Ask a visual person how to create a vision / dream board, and they’ll say “Oh it’s easy!”
They’ll run out, get some poster paper, some magazines, a pair of scissors, and a glue stick and go to town on the project.
An hour later they’ll have this crazy looking collage of pictures, all cut out and sliced together, with action words like “Awesome” and “Yaay!” intermixed between the pictures.
Ask a non-visual person, whose primary modality in life is either auditory or kinesthetic to tackle the same project and it’s a totally different story.
An hour later you’ll find them both still sitting there, having flipped through 50 magazines and finding NOTHING that inspires them.
This doesn’t mean auditory or kinesthetic people don’t have dreams, or that they can’t create a “vision” board, but they just have to approach the task from a different perspective.
Auditory and kinesthetic people are different from visual people.
If you’re kinesthetic, you have to approach it from a kinesthetic perspective.
If you’re auditory, you have to approach it from an auditory perspective.
Vision Boards for Auditory People
Since I’m predominantly an auditory person, I’m going to share an idea I had this morning for a “vision” board for me.
One year ago I put up a cork board in my room that’s about 5 feet wide by 4 feet tall.
It’s big enough to fit PLENTY of pictures as a “vision”board.
One year later, it’s still pretty much empty.
A visual person would already have that thing FULL of pictures!
But as an auditory person, pictures don’t really excite me that much, so no wonder I haven’t been really that excited about populating it.
So this morning I had an idea.
Instead of trying to force myself to cut pictures out of magazines, or to scour the Internet for pictures to print out, instead I’m creating a “vision board” with just three simple tools.
- A cork board
- Index cards
- Push pins
Using these tools I can simply write down what things I want, or I can write down little sayings of things that either I will say or someone else will say to me once I manifest the thing that I want to manifest.
Let’s use an example to illustrate what I mean.
Example #1 – A New Car
Let’s say I wanted to manifest a new car.
A visual person would just cut out pictures of the car they want and plaster that all over their vision board.
As an auditory person, here’s what I’m doing instead.
I take a simple 5″x3″ index card and I write something like “Woa! Nice Car! I love how it sounds!” on it. Then, I take that index card and I pin it up on my cork board.
Then I take another index card and I write something like “Holy crap, the stereo in this car is awesome and I love how I can play songs straight from my cell using Bluetooth.”
Or I can write down an exact description of the car I want, such as for example if I wanted a silver 2015 Mercedes SLK I would write down “2015 Silver Mercedes SLK” and maybe put a few more details into the description.
Then I just take that index card and add it to my dream / vision board.
Now, to a visual person, just having a plain old cork-board with a bunch of index cards pinned up would probably look BORING, but to a non-visual person it makes no difference.
Example #2 – Weight Loss
Here’s another example.
Let’s say you wanted to lose some weight and to put that on your vision board.
A visual person would probably cut out pictures of a hot looking body, or maybe put up pics of themselves when they were more fit.
So what would I put up instead, as an auditory person?
Well, I could either simply write down specific goals like “Cool, I hit my goal of 225lbs” or “Cool, I hit my goal of 200lbs” or “Cool, I’ve lost 35lbs already” or whatever I would usually SAY to myself when I reach a weight loss goal.
Or it could be what I HEAR myself saying to myself inside my head.
OR I can write down things that I will hear people saying to me when I reach my goals like “Wow! You look great. Have you lost weight?”
These are all just simple statements I would write down on a simple 5″x3″ index card and pin up on a “Vision” / Dream Board.
Vision Boards for Kinesthetic People
I’m not a predominantly kinesthetic person so I don’t know exactly what would be the ideal things a kinesthetic person would write on their index cards.
However, I do know that kinesthetic people are more or less the exact opposite of a visual person, so they don’t really care what something looks like so much, and so I bet it’s not an exciting thing for them to cut out pictures and put them up on a vision board.
I would think that kinesthetic people would most likely benefit from writing out the description of the feeling they would feel having the thing that they want to have.
So maybe on the index cards they would write something like “I feel so much better in my clothes” if their goal was to lose some weight.
Or they might write down “I love how these heated seats keep my butt warm even with the windows open” if they were trying to manifest a new car.
If you’re a predominantly kinesthetic person, you probably know much better than I do what makes you tick, so write down whatever excites you on those index cards.
Another thing you could do is if for example the new car you want will have leather seats, you could get a small piece of leather from somewhere that’s similar to the leather that car seats are made of and cut that out and pin it to the board so that you can touch it and feel it with your hands.
Or maybe you could get one of those “New Car Scent” thingies and pin it up so that you can smell your new car. 🙂
I’m sure you know better than I do what excites you, so use your imagination.
My point is simply this…
Vision Boards are NOT Just For Visual People
Most people who love using vision boards are, more often than not, visual people.
Visual people usually love to use them, and so, more often than not, they try to teach other people how to make them.
The challenge is that because they are visual people they only know how to appeal to other visual people, and that’s usually why you don’t see many auditory or kinesthetic people making vision boards.
It’s not because vision boards are not useful – they are an extremely powerful tool – it’s just that you have to approach making them from YOUR modality, not someone else’s.
I personally started making mine today just by using simple 5″ x 3″ index cards and by writing down what I will either say to myself or what I’ll hear others say to me when I manifest the goals I’m going after.
Play around with some ideas of what might work for you and your primary modality.
Remember thought that even thought most people are predominantly more biased towards ONE modality, everyone does use all of the modalities, so even if you’re not a visual person it doesn’t hurt to throw some pictures up there if you want, or even if you ARE a visual person, it doesn’t hurt to throw some auditory or kinesthetic statements up there as well.
Tamara Hawk says
This post really got me thinking. I’ve never been big on vision boards. They do almost annoy me more than motivate me.
I realize I am different than most people (I’m told that often lol), but what works for me is to just write a list of what I want. I usually have a pretty long list at the end of my journal. I have a list of ‘one day’, and a list of ‘this year’. Once I write it down I don’t look at it very often, I have this feeling that once it is written down it is on its way to me, so I don’t need to keep looking at it. When I get something on the list, I go to the back of my journal and check it off, or cross it out.
I don’t really have a schedule for looking at the list, but I do look at it occasionally ~ sometimes I look and have forgotten about something that’s on there that I have now ~ then I can check it off.
I find that having things ‘in my face’ all the time is distracting to me.
As I said, I do realize that I am different than most people in that I KNOW that if I write it down its coming whether I ever think about it consciously again or not. The average person doesn’t have this level of belief (or knowingness).
Thanks for the post Paul
Paul Piotrowski says
My vision board, with my pinned up 5″ x 3″ index cards is in my office, and it is positioned behind me so that I don’t stare at it all the time and it doesn’t distract me. But when I want to look at it, I can stop and read through all the different index cards. I too have used lists in the past, but I often found that I end up losing them and then I end up having to create new lists, often forgetting certain items etc. Also, when I make a list of lets say 50 things that I want to manifest, and let’s say I’ve already manifested 30 and crossed them out, I find that the list ends up looking messy with all the scribbling on it. So my thinking with the index cards is that I can just remove the index cards that I’ve already manifested and start a “pile” which holds all the things I’ve manifested.
I just started this yesterday so I’m not sure yet how well it will work long-term, but so far I’m liking this method. 🙂
Thomas W. says
I have a small vision ‘board’ next to my work screen. It’s a digital photo frame, a Sony DPF-A72N. It’s hammering pictures into my subconscious mind, mostly pictures but come to think of it, also pictures of text. I guess I hear what it says too – that makes sense. When I have manifested something from the board, the photos are moved to a CD. It’s a powerful feeling you get when you find the pictures on the CD years later, and realize how relatively easy it was to manifest what you wanted. It reminds me that everything in this magnificent Universe is based on decisions, and it’s just a matter of time before you get what you desire. Sometimes I get the weirdest synchronicities through that frame, which is running in ‘random’ mode. Yeah right, not any longer 😉 (By the way, there’s lots of really cool videos online, which focus on the sound of a particular car – yum!).
Thomas W. says
This might be off-topic, but is there a test that you can take to find out, which modality you are best at? Like with personalities, i.e. Myers–Briggs and Enneagram etc. I don’t even know what a modality is 😉 I think I might have heard about it in school in some fiber optics class or something.
I mean, is it normal to have a Sony ECM-MS957 lying around, that you don’t know what to do with? Except it’s a really _nice_ microphone (at $370, for C…… sake). I suspect it has something to do with an untapped modality (auditory), if that makes any sense at all.
Paul, you struck a chord with this one. Don’t dis the daimon.
Paul Piotrowski says
I think it’s a matter of just becoming a aware of who you are. You can tell better than some test. For example, visual people will often be dressed in the latest fashion, their cars will always be clean/spotless, and in their language patterns they’ll often use visual verbs like “I’ll SEE you later.” or “I just don’t SEE that happening.” or “Yeah, we’ll SEE about that.” They’ll also remember what something looked like.
Auditory people will often have really good auditory recollection, like remembering the lines in a movie. They’ll say things like “I HEAR what you’re saying.” and “I HEAR ya.” etc. Their environment won’t be as clean as a visual person. Their desk won’t be spotless, their car won’t be as clean, but they’ll probably have a $2,500 stereo system in their car and a surround sound home theatre sound system. 🙂
Kinesthetic people will FEEL things, so they’ll use vocabulary like “I FEEL great.” or “I don’t FEEL good today.” Don’t mistake that with someone who says “I’ll SEE how I feel tomorrow” which is a visual cue. 😉
Also remember, we are ALL three modalities, it’s just that we usually predominantly prefer one.