I speak at Universities once in a while, to business students, about a business formula that I’ve put together. From my experience with Quizno’s, I understand the big picture of how to make any business successful no matter what the product or service is. I’ve discovered that in order to be successful every business needs to apply the exact same aspects. I stress that before starting any business, that it’s important to envision what the purpose of the business is, what it looks like and what outcome you ultimately would like. The clearer the vision, the more likely it is to appear that way, and the more likely things will show up that support your vision. Like magic!
My goal is to teach you how to use one aspect of that magic, something indubitably cheesy but surprisingly effective. I’m talking about a vision board.
All the Pretty Pictures
I have a photo box containing many images I’ve torn from magazines. I plan to glue them all to one large piece of butcher paper. The resulting collage will be a vision board; its purpose, to depict (and lead me to) my desired future. This whole process makes me roll my eyes as I was trained to do over the course of my very rationalist education but damn if it doesn’t work.
Sometimes.
I’ve made several vision boards that bombed out, and some that were so successful that the hairs on the nape of my neck prickled for months. Years ago I glued up a headline that said MAKING AFRICA WELL. I thought it was a joke oh, sure, like I could do that never expecting that a few years later I’d be invited to a wedding in South Africa and while there went to an orphanage in a township. Suddenly, I found myself raising and donating money for them.
I’ve discovered there’s a trick to making a vision board that brings forth such improbable coincidences. It starts with avoiding common pitfalls that result in faulty, inoperative models. Many people hear the basic instructions “Find pictures of things you want in your life and stick ’em where you can see ’em” and create virtually identical collages: a wad of cash, a handsome husband, a gorgeous body, a luxury car, a tropical beach.
Snore. These images constitute our culture’s idea of the good life. Even a rich, happily married beauty queen with a Porsche in the driveway and a house on the ocean will crank out this same damn vision board. This has no juice at all. To really work, a vision board has to come not from your culture but from your primordial, nonsocial self the genetically unique animal/angel that contains your innate preferences.
When you start assembling pictures that appeal to this deep self, you unleash one of the most powerful forces on our planet: human imagination. Virtually everything humans use, do, or make exists because someone thought it up. Sparking your incredibly powerful creative faculty is the reason you make a vision board. The board itself doesn’t impact reality; what changes your life is the process of creating the images combinations of objects and events that will stick in your subconscious mind and steer your choices toward making the vision real.
Step 1: Please Your Animal.
There are two basic procedures involved in creating an effective vision board. First, instead of cogitating about familiar images, scout for the unfamiliar. Your mind can’t do this. Your animal/angel self can. Just page through a magazine (and walk through the world) noticing things that trigger physical reactions: a heart thump, a double take, a gasp.
The only responses involved should resemble these:
“Ooooh!”
“Aaaahhhhh.”
“Whoa!”
“!!!!”
“????”
These “thoughts” register in your stomach, your heart, your lungs anywhere but your head. You can’t produce them in response to cultural cliche or abstract ideas. Nor can you always know why your body reacts to an image. Wondering, then finding out, is one of the most delicious things about assembling a vision board.
For example, as I rummage through my current collection of images, my body is utterly unmoved by photos of mansions or designer clothing. What interests it are pictures of an abstract sculpture, a dried leaf, and (overwhelmingly) a map on which the migratory route of the springbok antelope is shown in red. !!!! Go figure.
Though it makes no logical sense, I know from experience that gluing these pictures on one big page will begin catalyzing something beyond my mind’s capacity to calculate or conceptualize. If you’re not already accumulating images that rock your socks, stay alert. Whenever you find them, filch them.
Step 2: Let Go Mentally and Emotionally.
Most folks master Step 1 easily, gathering new and interesting images by the bushel. Step 2 of making a vision board requires something trickier: not thinking. To do it you must relax completely and let your mind go blank. You don’t concentrate on the result you want.
This is exactly what you should do once you’ve created a vision board. Stop thinking about it. Lose it. Recycle it. The biggest mistake aspiring reality creators make (aside from that predictable cash/tropical island collage) is continuing to push something they’ve already set in motion. You’ve felt the repellent energy of salespeople desperate to hook you it makes you sprint away so fast, you cause sonic booms. Don’t use that results-oriented energy.
Step 3: Be Still and Still Moving.
Making a vision board is not a substitute for elbow grease. Magical co-creator or not, you still have to do stuff. For example, I want to be better at speaking french. So I put a headline on my vision board: I am fluent in French. I watched movies with subtitles, listened to french music, and made a little progress. I made arrangements to live in Paris for 2 months, and take french language classes 3 times per week. After one month my French was flowing and could have conversations. By the time I left, after being emerged in the culture, I was fluent.
This is the zone of reality creation: regularly picturing delights that don’t yet exist, emotionally detaching from them, and jumping into action when it’s time to help the miracles occur. I’m barely learning this, to be (in T.S. Eliot’s words) “still and still moving.” But in the moments I get it right, every step I take seems to be matched by a universal mystery, which obligingly, incredibly, creates what I can’t.
So that’s my 411 on vision boards, but please, don’t believe me. Try it yourself. Do it as a lark, a hobby, a physics experiment (though calling it that may cause Werner Heisenberg to spin in his grave like an Olympic ice dancer). While you’re oohing and aahing, cutting and gluing, I’ll be doing the same.
