centimetres, so it’s a fair size.
There’s a lot of power in deciding ‘I want this and not that’. When people think, “Oh but I want everything – I want all these things”, you end up getting none of those things because you’re not deciding. When a person makes a decision about what they really want, there’s a lot of power in that. So yeah, there might be a few images that don’t make the poster board, but you could just put them in your journal. You might never even look at them again or you can find one image that represents that one feeling that you’re after.
Sia: Another question is how full that piece of paper needs to be. What if I only decided on six images? I have this 50x70cm piece of paper and because I only decided on a very small amount of images, I actually have those gaping holes everywhere. Is that a problem? Should I cover it with pretty pictures of non-discriminate nature just to make it look pretty? What do I do?
Leanne: The vision board itself needs to feel inspiring, so if a person doesn’t have a lot of images or phrases in there and they love it as it is, that’s great! It’s a long process, but what we do in the workshop is once all the images are on. we can decorate it if we haven’t found the phrases that we like. But really, if it’s empty and there are blank spaces and you’re good with that, it’s fine.
When I talk about creativity, there really is no rule. We’re going with what feels good. If I feel there’s too many open spaces, I would look at why that’s bothering me. Do I feel like I need to do more, to have more, to be more? If I’m good with that, that’s great – I’ve got space for something else in my life.
Sia: How do I deal with my perfectionism then, because I think you would come across quite a few people who say, “It’s not pretty enough. There are empty spaces because I’m not good enough – I couldn’t even do this.”
Leanne: Perfectionism is something that holds a lot of us back. For 20 years, I used to think that being perfect was important. Why wouldn’t I want to do it perfectly?
What I’ve learned is that just starting is the best thing to do.
Perfectionism holds us back because we compare ourselves to other people. We need to start getting to a place where we are not worried and concerned about judgments from other people. So if someone looked at my vision board and thought, “Oh that’s not pretty enough,” or “That’s not full enough,” I would like to be in a position of thinking that doesn’t really matter because I love it. That can then be applied to other things in our lives which stops us from taking action.
During the workshop, I have between six and ten people. All the boards look different and everyone will walk around, look at each others’ and say, “Wow that looks great. Wow that’s so different.” Everyone is so excited and pleased with theirs because they know that they love it. It comes from the heart and we’re learning. It’s a great place to start learning to not be concerned about other people’s judgments.
Sia: So now I have my board, whatever size it is, and I have images. I think it looks pretty; they all speak to me. What do I do next?
Leanne: This is a crucial part because we can have a beautiful vision board and look at it every day, but nothing’s going to magically change.
Start taking that inspired action.
Leanne: I’m not sure if you’ve had this experience where you’ll be in the shower and suddenly you’ll get a great idea. By the time you’re out of the shower, your old thinking has said, “Well, that’s never going to be. You don’t know enough. You’re not this enough; you’re not that enough; so-and-so knows more than you.” By the time you’re driving in your car to do your errands, you’ve forgotten about that amazing idea.
So what I really encourage is when those ideas come, whether you’re out having a walk or taking a bath, write it down and then ask yourself, “Where can I act on this?”
In the same way I had the idea to go to a Coffee Morning, see what happens or decide to investigate a few things online. When those ideas come, those are the ideas – when you’re in a relaxed state – that open you up out of that circle of what you already know.
Sia: I’m just thinking outside here, like you said. Having a scrapbook that you can use to post your images: it’s yours, and no one necessarily sees it. Can you then continue on and start putting those ideas that suddenly come into your head into that scrapbook and say, “Well, this idea is kind of related to that image”?
Leanne: Yes, definitely. I encourage that because a lot of times – especially the entrepreneurial, creative type who want to start and run their own businesses – we get lots of amazing ideas and then we don’t follow through on them because they become this big, long list of things to do. So write that idea down but remember, it’s not a to-do list like: “Next week I’m going to open a business bank account.” It would be an idea for a blog post, an idea to start a meetup or an idea to start or create a course – write those things down in that scrapbook or in a little journal. If it’s a great idea but maybe not for now, start adding to those later on. The most important thing is to really start to take that action.
A lot of places where people get stuck on are things like confidence and procrastination. I’d like to just share a little bit about that because I’ve had people who for 20 years, just like I did had an idea and then never followed through with it because of procrastination. It’s a great word that we love to use to keep us from doing what we really want to do.
The thing about confidence is: we don’t start doing the thing only when we’re confident. The confidence comes after we’ve tried, made a mistake, put ourselves out there and started to get a bit more experience at it. Then we can look back and go, “Oh, I’m confident now at this.” To take that first step is scary in the beginning and you may not necessarily have the confidence to look at people outside, see their confidence and not compare yourself to those people.
Sia: I think that’s what they say: you compare your first chapter with somebody else’s 22nd chapter and you think it’s the same.
So, I’ll have those ideas and I’ll write them down somewhere. What do I do every week, every month with this vision board? I’ve created it because I wanted to start a freelancing career or my freelancing business. Very often, quite soon after I start, I will experience my first difficulty – my first hurdle. It happens to everyone and I don’t know how many people never recover after their first problem or their second problem. The motivation starts to disappear and becomes less and less acute; all the wishes I have, all the dreams that I have become kind of colourless when I face all those difficulties.
What do I do? How do I use the vision board to help me out of those difficult moments that will start happening quite soon and can be quite severe? Is there a routine? Once they’ve created their dream board, is there anything that you suggest people do every month, every week, every year?
What Do I Do Now?
Leanne: What we can do now is to consider that there are things in my life that are not serving me that I might need to release, and there are other things that I know I would like to bring into my life.
Ask yourself:
What three inspired things can I do this week?
Sometimes it might just be one thing. In the coaching community and the business community that I belong to, we do one thing a week. Write down one thing a week that by Friday afternoon, if you’ve done this one thing you can say , “Yes I feel good – I’ve done this one thing.” It could be as simple as: write a blog post, or write my “About” section on my website that I’m going to develop, or walk four kilometres every second day. Anything that you could say by Friday that you’ve done and on Friday, recap your week. Have I done that one thing – yes or no? If you haven’t, don’t beat yourself up about it.
So every Sunday evening or Monday morning, look at the one thing you want to do that week and every Friday, look at what you have done. Think about how you could do it better or different, and just be easy on yourself. Yes, inspire yourself to take that action, but we spend our whole lives beating ourselves up for the things we didn’t do right or didn’t do perfectly.
Those three things would then be putting you in a place to start taking action.
Sia: So I look at the vision board and I see my “be”,my “do”, and my “have”. Somewhere in there is to become a freelancer so that I can travel the world and have my child with me. I want to homeschool my child because I always wanted to be homeschooled myself. While I’m travelling somewhere in Asia, I will meet my husband or my wife and we will get married – and God knows what else will end up being on that dream board. Is that when I look at it and say, “Okay, so what are the three actions or habits that I need to introduce and I need to get rid of so that what I’ve put on the dream board may come true?” Is that when I take it out of the visual space into words and actions, and where I translate it into something I need to follow through?
Leanne: Yes. Using the example of becoming a freelancer, start to look at what you are interested in – for freelancers, there are so many possibilities and opportunities out there. A person might think that they’re not sure exactly what this is and what it looks like, so I suggest follow what brings you joy. If writing brings you joy, then start writing. Say, “This week, I’m going to start writing. I don’t know how many pages but every morning for half an hour, I’m going to sit at my computer and write whatever comes to mind. The pages might start to flow or they might not, but set the timer. Then you’ve done that one thing towards becoming a freelance writer, for example.
Does My Dream Board Have a Due Date?
Sia: Is there a point where I have to retire my dream board? Do you have to achieve the goals that’s on there before you can move on to a different one, because otherwise you’re just jumping all around? Or by the end of the 12 months – because you created it for 12 months – you have to go and do a new one? It may have elements from the old one but you have to reassess. Is there like a due date for a dream board?
Leanne: There is no due date. When we talk about one year, it’s really just to bring the focus in. Otherwise, your mind will run off like naughty children. There are a couple of things a person can do. They can:
- Tick things off on a vision board when something has happened;
- Stick over it if they’ve achieved something; or
- Create a new one if there is an “unfolding”.
When people start to become more aware of who they are in the world and what they want, they realize either 1) that they achieve those things really quickly, or 2) they have achieved half of them and they start to change; the things that they want become even bigger and better. They think, “Wow, I did actually did play a little bit small there and I want to create a new vision board for myself.”
I’ve had women come back six months later from my workshop and create a new board straight away. They say, “Actually, when I created the first one, I wasn’t being really true to myself and now I’ve lived through that and I felt that.”
So there is no deadline. I really encourage people to do what feels right for them – to look at if they are really achieving this and if not, what’s going on that’s holding them back.
Sia: Can you or should you have different dream boards for different areas of your life? Can you have a dream board for your business, and one for your private life? Or does it have to be one together?
Leanne: You can have one for your business. You can have one for your personal use. Some people like to create a travel vision board. If you’re creating your first one and you want to only focus on your business, that’s great.
Sia: So I want to come back to the fear, procrastination, and perfectionism because at the end of the day, it’s actually three faces of the same thing. It’s fear of failure which then leads you to procrastinate, and it also leads you to perfectionism because you’re afraid to fail. At the end of the day, we are just afraid that no one will love us because we’re not as perfect as we think we should be. We will die lonely and hungry because our tribe will get rid of us.
What can we do? All of us go through the phase of ‘I’m not good enough. What I’ve done is horrible. I don’t even want to tell myself the truth. I’m just saying I’m not gonna do it and I self-sabotage whatever it is I started because I don’t want to face the failure. Is there anything we can do?
Leanne: The fear never really goes away – we just learn not to let it drive the bus anymore. When that voice comes in that says “you can’t do it; you’re not good enough”, a lot of us are on autopilot and we don’t even realize that that voice is driving our decisions and our actions. We need to get to a place where we become aware of that voice – whether it’s our own voice or the voice we grew up with: from parents or teachers or family members.
Courage isn’t getting rid of the fear. Courage is saying, “Yeah okay, the fear is there and I’m not going to listen to that voice anymore.” Then I can be in a position where I listen to the voice and I don’t take any action or I say, “Okay, Voice, thank you. You’re not driving the bus anymore.”
Now, I have to find a new voice and this is new for a lot of people. We spend all our lives listening to that other voice. Then you become aware of it and you have to question it and say “thank you”, now replacing it with a new, encouraging voice as if you were the parent of a child or even imagining what you would say if you were a five- or six-year-old child yourself.
Sia: Let’s just recap. So what do you do when you want to create your dream board?
Time needed: 1 hour and 20 minutes.
How to create an actionable vision board that really works
- Write down three things: what I want to be, what I want to do, and what I want to have.
- Go and gather magazines.
I don’t look online; I don’t look on sites where I can pin what I like, like Pinterest, because that will just keep me stuck where I am. I go and select magazines from all over the place – buy, or get them for free.
- Give yourself 60 minutes time to get images and phrases that speak to you and…
that are somehow linked to the things I wrote down, but not necessarily. My goal is to find more than just what visually represents the things I wrote in those three columns.
- Put images and phrases on a piece of paper
Get a maximum of 50x70cm – that’s probably an A3 type piece of paper – and that’s the biggest paper you can go for. Put all the images all the phrases on it. If you don’t want anyone to see, you can take a photo and make it your screensaver. If you want to have it with you then you can create a scrapbook where you put those images on different pages and look through them.
- Decide on three habits that you want to introduce into your life, and three things that you want to get rid of by the end of 12 months.
- Continue to keep track of how you are introducing or getting rid of those things on a weekly or monthly basis.
That’s the full cycle.
Leanne: Yes, and I would like to add something to that as well:
Find a photograph that you love and put that in the middle of your vision board – a photo of yourself that makes you feel happy and excited. That really helps it to feel like it belongs to you.
Sia: Does it have to be a photo of me, or the photo of what I want to be.
Leanne: It would be a photo of oneself, an already existing on.
Sia: Does it have to be a recent one? Let’s assume I gained 20kg of weight in the last 12 months and I hate all of my photos. Do I still need to find something that I can look at that needs to be recent, or can I go to the photo of me when I was 16?
Leanne: That’s a great question as well because some people want to put their 19-year-old, skinny-body-self on their vision board and that’s okay as long as we’re not wanting to go back to the person that we were. It’s great if we want to lose weight, get healthy, or be back at a certain weight – if it’s an old picture and you love it and it gives you a great feeling and also lets you know that you’re the older, wiser self; you’re not the 20-something self in that photo. Or, use a recent photo that you can find as long, as long as it’s a photo of you that you love. You can even just take one with your phone; take a selfie and smile and say, “This is it. This is the new me.”
Sia: What about a photo where I think, “Ah, you know, ten years ago, this is when I was the happiest ever in my life.” Is that something we should go for, or is a selfie better than a photo of 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
Leanne:It can definitely be a photo of 10 or 15 years ago if it reminds you of happier times – maybe you were stronger; maybe you were successful or confident – as long as you can take with you what you learned to see yourself as the wiser you and not go, “Okay, well, there’s 10 years in between where I made all those mistakes.” So there’s just the energy around the photo of not beating yourself up for the fact that over the last 10 years, you didn’t succeed. It’s really looking at the energy behind the photo and just feeling good about it.
Sia: Brilliant! Thank you so much Leanne, that was very very helpful.
Leanne: Thank you very much. I really really enjoyed sharing that.
Sia: Always remember: once you become fearless, life becomes limitless.