The Vision Board Book
How to Use the Power of Intention and Visualization to Manifest the Life of Your Dreams
In February 2008 I was tasked with a daunting challenge: team up with John Asssaraf to write the definitive book on vision boards, how they work, the history and theory behind them, and a thorough how-to for how to create your own — and do it all in, oh, ten days.
That “ten,” fortunately for me, was expanded to thirty. Still, a single month to write a full-length book on this weighty topic? Yep. And we did. The Vision Board Book is part of a fascinating production called “The Complete Vision Board Kit,” produced by Beyond Words Books, a division of Atria, the people who brought you The Answer, which is the book I had just done with John prior to this project.
So you might think of it as a little bit of dessert after the meal of The Answer.
Excerpt from The Vision Board Book
One reason so many people fail to achieve the things they genuinely want in life is that they get bogged down in worrying about the “how.” As a child, when you would think of something you really wanted—a bike, a trip to Disneyland, to become an astronaut, anything—the first thing you probably heard was something like this: “How are you going to do that?”
Most of us have been taught to pursue our goals by mapping out a logical series of steps to take us there. Start at the beginning. One step at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
So we take our big, beautiful dream, set it to the side, and ask ourselves, “Where do I start?” Pretty soon we say, “Oh, get you’re your head out of the clouds! Get realistic!” And just like that, millions of dreams are snuffed out every day.
Creating a vision board takes the opposite approach. Instead of fussing about the “how,” it focuses all your attention on the destination—the “what.” Rome may have not been built in a day, but it could very well be dreamt in a day. I’m not saying it isn’t good to plan or to consider a logical sequence of steps. It’s just that this is not usually the most effective way to make a dream come true.
There was no logical, step-by-step way Patrick could have bought that watch, and he knew that. But he didn’t get hung up in the how: he focused on the what.
Think about a pivotal event in your life—an event that completely changed the course of your life in a positive way. Then ask yourself: did that event happen as a result of your careful, logical planning?
Creating a vision board focuses your mind on the destination. If it’s something you want strongly enough, and the image is burned into your mind and heart deeply enough, then in the influence of that powerful, magnetic, gravitational attraction, you’ll find the how. But you can’t start with the how. The what must come first.
