Crafting Vision Boards That Work: Manifesting Success in Business and Life

Ever felt like your New Year's resolutions dissolve faster than sugar in hot coffee? You're not alone, and this episode is the game-changer you've been waiting for. Get ready to learn why the typical January 1st goal-setting might be setting you up for a fall, and how to turn the tide to your advantage. We'll unravel the mystery of the critical faculty of the brain, that all-too-often acts as a bouncer, keeping our aspirations out of the VIP section of our minds. 


With a special technique, I'll show you how to befriend that inner gatekeeper, transforming your vision board from a mere collage of wishes into a beacon that guides you towards your dreams.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Happy freaking New Year. This is your bonus episode of the Aligned Business Woman, where we'll be talking about why vision boards don't work and why you shouldn't set goals on January 1st. Now, before you're like, wait a minute, vanessa, don't you have an upcoming event where you're doing vision boards and goal setting? Well, yes, I am, but there is a traditional way to do it and then there's the Vanessa way to do it. So keep on listening to make sure that you are doing it the Vanessa way so that you are highly effective when it comes to goal setting and reaching those goals. Hey you, your next level of expansion is here and you're not gonna accomplish it through hustle and grind. Oh no, not you. You allow ease and flow to come through you so that you can manifest the business of your dreams. Welcome to the Aligned Business Woman podcast, where you get to be in flow and allow your strategic CEO to meet your inner goddess. This is the podcast for female entrepreneurs who want to strengthen their intuition muscle while applying simple and practical business growth strategies to accelerate. We'll combine energetics and strategy, along with human design and your gene keys, to optimize your business performance and results. Before we dive into this episode, that is a audio ripped from my Facebook Live that I did. I wanna make sure that you save your spot for the Aligned Business Woman circle vision boards and goal mapping with Femforce photography here in Houston Texas, because time is running out and seeds are going fast and you wanna make sure that you secure your spot so you can be in the room where so much transformation is gonna be happening and you're gonna get so many perks. All right, let's dive into this episode and just don't mind me talking to the audience because, again, this is during a live recording. How the freak are you? How is your new year getting off to? Right now we're on day two. How are you feeling about the new year, about 2024? Let me know in the comments and as you hop on, say hello, let me know that you're here. If you happen to watch the replay hashtag replay, let me know. Go be a creeper, come on, say hi. Let's do something different this year, right? Let's get different results this year and let's get, let's engage and connect this year so we can be able to get more of what we want in the new year. Let's have an developing aura and invite people in and embrace the good and bad. So happy new year, vanessa.

Speaker 1: 2:42

Here and if you don't know me by now which most of you should, because you're in the spaces that I like to show up in. I am a business coach and business strategist. I like to think of myself as a brain trainer for women entrepreneurs, where we get them out of their head so they could take action in their business and they can stop second guessing themselves and they can see the strategy that's always been underneath their noses, that is gonna lead them to success. So it's like having a coach for your brain, right? I tell you, ooh, you need to fix this technique, or hey, I inspire you to keep on going. So that is me again.

Speaker 1: 3:20

Say hello as you hop on and let's chat today about why vision boards don't work and why you shouldn't start setting your goals on January 1st. Now, before you're like, wait a minute, vanessa, aren't you holding a vision boards and gold mapping event in January? Well, yes, I am Thank you for noticing. And why haven't you signed up yet? Or have you? And if you signed up already, thank you so much. I cannot wait to see you next week. Well, in my opinion, the way that vision boards are traditionally done is a disservice because it doesn't include a way to bypass the critical faculty in your brain. If you don't know what that is, let me explain what the critical faculty is and how understanding how it works will help you achieve your goals much faster and with greater ease.

Speaker 1: 4:19

Now I can't give you the full shebang here, because that is going to be reserved for everyone that signs up for the vision board and goal mapping event which, by the way, the next two days the doors closed, so you want to get your ticket right now. This includes all the meals for the day and includes a swag bag. It includes the 88-page CEO power-planning workflow that I have seven steps to creating a profitable business and you get branding photos or headshots with FemmForsche photography. Every person is going to get at least two to three. The higher passes are going to get more photos and then the highest pass is going to get five to ten photos. Plus they're going to get some b-roll, so for video content like Instagram Reels or Stories. So you want to be sure that you grab your ticket today.

Speaker 1: 5:09

So, going back to the traditional way that boards are done, it is in a social gathering. Everyone's talking, talking about the year, what they're leaving behind in the year what they're going to bring into the new year, and it's a really fun activity. And what ends up happening? When it's in that kind of environment, dopamine's released, right, because our brains get excited about creating something new and that excitement's only short-lived. Then, once the dopamine starts to fizzle out, our logical mind starts to talk us out of certain things, starts to question is that even possible? Do you really think that you can have that kind of business by the end of the year? Do you think that you can find a man that is going to be good looking, great, smile, smart, good in bed and treat you nice? Come on, girl, right, all of the things that our brain wants to talk us out of. Here's a little exercise that you can do from now until we meet at the Vision Board event.

Speaker 1: 6:20

I want you to isolate that inner voice. I want you to isolate it and I want you to imagine that you're putting it into a physical body outside of you, whatever that person looks like. Personify that voice and imagine that that voice is following you around every single day. How long would you keep that person around? Probably not very long, right? You'd be like why are you treating me like this.

Speaker 1: 6:49

So the same goes for us. Why are we talking to ourselves like that? And that is because, from the ages 0 to 7, we are sponges, we are downloading information from our environment, we're allowing an authority figure to imprint their beliefs into us and then we make them our own and then, as adults, our critical faculty which is what allows it's like a filter which allows information in will go in and match and ask hmm, is this familiar, is this useful, or should I discard this? And if our belief systems from 0 to 7, don't match where we want to go because they were set in a mind where we don't have the maturity and the minds that we have right now, then we're going to discard a lot of information and we're going to allow that inner talk to talk us out of certain things.

Speaker 1: 7:45

Right Now, let me know in the comments what is something typical that you like to set for the year, and maybe you almost reached it, or maybe you haven't reached it at all because of that inner voice. What are some of the things that that inner voice says? And right now, as you're typing it, after you type it, I want you to read it and ask yourself how can the opposite be true. How can you flip that around? Yeah, so the critical faculty, and one of my blog posts I talked about how, the critical faculty in the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. I want you to think of it like this in Shrek, shrek wants to go rescue Fiona. She's in the tower because she has this resource right. He's going to reward a reward for rescuing her, right. And I want you to think of the dragon as the critical faculty. It will only allow certain things in, because the critical faculty, the dragon, wants to protect the princess Fiona.

Speaker 1: 8:58

Now, there are three ways to bypass that dragon or, in this case, the critical faculty, and those three things are how we create change, and I'm going to tell you one of them. One of them is repetition. Notice why. You might hear someone say you have to create a habit out of it before it becomes, or you had to repeat it before it becomes a habit after 21 days. Right, because eventually, what you're doing, it's like creating a new dirt road. First it's grass, you keep driving over it, you keep driving over it and then, eventually, it is a new path for you. So that is what happens in your brain when you use repetition to create a new habit, a new thought, a new belief, right? And so in the story of Shrek there is the donkey, which is another way to bypass the critical faculty. And I like to associate the donkey because in this storyline the dragon falls in love with the donkey. And so when you think about falling in love, it is an intense emotion, right? Sometimes we do crazy things when we're in love, we're not thinking straight when we're in love.

Speaker 1: 10:18

So we are going to have this experience when I facilitate the vision board portion of the entire day, the vision board and goal mapping event, we're going to use two of the three. I haven't mentioned the third one and you kind of probably can pick up what the second one was. We're going to activate these different exercises so you can bypass the critical faculty, that inner voice that tries to talk you out of your beautiful visions, so that as you go throughout the year and you're creating your own repetition by looking at the board and you're creating your own exercises and you're activating all of the feelings that you felt during the event, they can put you back into the same state you were in, so releasing that dopamine, that excitement, reigniting that fire in your belly when you created those goals throughout the year Sorry, my dog's snoring over there Because it's this that's going to anchor you in, to continue taking action and to be able to call out that inner voice that wants to talk you out of things or when something gets really scary, you remember this in your full body. And then eventually, these thoughts, they transition from unsupportive thoughts to more empowered thoughts and eventually, the more you think those thoughts, they become a new belief. It is that dirt road, or that road that you're paving, that dirt road that eventually becomes your path of least resistance, the quickest way for you to be able to reach your goals.

Speaker 1: 12:01

So which brings me to why I believe you shouldn't set goals on January 1st. Now there is this phenomenon that says that we have this false perceived motivation at the beginning of the week, at the beginning of the month or the beginning of the year, and I really don't think that sometimes you can set goals at the end of the year, but I think it's really tricky to set goals during the holidays, and I know that that's not the beginning of the year where you will find this renewed momentum. But when you're setting goals, there is an effective way to do it, and that is being at cause of your goals. So the reason why I think that setting goals on January 1st or even the holidays is not conducive to you reaching those goals is because a lot of times people are on vacation, people are, you know, taking it easy. It is not that priority to serve you. Their priority is them, is their family, right.

Speaker 1: 13:16

And so when we're setting goals that put you at effect, meaning that I cannot do this unless this person does this for me. Or, for instance, some people are like, oh, the title company is closed on this day, so I can't close, I can't close on the home, right? I'm just trying to think of, like, some people that are in the audience and some of the things, the situations that they might experience. Or, you know, if you sell insurance, I remember this working for MetLife and then, as we became MassMutual, I remember it was, oh well, no one wants to talk about life insurance right now, no one wants to do this right now, they want to save it for the new year. And eventually the new year became spring, and then the spring was like summer and then it was like, oh, we're on vacation, and they kept like dragging off, right.

Speaker 1: 13:59

So these goals when we set them, where we're putting the outcome in the responsibility of someone else, then that makes us have these at effect thoughts which can eat at our confidence and they can actually demotivate us. So let's say that maybe at the beginning of the month, in March, you want to set goals. I guess that could be good, right, you can set the quarterly goals for the upcoming quarter. But I just want you to be mindful that when you're checking in on the motivation behind setting your goals, that it's not a false sense of encouragement because it's a fresh start. That is the phenomenon. It's like oh, it's a fresh start, so then I can definitely do this, I have a reset right. That is why I don't think that doing goals on January 1st or at the end of December is going to be helpful.

Speaker 1: 14:59

And then going back to that, like when we create goals that are like okay, well, this outcome, I can reach this. If this person does this, if this team member does this, it can trigger self doubt and discourage you, because what is telling your unconscious mind is that you cannot do that, you're out of control of this outcome because you're dependent on someone else. And then we generalize, we distort the lead and generalize information and we'll forget that, oh well, I couldn't do this because of this person. We were putting ourselves that effect and sending me like, okay, what can I do instead? But then we start to think, well, this didn't work out. And sometimes we think because that person didn't do their part. But then it just becomes a generalized thing that I tried something and it didn't work out and that, right, there is going to again eat at your confidence and then it's going to program your, your unconscious mind or your subconscious mind, to reinforce the beliefs that something doesn't work out for you. And we don't want to give fuel to that fire. We want to be empowered in all, knowing that we're able to achieve our goals and that we're in control, direct cause of the outcome.

Speaker 1: 16:22

All right, that was brief and that's all I have for you today. And I want you to make sure that you purchase your ticket for the vision board and go mapping, because doors close on January 4th and you won't be able to get in and I don't know where you can get such an incredible value, all the things that you're getting, plus the headshots, for such a great price. So lock it in now. All right, I'll see you next time on the next episode of the align business woman. Thank you for joining me on this episode of the align business woman podcast. I'm your host, vanessa Ann Miller, and I'm so excited to share some good news with you. Head over to the show notes so you can grab your free gift and make sure to leave a review and join me inside the align business woman Facebook group until next week. That I love.