Stop Using Vision Boards. Do This Instead

Ruth Tsui: dream house, fast car, luxury travel, or maybe if you're like me, a shepard or hiking in the mountains. Now, either way, we are told that we should stick those big dreams, those visions onto a vision board and manifest it into reality. Now I have never had a vision board. Actually, I lie. I did once on a mastermind retreat and I left it in the hotel room afterwards. Oops. So today I'm going to tell you why they fail, the psychology behind why they make us lazy, and the three-part framework I use instead to hit my goals. So vision boards, why do people love them? Well, they get you focused on your goals and it taps into the emotional feeling of it. And that is really important, finding the spark, the desire, the motivation behind all the hard work that you are going to put in on a daily basis. visualization is shown to be highly effective at... priming your brain for success because your brain can't really tell the difference between the visualization and the reality of the thing that you're visualizing. But vision boards can and often do backfire. So the first reason for that is this dopamine deception. We're creating the vision of our dream life and our dream business and it floods our brain with dopamine. It feels good. It feels really, really good. And because we can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, we're actually getting rewarded before we've done the work, which can make us really, really lazy because it lowers our drive and it lowers our motivation to do the real work. And if in our vision board, we are not focusing on the actual process, the effort that goes into achieving the outcome, we are doing ourselves a disservice. The second thing is that there's a gap between the what we want and the how we're going to do it. So when we focus 100 % on the outcome and 0 % on the process, It's like buying the treasure map, which shows the X, but it doesn't show all the obstacles in our way, like the rivers and the mountains. And this is setting ourselves up for failure. If we are expecting the goal to happen with ease, when it doesn't, that gap between expectation and reality leads to frustration. And when we feel like we're not making progress, when we feel like we're not getting what we want, we are much more likely to give up on the way. And then also we can get ourselves stuck in this kind of comparison trap, the gap between where we are now and where we want to be. And we're staring at our dream life. We're looking at it and it feels so far away from where we actually are that this triggers a sense of shame. You know, I'm not good enough. I'm not capable of this. Why can other people do it? And I can't. It hits your self belief as well, because, you know, you keep trying and you keep failing. really knocks your confidence and it feels demotivating. Or if you feel like the gap between where you are now and where you want to be is so vast, and that gap is so wide, you won't even start in the first place because of lacking of self-efficacy, lacking the self-confidence, the self-belief to actually do it. If we think that we're not going to achieve success, we probably won't even start in the first place. Now I'm not poo-pooing vision boards completely. But inspiration without designed intentional action is basically pointless. And you don't need a vision board to hit your goals. You need action architecture, which is a system that supports you to achieve your goals. And this falls at the middle of three concentric circles. So you've got your spark, your strategy, and your setup. So your spark is the motivation. It's your big why. It's the energy behind why you're moving and doing the work in the first place. And this is the thing that's going to keep you on track on a Tuesday afternoon when you've heard no for the 10th time today and you're questioning everything. Not someone else's thing. It has to be your thing. It has to be your why. So the online space will tell you that you have to hit six figures and 10 K months and all of this kind of stuff. That might not be your motivator. And putting that on your vision board is not going to be the motivator you think it is if actually your vision and version of success. is taking your kids camping to France for three weeks in the summer holidays. So really think about what is this goal for? Not just the top line logical numbers, sensible kind of stuff, but the real underlying reason why that is valuable to you. Then we have our strategy. So instead of trying to focus on these 15 different big goals at once, which is essentially what a vision board is, that sense of trying to catch 15 goals at once is like herding cats. Instead, we want to choose one specific goal that we are going to be focusing on for 90 days. And we're going to work out what needs to happen and when we're going to map out the milestones, we're going to map out the actions that we need to take, the behaviors, so that we can see where the progress is happening. When we make progress visible, that is the motivation. Motivation doesn't come first. We have to act and then we get motivated. It's a feedback loop of, we do the work, we see the progress, that makes us feel good, we do more. Rather than going, I don't feel motivated today, so I'm not going to do it. But you can stay in that loop forever. So we start with taking the action and then the motivation will follow. And then we need to consider our setup. having a vision board on your wall is basically decoration and somewhat pointless. What actually changes whether or not you do something is how you've set up your environment. So your workflows, your habits, your systems, the support that you're getting, because this is going to be the thing that is going to help you to achieve what you want to achieve. So if you want to write a book, clear your desk, print out the chapter overview, block off your notifications on your phone, close the office door to your kids so they can't come in and distract you. You want to make more sales, right. Get focused with the leads tracker. Have a process for following up. Make sure you know what you're going to say in that introductory DM. Make the decisions in advance so that when it's a rainy Thursday in midwinter and you'd rather sit by the fire drinking tea, you have a process to follow. The expectation, the decision is already made. The process is already there. When you have that process there, it makes it much more likely that you will follow through. Even on those days where you don't have the energy, where you don't have the motivation, because you're following a script, you're following the pattern. And when you follow that pattern, when you follow that script, you're going to keep taking the action as just what you do. This morning, I did not want to go for a bike ride. Like I woke up and it literally had an internal argument. I hope I'm not the only person that does this. but I had an argument with the two voices in my head, one go, you should go for a bike ride. I don't want to go. You should go for a bike ride. don't want to go. This is at six o'clock in the morning. I went for the bike ride. I decided that I was going to go and I was just going to cycle for as far as I felt like I wanted to. I did the bike ride. I feel great. but the reason that happened was because I'd already committed to Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings, half past six, I go for a bike ride. Doesn't matter how far I cycle, I'm just going to do it. So I got dressed and I did the thing. So I want you to sit and reflect on where your current blocker is in terms of hitting your goals. Is it your spark? Is it your strategy? Is it your setup? So if you feel like you're exhausted all the time, like you've lost your oomph, that you've lost your energy, then it's time to reconnect with your big why. Not just the logical numbers on a piece of paper, not just that I need more clients, but the actual why. Why is it important to you? If your goal feels overwhelming, big, and so nebulous that you don't even know where to start, then you need to work on creating an implementation plan that breaks everything down right down to these tiny micro actions. that are gonna get you moving forwards because rewriting your website is a massive goal, whereas actually just writing the hero headline for your homepage is one tiny action that you can take and you can probably get done relatively quickly. So break it down into really small tangible steps instead of having this big nebulous goal. And if everything feels kind of chaotic, you're making decisions about your strategy while you're also trying to execute the strategy, your days feel messy, your approach feels inconsistent, then it is time to work on your environment, fixing your setup so that you are reducing the friction that you have and you're making the action easier to take. And when you're a solo player, you are the CEO, you're the marketing director, you're the worker bee all at the same time, pulled in a hundred different directions, just trying to keep all the plates spinning. And when your action architecture, that's boxed, strategy and setup are out of alignment, your momentum will stall. and you cannot afford to spend a month circling your goals. Like you have big dreams and big visions and you actually need to do the work to make it happen. That is not gonna come from having a vision board. Like if you are a vision board kind of person, you probably created one in January and there's probably stuff on there that you have just kept pushing, pushing and pushing. And we're coming into September, coming into autumn and we wanna make sure that that goal that you had at the start of the year actually gets actioned. What you need instead of this big vision is some clarity. And that is exactly what my Momentum audits are for. It's 30 minutes, it's completely free. And what we do is we look at aligning your Spark strategy and set up so that you can turn these big dreams into reality. If you want to book one of those, I will pop the link in the notes, caption, comments somewhere around this video. Until next time, I shall see you then.