The Action Board (Vision Boarding with Value Tagging)
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 8
- Confidence
- —
Swart prefers to call a vision board an action board, because the collage is only half of it. The mechanism she gives is selective attention, selective filtering and value tagging: we are so bombarded with information that the brain automatically filters out anything not vital to survival, and unless you are mindful, that filtering happens subconsciously. Building a board and looking at it daily trains the brain to tag what you actually want as important, so it stops filtering out the person who could introduce you to a client or a partner. Value tagging is partly logical, ranking survival needs, and partly emotional, holding longer-term desires, and logic usually trumps emotion unless you keep reminding yourself. The second half is going out and taking small steps.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Work from magazines, not a search engine
Printing images limits you to what you can already think of. Flicking through magazines surfaces images you're drawn to without knowing why, which is the point.
Pro tip If you're very sure about something specific, print that one; browse for the rest.
- 2
Build it by hand, in colour
Cut and stick a physical collage. Swart notes the tactile, colourful process stimulates other senses in a way writing a list does not. She uses a canvas around half the size of a large board.
Pro tip Mostly images; use a phrase only when it genuinely captures the thing.
- 3
Group sections and choose what touches what
She groups themes and is deliberate about adjacency: home and life have to be in balance, so they sit together, while personal fitness goals needn't touch either.
- 4
Use position to encode meaning, and leave blank space
Top can mean top priority, bottom can mean foundational; the meaning is yours as long as it's intentional. She leaves space deliberately, because she isn't arrogant enough to think she can imagine everything good that could happen.
Pro tip Leave a gap for magic.
- 5
Put it where you'll see it twice a day
She keeps hers by her bed and looks at it morning and night without thinking about it. It's fine to keep it private, though she keeps hers visible to others including income targets.
Watch out A board filed in an app you never open does nothing for value tagging.
- 6
Visualise it as true, and add gratitude
Look at it, visualise it becoming true, hold the belief that it will, and more recently she adds gratitude that it is already unfolding even if you can't see all of it yet.
- 7
Take one action, however small
The step that makes it an action board: ask who in your network could introduce you, change a health habit, make the call. She frames it as noticing and then grasping opportunities that move you closer to your goal.
Watch out Creating the fantasy and waiting at home for it to arrive is the failure mode.
- 8
Remake it once a year on your own calendar
She makes a new board annually. It doesn't have to be January; September works as back-to-school, or your birthday, as long as it's set up before the period it covers.
In the wild
By late 2015 Swart had been divorced for years, was working like a maniac, and realised her 2014 board had been all travel and business with one tiny heart on it. Nothing had happened on that front. So in December 2015 she made a board that opened up love: a prominent engagement ring from a newspaper placed top left, because left is the hand and the heart, a phrase top centre that spoke to her without her knowing why, some house imagery, and a rhino and tiger for her interest in conservation. In February 2016 she met the man she would marry on a plane.
→ Together within three months, engaged six months later, married a year on, with a conservation charity in place of gifts and a renovated house that looked like the imagery on the board.
In the first year of her business Swart worked out how much money she wanted to earn by calculating what she needed to live on. A friend challenged her that this wasn't very vision-board-like and told her to double it. She protested that double was not realistic for a first year, but found the doubled number, liked it, and put it on the board anyway. It came in. She then repeated the doubling for several consecutive years.
→ The doubling worked for several years running until it flattened out, because there were no more hours available to sell.
Common mistakes
Making the board and then waiting
Swart's whole reason for renaming it an action board is that the popular version implies you can create a fantasy, sit at home and wait. The board changes what your filter lets through; you still have to notice and grasp the opportunity.
Only printing images you already imagined
Searching and printing caps the board at what you can consciously think of. Browsing magazines lets you find images you're drawn to for reasons you then have to work out, which surfaces wants you hadn't articulated.
Storing it somewhere you never look
Ali's first attempt was a digital whiteboard he never opened again, so it did nothing. The value-tagging effect depends on repeated exposure, which is why Swart keeps hers by the bed and sees it twice daily.
From the transcript
“so a vision board is essentially a collage made by hand where you actually have magazines and you cut images out and stick them down…”
“and then looking at it at least well looking at I say at least daily I keep Mine by my bed so I can look…”
“the brain naturally filters out things that aren't vital to our survival and if we are not mindful then that's being chosen subconsciously”
From the episode
Change Your Brain: The Power Of Neuroplasticity And Braincare - Dr Tara Swart
Dr Tara Swart