Oprah, Beyonce, Will Smith, and Jim Carrey, what do these four people have in common aside from fame and success? They all preach the powerful effectiveness of vision boards. These are just four examples out of the thousands (maybe even millions!) of people who put their faith into this success tool. Vision boards have become so on trend that TD Bank ran a survey with more that 1,100 people, 500 of which were small business owners, and they found that 67% of those surveyed believed that vision boards attributed to their success.
So what exactly is a vision board? Well, it’s a collage of images that pertain to your goal. Let’s say that you’re interested in buying a house at some point in your life. If you wanted to bring it to the front of your goal list and do everything you can to help it happen as quickly as possible, you might consider creating a vision board on the subject. The board would include interior and exterior photos of house attributes you love, paint samples, and maybe a picture of a dog if you plan on getting a pet once you’re a homeowner. You might add inspiring words, a graph to document your financial progress, and a map of the neighborhood you’d like to live in. Once your board is complete you place it somewhere that you will see it multiple times every day.
Having a vision board allows us to continually visualize the life we wish to achieve, and it sounds pretty cool, right? But why does that matter? More importantly, how can it actually help us achieve our goals? Our brains combine prior knowledge with uncertain evidence through a process called Bayesian Integration. This means that when we are presented with the unfamiliar, our brains begin looking for familiar facets of the situation to compare against prior experiences so that it can tell us how to respond. For our ancestors, this looked like running away from the rustling in the bushes because last time it was a bear making all the racket.
As you can imagine, this process has a huge impact on our thoughts, perceptions, and ultimately, actions. A vision board, or a similar tool, helps us to prime and condition our brains to our new reality. (Note: achieving a goal isn’t about attaining the goal itself, but about becoming the person who has already achieved it.) When we want something, especially something really big, something that changes the entire tone of our lives, we often have to make changes to get it. Perhaps we need to get up earlier so we have more time to work on a project, or we need to start saving and investing instead of just spending. Whatever the action, it changes the way that we perceive ourselves. You might become a morning person, or someone who is financially savvy, and these things change our ego.
Changing our ego, our sense of self, the way we view the concept of “who we are” is an uncomfortable process, and often the reason that people experience failure when setting out on a new venture. In order to avoid this pitfall, you need to train your ego into telling itself that you already are who you’re trying to become. The easiest way to do this is by creating a new feedback loop. A feedback loop is your ego’s perception of your reality, dictated by your five senses. Feedback, in this case, is the story you get from your ego about your reality, and the loop comes in when those five senses trigger you into a previous experience; Bayesian Integration, and you begin to act out the same behavior as you did in the past, reaffirming the belief system.
Our belief systems are our ideology or a set of principles that help us to interpret our daily reality. What you experience in your day to day life triggers a belief system inside of you; sitting in your car at a redlight might remind you of how you’re always late. This reminder causes you to reinforce that belief that you’re perpetually tardy, and when the opportunity to be on time presents itself in the future (like leaving ten minutes early to avoid traffic, or getting ready ten minutes sooner to avoid yourself) you won’t even see it because you’re the person who’s always late. Being on time and the actions it takes to be punctual aren’t a part of your perception. As Abraham Hicks would say, you’re not calibrated to them, and that’s because they’re not in alignment with your current belief systems.
Thankfully, through neuroplasticity, we’re constantly shaping and reshaping our brains through every new experience. When you’re calibrated to the things you want, your actions start to reflect that and you choose the path toward your desires. Through this process, what you’re really doing is beating down a new neural pathway in your brain. This means that the more you take actions that align with your success, the more your brain will prompt you to take similar actions. When you add in a primer, like a vision board, you’re changing the narrative and your feedback loops, therefore, retraining your brain.
Now of course, you have to actually USE a vision board, not just look at it and argue for your limitations. When you create your vision board you put your power into it, that means you believe as hard in your vision as Peter Pan and the Lost Boys believed in Tinkerbell to keep her alive. Repeatedly seeing the same things and identifying them as a part of your life tricks your ego into coming along for the ride. The more you believe in an aspect of your identity the more likely you are to act in alignment with it. So when you see your vision board you have to get into the feeling of what it’s like to achieve your desires. Tapping into the emotion helps it become real for you in that moment. This helps you become a vibrational match to your desire and that’s how the law of attraction delivers to you; similar frequencies vibrate on the same wavelength.
What all of this means is that in the future, when opportunities present themselves, you’re going to be much more naturally inclined to take the path that leads you toward your goals. Even if you don’t subscribe to the Law of Attraction theory, you can see the ways that retraining your brain can help you succeed. By staying mindful of the Bayesian Integration process and keeping your desires at the forefront of your mind you can make informed decisions about your actions and find peace in knowing that you’re headed in the right direction. You can manipulate this process to work for you in any area of your life, using a vision board is just one of the many simple ways to integrate a program of your choosing, as opposed to allowing your brain to choose one for you.
