Create Your Success Board

The tools you need to manifest your Goals in life have always been with you and around you but escaped your notice. When you recognize them and create a space to make them visible in your daily life, they help you visualize your success. This activates the innate creativity of your subconscious mind and programs your brain to use the resources available to you.

The place where you make your own future success visible is called a Success Board. It is a representation of where you are going, and one of the most powerful visualization tools available to you. Placing a Success Board where you can see it every day will trigger your brain to envision your ideal life and future daily.

Why Success Boards are important

The images and words you place on your Success Board will help you explicitly visualize your Goals and make them come alive. Visualization simulates events and activities before they actually takes place, like a proxy for performing the activity.

A Success Board will —

Help you to think in pictures

Help you to visualize your future.

Give you clarity about your Goals.

Act as a reminder to to take action for manifesting your Goals.

Send strong daily signals to your subconscious about what needs to be done.

Once you think of an activity, the brain quickly simulates the event and signals other parts of the body to act. For instance, when you visualize yourself eating your favorite ice cream, your brain actually rehearses that reality so vividly that sometimes you can even taste the flavor. It’s no different with your life’s Goals. As you visualize each one, it starts coming alive in your mind and becoming a part of your reality long before it manifests physically.

Take the Lifestyle goal of owning a home. Your Success Board in this case may have images of your dream house. You could personalize your Success Board by depicting the exact home you wish. The more specific the visualizations of your Goals, the more direct will be your message to the universe about them.

How many Success Boards?

In practice, you will need no more than four Success Boards.

1. Health: This is a standalone board because poor health is the greatest enemy of success and will prevent you from carrying out the actions that your Goals demand. This one Goal has the power to enable or disable all your other Goals.

2. Gratitude: It’s important to remind yourself how far you’ve come. A Gratitude board will remind you of what you already have that you were visualizing not so long ago. This will send the message to your mind that it’s not impossible to achieve big goals.

3. Goals: This board encompasses the Goals you created for yourself earlier and gives you a space to envision and bring them to life. Since the first goal, Health, merits a board for itself, the remaining 10 would find a place on this board.

4. Quick Action: This board is different from the others because it serves a short term purpose. It creates a space for your current project or tasks, such as preparing for an exam or painting your house, and creates a space for helping you visualize it and complete it rapidly. Once the task is done, you can clear the board and prepare it for the next one.

Below, we’ll try and describe the purpose and content of the four main boards, and then zoom in to the 11 Goals, with tips and pointers on how they could look.

Health

Purpose: To help improve your health.

Contents: On this board, place things that would act as health triggers and inspire you to optimize your health, including pictures of fruits, herbs, ayurvedic plants and lots of vegetables. Include images of the kind of body you hope to have one day, yoga asanas and natural remedies. Include practical, inspiring quotes on health.

Here is an illustrative visualization of what a Health Success Board could look like.

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Gratitude Success Board

Purpose: To make you a more grateful person, and to help you stay grateful.

This Success Board is for everything already in your life that you should be grateful for, and as a reminder of how far you have already come. The Gratitude board will remind you never to take things for granted: your parents, the lovely life partner you would die for, your caring family and your advancing career and friends. This board will make you feel truly blessed.

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. Parents

2. Family

3. Vacations

4. Celebrations

5. Material possessions and belongings

6. A happy photo of yourself

Goals Success Board

Purpose: To help you visualize your life Goals.

Visualize each of your Goals separately, using images, quotations, inspirations, photographs, mentors and so on. Each time you look at it, your Goals should come alive in your mind and you should feel freshly inspired to walk down your chosen road. The Goals Success Board is your engine and it will propel you forward every day.

A little further down you will find tips and pointers on each Goal.

Quick Action Success Board

Purpose: To help you to take immediate actions towards a short-term goal.

Let’s say your imminent goal is to pass an upcoming examination. Examples of what you could visualize on this board for this event are —

1. Picture of books covers from your reading list

2. Printout of the chapters list

3. Your weekly, monthly and quarterly work plan

4. List of challenges you are facing, with solutions, completion time and date

A Quick Action Success Board will change from project to project. Use your creativity, pretend that achieving that goal is a game you are playing with yourself and try to enjoy creating this board. Start really small and divide your big goal into small do-able daily, weekly, monthly and yearly actions.

How to create your Success Boards

Set good chunks of aside for creating your Success Boards. The actual Success Board can be a medium-sized bulletin board made of cork, thermocole, soft wood or cardboard. If you live in a small house, it could be a small vacant area of your wall, or even a binder. The important thing is to create a Success Board for each Goal. Do the following —

1. Find images that represent your Goals or symbolize the future you wish to create for that Goal. Use photographs, magazine cutouts, pictures from the web and photographs of role models. Whatever inspires you!

2. Make a collage of these images on the Success Board for that Goal, whether it is an actual board, a wall space or a binder. The more creative your Success Board, the more likely it is to inspire you.

3. Keep it neat. Avoid creating a cluttered or chaotic board – you don’t want to attract chaos into your life.

4. Add motivational words of affirmation and inspiring quotes that represent how you want to feel, such as courageous, loving or imaginative‘.

5. Review your Success Board every day, especially when you wake up and before you go to bed.

6. Keep it alive and evolving by adding new images and inspiration to it.

Now — make your own

Using the guidelines and examples above, you are now ready to make your own Success Boards, goal by goal. Your Success Boards are unique and personal to you. There is no magic formula or recipe for what you should put on it except that it should reflect your Vision and inspire and motivate you to act.

Listed below are illustrative tips and pointers for each goal.

Health

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. Walking 3,000 steps a day; or starting morning walks

2. Joining a gym

3. Becoming vegetarian

4. Meditation and yoga

Career

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. Syllabus of your course

2. Reading list

3. Joining a coaching institute

4. Weekly, monthly and quarterly action plans

If you career goal is to join a corporate bank and you’re preparing for a competitive exam, consider creating a Quick Action Board exclusively for this so that you will never neglect this vital ongoing activity, and be inspired to do it to the best of your ability.

Relationships

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. A list of personality traits of your anticipated life partner

2. Your parents’ wedding photographs

3. Shlokas that speak of the importance of being a responsible, loving, devoted partner

4. What you wedding invitation might look like

5. Invitation list for your wedding

6. Birthdays of people who matter to you

Spiritual (Emotional)

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. Meditation

2. What your personal shrine will look like

3. Pictures of the gods who you seek guidance from

4. Objects that create peace and calm around you (chimes, music, incense)

Personal Development

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. Gym schedule

2. Gratitude list — people who have been kind to you

3. Forgiveness list — people who have wronged you but you want to forgive

4. Daily quiz for brain development

5. Daily chess problem

6. What you want your body to look like

Lifestyle

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. Your dream house

2. Your dream car

3. Cities and resorts that you will vacation in

5. Your favorite fashion styles

Career

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. List of skills you want to build

2. Imaginary salary certificate after 20 years

3. Your role model in the profession you want to excel in

4. The national recognition you will receive one day

Business

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. What your office will look like

2. Your future visiting card

3. The professional associations you will be member of

4. Your future credit card

5. An imaginary Forbes magazine cover with you on it

Financial Independence

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. Your freedom number: how much money you need to be financially independent

2. Your future credit card

3. Pictures of gold and jewelry

4. Your current bank balance

Social Influence (Networking)

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. List of clubs you will one day be a member of

2. Your Facebook and Twitter pages

3. A visual depiction of your current professional network and linkages

4. Photos of your 5 best friends for life

5. You LinkedIn profile

Giving back

Examples of what to visualize on this board —

1. Your top 5 favorite charities

2. How much you would donate when success comes to you

3. A list of immediate donations that you can give with what you currently own

4. Photographs of people you want to help

With mobile technology in our pockets around the clock, it seems logical to have quick-reference Success Boards you can carry around. Programs such as Evernote and Notify allow you to create your own digital Success Boards where you can combine text, video, photos and audio — more than you can do on the Success Boards you created in your home. Go ahead and replicate your real-life Success Boards on your devices, perhaps with a photo of your actual Success Board or with image, video and sound downloads from the web, using the tips and pointers above.

As we use and spend more time on computers, laptops and mobiles, it would be great to have digital success boards synced to all your digital devices.

Going forward

Once you have created your Success Boards, you must integrate them into your daily life so that they serve their purpose.

Create a daily routine around your success Boards. Spend five minutes every morning in a ritual of focusing and mindfully inspecting all that is on your Success Boards. From time to time, sit comfortably or lie down on your bed and deliberately refocus on your Vision, Mission and Goals. As you do so, recall the images and words on your Success Boards.

Success waits around the next corner. With the help of Success Boards you will begin living as though you had already turned that corner — and presto! Success will be yours.

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