Vision Board V Ideal Scene
Thought I’d do a follow-up to my post about the success I’ve had writing goals down – in one form or another – to increase the likelihood of achieving them.
I pointed out that if we aren’t meant to have something no amount of writing is going to change that.
In the post I mention working with Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization Workbook to focus on two goals
- Romantic relationship
- Writing career
I used the Ideal Scene exercise to write out a day in an imagined future when this person was already in my life.
Writing it as if I was writing a letter to a friend telling them all about this romantic partner.
I had incredible success.
It was as if I’d projected myself into the future and wrote a day in the life he was a part of.
I used the page where you do a form of Vision Boarding to put images – either drawn or cut from magazines – for my career goal.
Using images from magazines I focused this exercise on my goal of being a successful writer.
While I know the Ideal Scene was a resounding success I had to put the Vision Boarding effort through a couple of filters before seeing that it, too, was a resounding success.
It just happened differently than I was expecting.
In short.
Though I’d long said I wanted to be a successful novelist – and I had been writing fiction stories for years – after completing the exercises in the workbook I set the workbook aside then turned my efforts to more immediate concerns which included the job I had.
I was not being paid to write.
Passionate about success in whatever I do, I put tremendous effort into succeeding.
At the job I was being paid for – an aspiring technical consultant.
I went on to become a very successful senior technical consultant with expertise in network interoperability and global supply chain management.
And the writing?
Here’s the interesting thing. I spent part of the time at the first Fortune 500 tech company I worked at as a tech writer. Not only did I write content for proposals and other technical publications, I created the graphics for those publications. All of this set me up for success as an independent writer.
Though I had no idea at the time.
But Wait! There’s More!
The Vision Boarding worked too!
I recently took stock of my my writing career and realized I’d achieved everything I set out to decades ago. It just didn’t happen how I thought.
I never would have guessed that Smashwords would come along though once it did I knew the writing industry would never recover from the fallout tsunami.
While attending an RWA conference in Anaheim years after Smashwords and Amazon upended the industry I looked around to see I was ahead of the curve on the direction things were headed because my business acumen – along with an ability to see the way the wind was blowing -had set me up for success in the new publishing landscape.
Both skills were honed while working in the tech industry with its rapid and constant change.
And that Vision Board?
I achieved everything I pasted into that workbook. Just not how I thought it would come about.
Perhaps the highest irony is that while I thought I would be traveling for writing – I put imagery that showed travel along with writing on that page in the workbook- it was the other way around. I was traveling for business and took the opportunity to work on my craft when time allowed.
Which when something matters you find.
In Conclusion
I achieved every career goal I set out to but the biggest takeaway is that the Universe was in charge of how that happened.
And when.
As for the Ideal Scene and Vision Boarding, I would definitely recommend either or both methods as tools to help achieve goals. Just be prepared it may take longer than you expect and will lead you along paths you might not otherwise have noticed.
Or planned on taking.
Be well!
Note: I met my husband through work so my focus on becoming a successful technical consultant – doing what I could with what I had at the time – paid off.
It helped me achieve multiple goals.
Elizabeth Maxim 