How to Be a Bawse: A Guide to Conquering Life(23)
I’m sure this is not the first time you’ve heard of a vision board. That’s because it’s not a concept I made up. It’s a pretty well-known device that most people know from the book and film The Secret. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then yes, I invented vision boards.
A vision board is a piece of paper, a piece of Bristol board, or a chalkboard—any surface, really—that has images of all the things you want to obtain in life. The idea is to collect images that represent your goals and paste them onto the board to create a collage. Then you place the board someplace where you will see it often, reminding you of your goals. I’ve made two vision boards so far in my life and can tell you firsthand that they have positively impacted my hustle and my mind. Here are three reasons you should have a vision board:
“A BAWSE DOESN’T JUST KNOW WHAT THEY WANT FOR CHRISTMAS; THEY KNOW WHAT THEY WANT FROM LIFE.
Creating a vision board gives you clarity about what your goals are. People know they have to work really hard, so they do, but sometimes they’re unsure of what they’re really working for. What’s the goal? After all, you can’t get what you want in life if you don’t know what you want. Not having a clear understanding of what your goals are is like not putting an address into a GPS before driving. Something like “money” isn’t a clear goal. How will you ever know if you’ve made enough money to achieve your goal of making money? Does money mean a nice tux or a private jet? Set clear goals and define them with clear images. You can’t hustle toward a blurry picture because you’ll never know if you’ve gotten there. Create a vision board and be honest about what you want. If you want a nice car, put it on there. If you want a six-pack, put it on there. If you want to travel the world, put it on there too. If you want to date Channing Tatum, same—but that might not work. Everything else, though, PUT IT ON THERE! Now you know what you’re aiming for.
Creating a vision board helps you to be self-aware, which, it goes without saying, is a key Bawse quality. Success is subjective. For some people, success means owning a yacht; for others, it means being a good parent; for still others, it means running a 10K marathon. When you begin pasting your goals onto a board, you can have a better understanding of how you define success. Your vision board will be filled with all the things you think are important—and what you think is important is very telling. Taking a look at your vision board can often help you understand why you make the decisions you make. If you’re unsure why you love to work late nights at the office even though your fiancé hates it, the picture of a CEO’s desk on your vision board might be the answer. Or maybe it’s the picture of a stack of money.
A vision board allows you to be constantly reminded of what you want in life. Now that you’ve gained clarity and self-awareness, you can motivate yourself by storing your goals in your subconscious. What better way to do that than to stare at images of your goals? I keep my vision board above my bed, and sometimes, like when I’m struggling to fall asleep or I’m talking on the phone, I’m looking at my vision board without thinking about it. That subliminal messaging to my brain does wonders!
A vision board can also help you make tough decisions. If you’re having a hard time making a decision about something—you have two choices and both are tempting—refer to the goals on your board and evaluate which of the two options align better with your vision. Often you will find that a tempting choice does not do anything to help you achieve your goals—it only divides your attention. Giving your vision board a glance can help you keep your eyes on the prize without being distracted by shiny objects. We’re all squirrels sometimes. Not to mention that—Wait, is that tinfoil? BRB.
If creating just one vision board will help you to become more self-aware, imagine how much you’ll learn about yourself with your second vision board! You can literally track how you’ve grown as a person when you compare your first and second boards. What are you changing? What has become more or less important to you? My first vision board had several images of money on it. I can’t say that I truly fulfilled that goal before making my second vision board, but still … money was not on my second one. Somewhere between my first and second board, money became less important to me. Maybe I realized that it didn’t make me as happy as the other things I had on my board, such as travel and content creation. LOOK AT HOW SELF-AWARE I AM. Now I can focus my attention on travel and content creation and not chase easy money.
Before you run off to create a vision board, let’s talk about visualization. In my life, I’ve practiced both long-term and short-term visualization, depending on the situation. Both have served me well on my journey to becoming a Bawse.
Long-term visualization is when you imagine yourself in a scenario that you hope will become a reality one day. You’re not quite sure when or how it’ll happen; all you know is that you want it to happen. In other words, you imagine the experience of obtaining all the things on your vision board. You can do this simply by sitting in a chair, closing your eyes, and imagining yourself signing the sales agreement for a new house. Feel free to even mimic signing your signature with your hand (bonus points if you hold a pen). Now, by The Secret’s logic, that’s all you’d have to do to obtain a new house. But I don’t believe that. The universe might respect the law of attraction, but it respects a good hustle even more. After you’re done visualizing, get up and get to work.