WARNING! You too CAN turn your DREAMS into reality!

At this time of year many of us are discussing resolutions, summarising the year ahead, creating intentions, behaviours, goals and objectives for the year ahead with a word or two and an affirmation.

I like to do something a little different, by creating something that I view on my phone, carry in my wallet, pin on the wall, save as a screesaver or post on social media.

As I envision 2023 and beyond, I will create a Dream or Vision Board. I have found this an extremely effective method of visualising the future and using it as a tool to plan to achieve it.

Come with me over the next 5 days I will take you through 5 simple steps to create a personal Dream board.

• Step 1 – What is a Dream Board and How and Why does it work?
• Step 2 – Dream Catching – how to explore and capture your dreams.
• Step 3 – The Process of Creating Your Dream Board
• Step 4 – How to use your Dream Board
• Step 5 – Actions for sharing and keeping Your Dreams Alive

But before we embark on this exciting journey of creatimng and truning our dreams into reality we need to understand what a Dream Board is and How and Why it can work.....

So, what is a Dream board?

It is a collection of images, quotes or affirmations that represent your future dream or vision of what you want in your life, business or both. You may be familiar with Mood Boards that are used by marketing and creative industries that pull together images, words, textures, colours to help communicate to others an understanding of the target consumer or the interior design of a room to be decorated.

The Dream board is the same, the collection of content you choose are carefully and thoughtfully selected to visually represent what your dream could physically look like and or feel like, the process is a creative one as you are effectively shaping a vision of your potential future!

The board helps as a short cut or prompt to remind you of your visualisation of the future; rather than having to keep imagine the images and feelings of what you want in your life afresh, you have a physical or digital board that reminds you of this vision; with enough focus and effort you will be able to make significant progress towards or arrive at that future.?

In a nutshell, Visualisation is simply using your imagination to create pictures, feelings, sounds, smells and even sensations of the future that you dream of.

So, why spemd time pulling together a load of pictures of what you want to achieve?

How does a Dream Board Work?

An amazing and powerful quirk about being a human is that our physiology and neurology react very similarly to stimulus that is internal (i.e., we imagined it) and stimulus that is external (from an outside force or our environment).?

Don’t believe me?,

Then stop, and take a moment to imagine a past exam, test or interview; you may have been nervous, worried and stressed because you hadn't prepared enough or did not know what to expect, it's likely these these feelings were accompanied by physical sensations, such as sweating, raised heartbeat, nausea or fidgeting; these are all signs that your body was preparing for the stressful event that your brain was imagining. Often these events turn out much better than we anticipated, it wasn’t so bad after all, but our body was responding to our brain and physically preparing to protect us from the worst, through our fight or flight mechanism. The same duo of brain and phyisology also work in unison in positive situations, although these thoughts and feelings can be harder for us to achieve as our brains and bodies are designed to protect us from danger.?

Therefore, we need put more effort and practice into creating these positive potential situations, and a positive Dream board is a creative tool to help enable our visualisation more easily and readily.?

If we can train ourselves to imagine our positive future with enough detail and attach other sensations to it, such as sounds, smells and feelings then our brain will believe that it is real as it stumiulates the same sensations when it visualizes doing an action as it does when you are actually physically performing the action.

Therefore, we can use this insight to start to help our bodies and brain to be receptive and ultimately take action towards the future that we want; once we have these dream goals expressed visually fixed in our mind it is much easier for us to start working towards them.?

Initially, I used to write my goals down, print them out and stick them inside a kitchen cupboard so that I saw them regularly as I did everyday tasks like open the cupboard door to find tea or coffee, this was good, and I achieved a lot, but converting these into images improved my success and was much more of a fun process too, and I have never looked back since I achieved my first goal through a visual picture of my future.

I was 23 and hadn't been working for long, I had a great job and was working hard, but what for? I cut out and stuck a magazine advertisement for a Mazda MX5 Sportcars on the wall under my bedroom light switch, in the picture the car was bright red and shiny as it sped along the sun kissed tarmac through an avenue of Mediterranean trees. Over the next 18 months I researched prices, model variants and engine types so I knew exactly which specification I wanted, and just as, if not more importantly, every day as I left for work in the morning and returned weary from work each evening, I saw that picture of the beautiful little sports car as switched that light switch on and off, I was reminded of what I was going to working towards.

The first day I could get insured for that car was my 25th birthday and I drove it off the forecourt; it didn’t fall into my lap, there were challenges and I had to adjust my plans alomg the way, but I achieved that dream goal through using a my first simple dream board. At the time I knew nothing about visualisation or how the brain worked, my purpose was to own and drive that car; the sensation of driving it was already within me.

But don’t take my word for it, plenty of athletes, entertainers and businesspeople have used visualisation to help them achieve their dreams and goals, a dream board as a tool to help you do that.

“If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it – then I can achieve it” Muhammad Ali’s

“I have visualised my imagination so clearly and so consistently that it has manifested itself into my reality”. – Conor McGregor

“Anything you can imagine, you can create.” - Oprah Winfrey

Now that you understand what a dream board is and how it can aid the visualisation of your dreams, we will move on to Step 2 tomorrow –

Dream Catching – How to Capture Your Dreams.

#2023goals #dreamboard #dreamweaving #2023objectives #2023planning