Are you ready to unlock your full potential and achieve your ambitions? In this episode of the BritCham Vietnam podcast, host Matt Ryland sits down with Vandana Saxena Poria OBE, an entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, and chartered accountant, to discuss the transformative power of vision boarding. Vandana shares her journey from the UK to Eastern Europe and India, highlighting the importance of having a personal vision and the impact this can have in accelerating your progress and acheivemments. Discover how vision boards tap into the subconscious mind to bring your dreams and aspirations to life. By being playful, curious and courageous you can create the life you've always imagined.
For more information about the Britcham Chamber of Commerce Vietnam please visit www.britchamvn.com
Are you ready to unlock your full potential and achieve your ambitions? In this episode of the BritCham Vietnam podcast, host Matt Ryland sits down with Vandana Saxena Poria OBE, an entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, and chartered accountant, to discuss the transformative power of vision boarding. Vandana shares her journey from the UK to Eastern Europe and India, highlighting the importance of having a personal vision and the impact this can have in accelerating your progress and acheivemments. Discover how vision boards tap into the subconscious mind to bring your dreams and aspirations to life. By being playful, curious and courageous you can create the life you've always imagined.
For more information about the Britcham Chamber of Commerce Vietnam please visit www.britchamvn.com
Hello and welcome to the BRI and Vietnam podcasts. I am Matt Ryland, executive director of the British Chamber, and it's great to have you listening to our latest podcast today, is with Vandana S. Sex Aena. Purer, O B e, Vandana describes herself as an entrepreneur, a TEDx speaker, and chartered accountant. She's a disruptive visionary, a master storyteller, and curator who awakens and ignites organizations and people by disrupting mindsets and perceptions. Bandana spent her first two decades in the uk. She then moved to Eastern Europe for 10 years where she worked for Ernst and Young and was one of the first globally trained people on I F R Ss. It was here that she set up her first business in 1997. Which was later sold to a listed company. She then joined this company and set up their international division in 10 countries. So has worked globally with vast amounts of experience. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about the soft skills and the softer side of people with regards to vision boarding. We know that organizations have visions and objectives, but maybe it's not so common for individuals to have this. And hopefully V is gonna tell us, tell us exactly why they should. So without further ado, that's enough from me. let me hand over to Vandana. hello. Welcome.
Vandana:Thank you very much for inviting me on your podcast, Matt.
Matt:My pleasure. Great to have you here. a good place to start would be, a little bit about your background. I gave a little introduction, but please tell us, a little bit more about yourself.
Vandana:Sure. Thank you. so I grew up in the UK, as you said, grew up in the UK and I qualified as a chartered accountant. And, very soon after I qualified, I decided to move overseas. There were, there were many reasons for that, but one of them was the 1970s, 1980s. Britain wasn't actually very kind to anyone with, non-white skin. And, I just decided I wanted to try living in other countries and seeing what it was like. So I moved over to Eastern Europe. I, I became a serial entrepreneur. I actually sold my first company, when I was 28. I then, I sold it to a listed company and I, as you said, I worked for them, for the le next nine years. And I was opening offices for them across Central and Eastern Europe. So I started in book arrest in Romania. then I opened centers in Poland, Hungary, Clov. Ukraine, and a few others. I then moved to India about 18 years ago and set up a company there, which I exited from about six or seven years ago. And at the same time, throughout my journey, I've always been very keen on working with the UK and I guess trying to get better intercultural ties. So I, I would constantly work on this is how we do things in the uk. This is what you need to do locally to be successful. So I did a lot of work with the UK government on promoting the UK in different countries. And when I got to pun, which is where I'm based now, which is a small city in India of five and a half million people, set up the Indo British Business Group there. And off the back of that, you, because of the success of the British business groups in India, David Cameron set up the UK India Business Council and I was asked to be a director on that. And, in that process I was honored with an O B E from her Majesty, the queen, the late queen. the last seven years I've really been focused on one thing, Matt, and that is, Why are people not happy and why are people not doing as well as they could? And I know they sound like really broad questions, but actually they come down to very few things, and vision boards is very, very connected to that. So I'll stop there and hand back to you.
Matt:Wow. so much experience, so much to talk about. We could be here for hours, but uh, we will try and keep it to the point and, short. So it makes sense to, to move on to vision boarding itself. So to us about what the process is, what is vision boarding, and, why do you think it's important and why do you think it can help individuals, achieve more?
Vandana:well let's start with this. You would never think about setting up a company having some kind of vision of what you want that company to do. Jeff Bezos talked about Amazon and said, I wanna be able originally to get books out, to everywhere. no matter where you are, across the world. And, bill Gates was very clear that he had software that he wanted to go into machines and, and get it out there to as many people as possible. So companies spend a lot of time thinking about their vision. Then through that vision, they put in a mission and then they have objectives. if you think about why they do that, it, it acts like an internal compass. For organizations, it helps them decide what they want to do, what they don't wanna do, and what they wanna focus on. So it's quite incredible for me that companies spend so much time and effort on their vision and mission and their employees follow that vision and mission. And yet we as individuals don't think about vision and mission. We think about, oh, what's the next job I'm gonna get? Or What's the next house I'm gonna live in? But we tend not to think about our whole life. And having spent a lot of time talking to people in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, a lot of them have regrets and they're like, I'm so annoyed that I followed what everyone else was doing or what my company was doing, and I didn't think enough about me. And really, that's why I think vision boards are really important because they help you think about where do you wanna go in your life? Why do you wanna go there? And they help start building some direction, into your life that makes it something to aim for and something that shows you the way to really get to your dreams.
Matt:I suppose, Happy, happy people. Generally, it'll be more efficient. Get more things done and actually know where they're going. have some, have some direction. So for organizations, having, having, engaged and and happy employees is, is definitely a good thing. so how can people go about starting the process of doing their own vision board?
Vandana:I, I would say, Matt, if it's okay, before I talk about starting the process, I'd really like to talk a little bit about why vision boards. Are so powerful because a lot of people think, oh gosh, what's the point of putting some images up on a board? How, how, how on earth does that? This is cuckoo, but actually it's not. There's science and there is magic behind it. holding an image or images in your conscious mind long enough that your subconscious can play with them and begin to create a reality around them in their conscious mind is exactly what happens. for example, I gave you this statistic and I wanna know, Matt, if you remember anything about it. Do you know how many bits of information your conscious mind can hold? And it's
Matt:I remember rightly, it was, it was in the millions, or at least billions, maybe.
Vandana:actually, consciously you can only hold 40 bits of, of information per second. 40 bits of information, but your subconscious can process you. Absolutely right. 11 million bits of information per second, 11 million. We need to understand we are not just our mind. We tend to think we are our conscious mind, and that's our brain. We need to understand along with that conscious mind. We have a subconscious mind and we have a whole body. People don't get the mind body connection, but the thing that's most important here is even if you don't believe the mind body connection, you need to understand so much is going on subconsciously, and you know that because that's how you make decisions. if you're going somewhere, you automatically turn right to get to the building and you're listening to your music or you are on a phone call, but you, you still do it. That's your subconscious mind that's doing it.'cause you have so much locked in your subconscious mind. So more of our visions that we lock into as subconscious mind the more quickly we are gonna move towards our goal. and if we understand, subconscious processing and we add to that something called neuroplasticity, we've got an absolutely great mindset to move forward to, to our goals through learning. So neuroplasticity is if we start to adjust the way we think about something new neurons will fire in our brain and it will create new patterns in our brain that will move us more towards that. So every time you engage in a particular line of thinking, you're strengthening your neural circuits in your brain and, and, and your brain will keep coming back to it. So if you have a vision board, which has got pictures of where you wanna be in the future, what kind of life you wanna lead, et cetera, et cetera, it's the first step to telling your brain, this is where I wanna get.
Matt:Wow. we start talking about plasticity, it's getting deep. It's getting deep. But it is, it is a fascinating subject. And actually what I didn't say at the beginning, of the podcast is, this is actually a masterclass that we did in person. I. In Ho Chi Minh, and a very successful one. It was, and, we are very much hoping on, on, on follow-ups. I, I think one of, one of the questions, asked, then, and, and, and I think it's interesting to talk again now, is what kind of challenges do people have when starting the process of setting up a vision board?
Vandana:I think the first challenge. That people have is they're frightened. They're like, oh, if I do a vision board and I don't reach it, then I'm gonna be so disappointed. And if you're starting from that premise, the challenge is that another part of your brain called the amygdala starts going off. And the amygdala is like that bit that says don't do it because it might hurt you or it, you might get disappointed by it. it's the bit that actually started in human beings, where, in the animal era when we, when animals like, they're, they're frightened of, I don't know, some kind of predator, getting them the amygdala triggers as soon as it sees any kind of movement. And it puts a whole load of it, like bathes your body in cortisol. And cortisol is just gonna get you, oh my God, I need to move, I need to get out of here, I need to save myself. the problem is that when that much cortisol goes into your body, your center for growth and learning shuts down completely. that's why when you have an argument with somebody, and, and you really head up and you walk away, you often think, oh, I should have said this. I should have said that. That's because your center for Growth and learning is shut down. So the first, the first challenge is that this amygdala still exists in in human beings. We are not worried about a lion or a tiger coming into where we are sitting, but we are worried about anything that that can make us feel insecure. So that's the first challenge. The second is, I don't know what I want in the future. I've got no idea what I want in the future. And because we've got no idea, we don't. We don't spend time on it. We don't spend time thinking about it. So I teach people, and what I'd like to teach your listeners to do is to be playful, courageous, and curious. so to, to just open their minds and just say, look, we're just gonna have a little fun doing this kind of activity, and we're gonna write a few things down. And if it doesn't happen, it's okay, but there's no harm in dreaming.
Matt:Absolutely. That never, never a true word spoken. And it's having, it's having the courage as, as you said, to do that. and, and yeah, having the, the openness to do that. So if someone wants to Start their own vision board. can you talk us through how they, how they should go about doing that?
Vandana:Yeah, I, I think the first thing is, Don't go straight to doing pictures. The first thing that you need to do is you need to sit down and you need to courageously, and curiously look at your life. As it is today. So think about, I I normally give people six or seven things to think about and, and what I try and do is imagine, imagine that you have a wheel and the wheel is divided, so you've got wheel on paper or a circle on paper, and you divide that into segments or pies. Each part of the pie would be a different one of these segments. So I'd get you thinking about your personal growth. So how much time do you make? Your own personal growth. for example, I admire you a lot because you're, you've started this podcast that you're doing for others, I'm sure that you probably listened to, to lots of podcasts before you started doing yours. And you also thought about what you want to have in the podcast to make it a good podcast. That's personal growth, that's helping you improve a particular area. of, of, of your life, that's personally important to you. The second thing that I think people don't think enough about is how much fun and leisure am I making time for fun and leisure? So what do I do for fun and leisure? The third is think about your home environment. Do you have a stable and happy home environment? So where you live, Would you, would you like to change something about that? do you have the right kind of desk to be able to do the kind of work you wanna do? Is it set up the way that you would like your, your home to be set up? So think about your home. So we've got personal growth, we've got fun and leisure, we've got home and environment. Think about your finances. Are you as financially stable as you'd like to be? Or would you, you know, do you have some worries? Would you like to make it a better position? Think about your health. think about, how are you both physically and mentally? Are you making time for that? And then the other one is your close relationships and your tribe. So do you have a good friend circle? Do you have good close relationships? So I'd say those, Categories are quite important and I would, I would literally being an accountant, put a number beside each of those. Out of 10. How happy am I with it? the reason why it's good to do that is because it gives you a baseline. It gets you to think about where you are today. Once you've done that, you should look down that list and you should ask yourself, are there any surprises there? Because sometimes, as human beings, Matt, we're really, we're really good at just hiding things from ourselves, but we're not really hiding anything. It's in our subconscious. So I'd look at, are there any surprises? and what can I do with two or three of those categories to make them a 10 out of 10? So pick two or three that you're, that are really important to you. And say, if I wanted to make them a 10 out, 10, What would it look like? So if I wanted to get physically fit, what would it look like? So say I've got six at the moment on physical and mental fitness and I wanted to get it to a 10. I think one of the things that I would do is I would say I need to exercise more. I need to exercise at least three times a week and do some serious cardio for at least 45 minutes. I probably need to think about my diet a bit more. I may need to think about bringing in something like meditation. That could be, those could be things that would bring it up to a 10 because I think, within four or five months I would physically be feeling better. If it's your friend, circle it. It could be that you don't really have, it enough, good friends. And so maybe one of the things that you need to. I need to find more like-minded people. Where can I find those people? And you start thinking about that. So the idea is really, really think about two or three of those areas and how would you wanna improve it? Once you've got that done, I would then say, I would like you to go into absolute fantasy. Imagine imagination land. I'd want you to close your eyes and imagine. Your best possible future in four or five years time and, and really go all out because this is your imagination and it's completely up to you. And this is where you should be playful, courageous, and curious. Now, I have to tell you, Matt, I did this about five years ago, five, five or seven years ago. I did this when I was starting my next business. And one of the things, I've always had a dream to have a book published. And, and so when I started thinking about my future, I like started thinking about, wow, I've got a book published. I got an award for the, for the book. I, I traveled because of the book. And then I also thought about my business, which is all to do with my mindset. And, I, I realized that I wanted to be speaking about it. I wanted to travel with it. I also realized that I wanted to put some metrics, So that, it was solid so that people wouldn't just say to me, oh, you just do pie in the sky stuff. But I had some metrics, et cetera, so I really imagined that. I imagine my kids at university, I've got two kids who are now 17 and 19 and, also imagine making some changes to my house. So I, I did that all myself. And actually online, there are some guided meditations that people can take. To really go into that, that, that, imaginary world. And like I said, please understand, even though it may sound like hocus pocus, your subconscious is where it all happens. So you really wanna go into that and you wanna make it a happy place to be. Now, once you've done that, I think the thing to do is, is to perhaps write down a few of the things that you saw that were really important to you. And then it's to go straight to the internet or straight to magazines and find images that talk to you. So you take those images, you, you, you, you can like, search for, so I searched for a book awards, for example, because I wanted to get a picture of a trophy and then I'd go onto images and I'd pick up a picture and I would open a PowerPoint presentation. So I had just that blank slide. And then I would put the picture into that PowerPoint presentation, and then I'd go back and I'd find a picture of my children and myself really happy with our dog. And I would take that picture and I would put it in the PowerPoint. So basically what happens is you start to build up a series of pictures that represent that happy life that you wanna be living in the next couple of years.
Matt:Having experienced the, the masterclass we did, a month, six weeks ago now, it is an incredibly powerful tool and giving yourself the time and opening your mind to actually the, the categories that you talked about, and actually thinking. Properly about which, which ones you give attention to, which ones you don't, visualizing it, and then doing, as you say, going, going on the internet. it, it is a powerful thing. My, my vision board is now on my fridge. I look at it every time I go to the fridge and, I have to say, I, I have started, I have started doing things towards achieving what's on that vision board and. I have to say before that I've always had, oh, I need to do this or I want to do that, and then something else gets in the way. we have crazy busy lives. Other things get in the way and I've never done it. But now I can, I can hand on heart say that, you know, I am now starting to achieve what's on that vision board. it is an amazing experience. One thing you touched on, and we did talk a little bit about, during the, masterclass that we did, what kind of timescale should these vision boards before? Is there a an ideal or does it depend?
Vandana:I think, I think it depends. I, Oprah, Oprah Winfrey's a big believer in vision boards and she would do a new vision board every few years. I. Sort of the, the, that's over the next two to three years so that you've got, you've got time for it to sink in. I, I should also say that there is a third step. So the first step, if you think about it, it's what I call examine, and thank you for reminding me about this. The first step is like really examining inside. It's like, where am I today? And then the second stage is that visualization. And the third stage is generation. So you put the vision board together and I think it's really important in that third step that you actually put down two or three things like you've said you're doing, which is, this is what I really wanna do. So if you've got up there, and I had up there a book that I really want to have a book, it's will I make steps to. To writing that book. So I'll make time every day or every two or three days to actually write something. I was actively going out and looking at who could I collaborate with and such a fantastic opportunity, just like literally fell onto my lap with, an amazing advertising guru. In India who was in his eighties and really wanted to give back to the world. And I met him. We had a few conversations and then he just looked over at me one day and he said, would you like to write a book with me? And I was just like, yes. And I said, what about? And he said, I dunno yet, but let's just start talking and we'll find it. And that's, and that's how the book came about. So I think it's not just, you do need it up there, but I think it's also worth writing down two or three steps that you're willing to take to get there and having them up somewhere so you're constantly reminded that you should do it.
Matt:Absolutely. That was you, you've just answered my next question, which was exactly that is how people, how do people see it through? Because again, we might do these things, and other things get in the way, et cetera, et cetera. But, I think that that's, yeah. Making tangible kind of milestones to a certain extent, which is again, what we do in business. so why don't we do that in our, in, in our personal lives? and sticking with the theme of kind of timescales, how often is, how often should it be revisited? Is again, is there a recommendation or what, what are your thoughts on that?
Vandana:No, I think, I think it's very much up to the individual when, when you look at it and you say, look, I've achieved those three or four things, or those things are no longer important to me. You can change it. You could do a brand new one, or you could, just adjust the one that you've got. It's, it's up to you.
Matt:Excellent Vanana. I think, We have covered a lot of, a lot of ground, and I think we could probably talk for another hour. but I think we've looked at the why. We've looked at the how, and we've looked at how you, how you see it through. Are there any final words that you have for our listeners on, on, on, on the, on, on the vision board subject to, to inspire them to go away and, and, and, and complete or start the process of their vision board?
Vandana:I, I would just, I think there's one powerful question to ask yourself when you, when you look over at your vision board, just ask yourself, what did you do to further yourself from yesterday? That's it. What's the one action you took that furthered yourself to getting towards that vision board than you did yesterday? So how are you getting closer to it? And I think that is, that's it. And also, it should never be a chore. It's always about enjoying it, being playful, courageous, and curious.
Matt:Perfect. It's a great way to end some inspiration. Thank you Vanana. it's been amazing to talk to you. Amazing to see you again. I very much look forward to the next time. Thank you for listening. I am sure you have taken many things away from that and, good luck with your vision boarding. I hope you enjoyed the, um, Vietnam podcast and we look forward to you listening to the next one. Thank You