Why Vision boards don’t work

… as useful and effective as nailing jelly to your forehead.

Coaches use vision boards to program your subconscious mind to constantly move towards something.

Being the UK’s leading development coach and ‘The World’s Best Hypnotist’ there’s not much I don’t know about programming your subconscious mind or visualisation, so I am going to let you in on a few secrets that I usually save for my coaching clients.

There’s three vital pieces of information to understand when programming your mind:

Your brain finds it difficult to differentiate between real and imagined situations.

That’s why you feel genuinely upset when watching a movie and someone dies, you can panic when thinking about something scary, because your mind thinks it’s happening.

Your subconscious state will always move you towards what is normal behaviour.

That’s why we always follow the same routines everyday, ever started to drive to work on your day off? Because you follow routine, you have getting up routines, breakfast routines, such routines etc. You may even have a certain parking spot

Your subconscious is responsible for 75-95% of your actions and behaviours.

Your subconscious mind is always working and guiding you towards what it thinks you want, most of our actions are subconscious, we are not even consciously in control, again using an example of driving we can arrive at a destination and not even know how we got there because our brain was busy.

The idea of a vision board is to firstly trick our brain into thinking the Ferrari on there is ours, it’s normal and thus our brains will work towards it. Great idea, although it takes a little bit more than a picture for that to work. You need to experience it, you need to hear the engine, you need to feel the luxury leather, you need to know what the glove box looks like.

So when I work with my coaching clients, I encourage them to make their goal as real as possible; Instead of putting a picture of a Ferrari, put yourself on a mailing list, learn about the car, get the insurance quote, go test drive one, go look at them on a regular basis. 

Instead of a picture of your ideal house, go view them, plan your kitchen, furniture, which schools your kids will go to. A coaching client of mine drove home from work past her ideal house every day, she now lives there.

You need to make it AS REAL AS POSSIBLE a flat picture, doesn’t help you visualise, you need to experience.

To visualise properly you need to use all the senses, visual (see), auditory (Hear), kinaesthetic (Feel), olfactory (smell) Once you have a real experience you can really bring that visualisation to life.

Secondly you need to consider your motivational direction, there are two directions towards pleasure and away from pain, most people think they are towards pleasure, you like nice things, so therefore you must be a ‘towards pleasure’ kind of guy right? Wrong. News flash, the majority of people like nice things.

Towards pleasure

You save money

You are consistent

You work meticulously towards your goals without prompting

Away from pain

You do things last minute

You need a deadline or things don’t get done

You come out fighting when your backs against the wall

So if you fall into the away from pain category the only way a vision board will work from you is if you put an eviction notice and an overdue credit card bill on it.

If you have an away from pain direction, you have to create the pain first, agree to do something that you haven’t quite perfected yet. I have an away from motivation and I always book things, agree to do things and that forces me into action. Even a simple social media post announcing that you will be going to do ‘A live video’ is sometimes all you need to get moving.

So by all means create a vision board, it will look pretty and remind you of what your working for, but unfortunately thats where its power ends.

If you’d like to book a FREE consultation to find out how I can help you program your mind effectively click the link: