This Simple Vision Board Trick Changes Everything for Midlife Women (Ep. 37)

0:00 I think that one of the toughest questions that I could ask you right now in midlife and I mean what the heck? Maybe at any age, I suspect, but one of the toughest questions is what do you really want? Where do you want to be in five years? Or what do you really want in a job or relationship or whatever? When I'm coaching, I often see sort of a blank look or a look of panic. Why is it so hard for us to figure out what we really want? Well, guess what? I'm going to help you. We're going to take a lesson from entrepreneurs and make this a little bit easier.

0:43 So stick with me. Welcome to Mind your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time, unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and oh my goodness powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind your Midlife podcast. When we hit our mid-40s, our 50s, our early 60s, we often are coming out of a period of life that has been really busy, and maybe that was raising kids, maybe it was really focusing on growing a career.

1:40 Who knows, it could be a couple of different things, and maybe we didn't really have time for a while there to think about what do I want? How do I want to spend my time? What's my goal? But here's what happens now. Number one sometimes we have a bit more free time. If you have raised kids and they are now out of the house or somewhat out of the house, you probably have a little bit more free time in your schedule. And two we start to see how valuable time is. We start to see that the years are just flying by and if you're anything like me, in my head I'm like 35, 38, maybe Not 54.

2:36 I'm not 54 in my head, and so when I realize I actually am 54, then I think, oh wow, if there's stuff I want to do, I better do it. Now. We're starting to see that we need to actually take action before we waste more time, and that's really good, except when it creates stress, where we're thinking now I don't know what I want to do. Who do I want to hang out with? What do I want to achieve? Do I have time? Is it too late. It creates this whole spiral of stress potentially, and so let's see if we can make this easier.

3:21 My idea for you is something that I learned when I first started my first online business. The first time that I had any exposure to entrepreneurship was in a direct selling company and, honestly, is the only reason I'm here today, because I started to understand the power of mindset and the fact that I better pay attention to all the words in my head and coming out of my mouth if I was going to go for big goals and be my own boss. So if you've never been in a situation where you had to be your own motivator and your own boss action taker, then this may be a little bit different way of thinking and I think it's going to help you.

4:11 Entrepreneurs know that in order to grow their business, it's on them, and that can feel scary and exciting in equal measure, and that can feel scary and exciting in equal measure. So if it's on them, then they better figure out where they're going. And the way I always used to say it is imagine you get in your car and you back out of the garage or the driveway and you're on the street and you start driving and you have no destination in mind. You've not put anything in the Apple Maps or Waze or whatever. You don't even pay attention to whether you went left or right out of the driveway, you just drive.

4:57 That's equivalent to we're doing a business and we don't know where we're going. We're just doing the things every day. You have to have a destination in mind. When you're an entrepreneur, you have to have something that you're trying to work for. When you're an employee, I think you're trying to work for promotions and you're trying to work for good relationships in the office and new opportunities, and they're doing well in your boss's eyes. There are built-in things to work for. As an entrepreneur, you have to create them yourself so that you are getting in your car, your business, driving out of the driveway and following the path you need to follow to go to the destination you want to go to.

5:43 If you don't know where you're going, you're just aimlessly driving around, and that might be fun for a Sunday drive, but it's not so effective for building a business and creating something amazing. So what entrepreneurs do is they come up with a vision of what they really want, and maybe it's a vision of one year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, it doesn't matter, because we're going to do this for our lives. So, an entrepreneur, the way we used to do this and I'm going to say this is absolutely an option for you if it floats your boat. The way we used to do this is cut out pictures of magazines and put them all on a board so that it looked like something wow, this is what we want.

6:31 Now we can do this online we're going to talk about that but the point is to have something visual in front of you that is exciting, that you can work towards. That's what a vision board is. It is not fluff. It is giving you something to focus on. And for us, as midlife women, who we're not necessarily an entrepreneur, we're not necessarily creating a business I understand that everybody's different it's giving you focus and it's making it easier to figure out what the heck you actually want. So why does a vision board even work? Because I will confess that the first time someone told me I should make a vision board, I kind of rolled my eyes.

7:16 You may have heard me say before I didn't have the greatest attitude about personal development in the past, but then I looked at the brain science, we have a system in our brain each of our brains called the reticular activating system or the RAS, and it's filtering what we notice. So the reticular activating system takes in all the input. If you, whatever you're doing right now, just pause. If you're driving, please be careful. Just pause and look around and pay attention to kind of everything you can see.

8:02 Typically you don't pay attention to everything you can see, but your eyes are taking that in. Your eyes are taking in all the information about all the things around you. All of your senses are taking in information smells, taste, sound, touch all of that. All of that information is coming in all the time. It's a lot. And so your reticular activating system decides for you, like a filter, which items are you going to actually notice, and it just throws the rest out. So I have a window to my right and out of the corner of my eye I know there are trees with green leaves out there, but my brain probably has more information about what's going on out there than I realize.

8:56 But until I turn and look and actually focus on it, I'm not really paying attention and my brain's going to filter it out. That's not my focus. It's going to leave it alone. So how does your brain know what to filter? It wants to be right number one, so it's going to find the evidence that agrees with what you believe in your subconscious brain. Do you believe you're fit and healthy? It's going to find evidence of that. Do you believe that you are having a great day? It's going to find evidence of that. Do you believe that you are having a great day? It's going to find evidence of that. Do you believe you're not a great speaker and you never can think of something witty to say? It's going to find you some evidence of that.

9:36 You see what I mean. We once bought a minivan and the one that happened to be available was this weird gray-green color. And I thought to myself I have never seen a car this color. What color is this? And it was everything else we wanted in the van. So, okay, fine. Well, guess what happened? As soon as I saw that minivan hadn't even bought it yet the next day I started seeing these gray-green Toyotas everywhere. They were there before, but my view of the world didn't believe that that color exists, so I didn't notice.

10:17 What I want for you is a way to get your brain to notice evidence that agrees with what you really want. So in the book Psycho-Cybernetics, the author talks about creating a video, a movie of your life, and the reason he talks about that is because visualization is really powerful. Now, if you are really into brain science and you're really into mindset like I am as a coach, of course I am then you'll find this really fascinating. If not, I don't think that me telling you to sit down and create a movie of your life and play it in your brain all the time is super helpful to you at this moment in midlife.

11:05 But the vision board can be an easy way and the cool part is that seeing images of what you want and how you want things to go is just about the same as actually trying to create this movie and play it in your head and have visualization. And if you regularly are faced with images of something you really want, it boosts your motivation. You know, we all kind of run out of motivation sometimes and we just like I don't feel like it, nevermind, we talk ourselves out of something when we hit a little road bump. And you're going to hit a little road bump somewhere, right, we talk ourselves out of it because we kind of lost the motivation or maybe we got a little bit nervous.

11:51 Seeing images of what we really want reminds us that we really want those things and it reduces some of that fear, it reduces some of that hesitation, it makes it a little bit more challenging to talk ourselves out of something and basically, what you're doing is you're trying to teach your brain to experience that reality of what you want now, so that it gets comfortable and that's what it expects, because now that's what it's going to show you evidence for using that filter. All right. So when you are sitting here in your late 40s, your early 50s, mid 50s, late 50s, whatever and you're thinking you know, I have this many years left in my career and what do I want to do?

12:39 What am I going to do? Maybe you're thinking about retirement. What am I going to do? I don't want to be bored. Will I be bored? Who will I hang out with? What will I do? Do I want to try something that I never did? Maybe I do have time still in my life to do that. Yes, you do. We're going through this and sometimes we get ourselves worked up. This is what I want you to use the vision board, for I want you to make it fun to create these dreams and let it be like a five-year, 10-year thing, not a plan, not something that's hard and we need to sit down and focus and make it difficult fun. Make it fun and I'm going to help you with that.

13:22 One of the really powerful things you can do for yourself is actually try something new in midlife. So you had an idea of a business to start, you know, 15 years ago and you never did it and it's still in there and you're still thinking about it. Try it. Or you've always wanted to volunteer with this particular group or doing something related to animals or whatever it is. Try it. You've always wanted to learn a new sport or a new game try it. But me saying try it doesn't take away the nervousness at the beginning when we in our 50s have to go and be a beginner at something that is going to be a little bit uncomfortable.

14:07 The vision board helps you kind of give some shape to what it will feel like when you do that and when you get good at doing that and when you do it regularly and you enjoy it. It's allowing these new challenges that might feel scary or you might be unsure about, to be enjoyable, to be self-care, to be something you think about happily In a, I think, a very cool way. We can kind of jump over some of the scaries, because we're going to teach our brains by looking at this vision board that all this stuff is really cool.

14:52 Okay, so what do you need to do? Ready, we're going to create your vision. I want you to start with a feeling, not a goal. This is not meant to be hard. This is not meant to be work-related, necessarily, and that's related to what you really, really, really want to do. Start with a feeling. How do I want to feel most days over the next few years? Want to feel most days over the next few years? There's so many feeling words For my Patreon members. I'm going to give you the wheel of emotions so that this makes it easier. Do you want to feel strong? Do you want to feel healthy? Do you want to feel connected? Do you want to feel active?

15:34 Do you want to feel well? I don't know. Your feelings are going to be the guide. And then the second step is put away the to-do list. I don't want your vision board to say try pickleball, try mahjong, go on a trip. What I want you to do instead is ask yourself what are the things I can do that make me feel that way, that way that I want to feel? Can I start walking with my friends? Can I think about where I want to go if I want to travel? Think about it visually.

16:15 What's a picture that, if you imagine yourself in that picture doing that thing, you feel the way you want to feel? Maybe it's words and this is going to depend on kind of what type of thinker and processor you are. Maybe it's words. Maybe the feeling word that you pick becomes sort of all sorts of related words about adventure or healthy or all different things. Maybe it almost becomes like a word map. You're jotting down words that just make you feel so powerful in that way. Or maybe it's quotes that way, or maybe it's quotes, maybe you have a favorite quote or two that really make you feel good and relate to how you want to live the next five to 10 years.

17:05 That's how you're going to come up with the pictures or the words or the quotes that then go all together on this actual physical vision board, poster board, or maybe just on a digital make a collage. Put it on your well, put it everywhere. Put it on the inside of your closet door. Put it on your bathroom mirror. Put it as your phone background. Put it as your computer background. Put it on the side of your refrigerator where you are when you drink your coffee in the morning. Put it next to your bed so you can look at it at night. Put it everywhere and when you look at it, make sure that you get that feeling that you want to get and make sure it's a positive feeling.

17:51 None of this telling yourself, man, I'm not there yet, kind of junk Positive feeling. Look at it and purposefully feel good and excited about, about having your life with all of those things in it. And you can. There's no rules. You can do it however you want to do it, especially because this is for life, it's not for work, it's not for business, it's for anything you want it to be. You can look any way you want it to look. You're making yourself something to look at that is inspiring and it makes you feel good. And then, maybe after a while, you update it, maybe parts of it.

18:31 You're like I thought I wanted to be like really into pickleball, but I tried it a few times and yeah, it's not for me, so let me just cover that up with something else. That's fine, do it? Make sure you still resonate with it. So, for my Patreon members, I have how-to guide to walk you through exactly how to create a vision board, the questions that I want you to think about and instructions on how to ask chat gpt to help you make it. Let's make this easier for ourselves, shall, shall we? I think so, and if you heard last week's episode where Dee Davidson told us to have chat GPT give us some meal ideas, let's use chat GPT to make our lives easier.

19:21 Why not? I love that. Use for it. Come hang out with us in Patreon, at patreoncom. Slash mind your midlife and you will see the exact how-to steps to create this for yourself, and I promise you it will be straightforward and fun. So here's your OMG moment to remember for today. Don't let the question of what do I want to do in the next five to 10 years become kind of a heavy chain hanging around your neck. Let it be a light and happy and exciting question and making yourself something visual to look at, about what your life can look at if you add in the things that are fun for you and the things that you're enthusiastic about.

20:14 That just helps you remember that all the time, that this is not a hard weigh-me-down thing. It's exciting to be able to move forward and to figure these things out. You don't have to know exactly how you're going to get there. You have to know kind of where you're going so that we're not driving out of the driveway and just aimlessly wandering around. So I will see you on Patreon for the exact how-to guide. Come find me on social too and tell me when you try these tips and how the vision board works for you. I'm at Cheryl P Fisher on pretty much every social. Come find me. I would love to hear from you. Drop me a note and then make sure you've hit the follow button, because next time I have a guest joining me to talk about limiting beliefs.

21:05 So we might be ready to move forward and yet something kind of still keeps stopping us in our tracks and holding us back. It's probably a limiting belief, and notice how this all goes together. So I'll see you then and in the meantime, remember, slow down, notice what's going on in your head, what's going on around you, and let's create something amazing.