Create a Dream/Vision Board - Take Action #11

Our Take Action #9 was to DREAM. Hopefully you did some of that and put those ideas on paper. Now, the fun part – creating your vision board! This is a couple-hour exercise – most fun when done on the weekend – this would be a great weekend to start. Remember those 6 areas of life that you allowed yourself to dream in: Health, Spirituality, Relationships, Wealth, Career and Education? Now it’s time to cut out pictures, phrases and words that resonate with you in those areas.

The materials that you will need are: poster size foam board, markers, sticky glue and magazines. I would encourage you to get as many different types of magazines as you can find including: Trade magazines, fashion magazines, home and lifestyles magazines, furniture catalogues, clothing catalogues, car catalogues, etc. The idea of this exercise is to cut out pictures, words and phrases that catch your attention and when you look at them you say “I would like that” OR “that is so me”. This will take some time especially if you are looking for something specific.

I have had some of my clients type up phrases and print them when they couldn’t find the words they were looking for.

The next step is to look at your board and decide how you want to set it up and this is completely determined by how your brain thinks. Some folks are very orderly and have “areas” on the board that they clump their pictures and words in and some folks have a collage of all areas all over the place. I like to break my board up into sections. For example, the top right corner might be “relationships”, I would have a picture of my future mate, pictures of a happy family and then words like “happy marriage”, “wakes up happy”, “joyful”, “respectful children”, etc.

There may be “things” that you want like a Mercedes or Victorian style dream house, or places like vacation destinations, gardens, and concerts. You may want a whole new wardrobe or want to learn to cook or always desired to have your own radio show. Put it all up there. Everything that you would envision as wanting to have in your future, put it up there. This is all part of visualization - which is the act of visualizing something you want as if you already have it. Part of visualization is thinking/meditating and the other part is having this visual reminder of what your intentions are. Just like when you wanted to lose weight, you would put either a skinny picture of yourself on the frig or a picture of some stick model. You might have a picture of a car you have been saving for taped to the mirror in the bathroom. A Dream Board or Vision Board is a larger scale of those examples and can include everything you want for your life.

Now, the key to all of this is to not shove your dream board in a closet or under the bed. You need to put it in a place where you will see it daily. The office or bedroom is always a great place. You may not want it hanging in the kitchen or family room because only you need to see it. As you look at this board, you will be amazed as months go by how things start to transform.

I created a board in October 2008. By February, I had moved into a place that looked like the house that I had put on my vision board. I met the man on the board a year later – my daughter said that the guy I pasted on my board looked like my boyfriend! I still don’t know if he is the “one” but he has a lot of the characteristics I put on my board. One of my “phrases” was to be a well known blogger – I am on my way….

Don’t underestimate the power of visualization. It’s ok to change your mind or create a new one every couple of years. We change, life changes and our dreams change. Also – being specific is a good idea. I have the house on my dream board, but next time I will put “own/purchase” – because I ended up renting the house. If you aren’t specific, you may get what you want in a different package than you imagined.

If you have some ideas on creating a dream board, please post them here OR better yet, upload a picture of your board – I would love to see it!  Below is a sample of mine and here is a link to other vision boards.

Have a great weekend.

Enjoy Taking Action,

Angela Lieb

Take Action #10 - Backup Your Computer!

It’s been about a week since my last post because I have been dealing with a computer that crashed and my data was not recoverable. 2 years of corporate e-mail backup, 2 years of research, company presentations and all of my 111 Ways to Take Action files…


Did I have a backup? Noooo….That would be assuming something would go wrong and not trusting the Universe/God that all would work out – as it has for me the last 10 times my computer died. The last 10 times, my data was able to be recovered. This time, not so much. I thought I was invincible. If you too are like me and you are an “optimist” and think that everything will work out, keep in mind that “Every year, 43% of computer users lose their music, photos, documents, and more” according to Carbonite, an online back up company that was recommended to me by two friends on Facebook.

Luckily, all of my personal files and photos are on another computer. It took all of 2 minutes for me to set up a free trial of Carbonite and it is backing up all of my stuff as I type. It should take about 2 days the first time around. I have 10 days before I decide if I will become a paying customer. For $54 a year per computer, you bet I will.

I would love for you to share your back-up horror stories with me. I would like to know that there are other clueless or eternally optimistic people out there.

The only good thing I can pull from this is that I have a clean slate. I can set up a new system that is more organized for all my files and also determine how much e-mail I actually needed to save. My dad asked how often I went back to those old e-mails – I told him about 5% of the time. I need to determine what e-mails are “keepers” and which ones are really not important. It is allowing me to simplify.

By the way, the company I work for, provides a shared drive that we can store all of our information on for back-up purposes.  Again, I thought it would take too long.  I hate learning these kinds of lessons.

What is your back up story?