May 2 Interview with Marian Brown, The Holistic Heart

Click here to listen to this interview!

Tina: Welcome to be happier today inspiration show. Today is Wednesday may 2^nd. And I’m really excited to have a great guest with us today, Marian Brown; I will introduce her in just a moment. But I have a quick announcement if you’re new to listening into us. Definitely check out some of our resources at 40DayLoveFest.com. Also we are having a free  webinar next Wednesday May 9^th “5 Hot Ways to Grow your Business by Giving Back this Summer!”  Go to BeHappierToday.com you can get all the details about to grow your business by giving back this summer.

So we’re always talking about doing great things from the heart and I’m excited to have Marian Brown here, the Holistic Heart.  “Reach for the Stars from your Heart” is Marian’s mantra as she developed her consulting business which allows her to travel, train, and teach others.  Marian is an international coach, trainer and true believer in the power of the mind, body and spirit connection. She focuses her coaching on helping women develop their business, especially working in direct sales and marketing. So she’s been working in that industry for over 20 years and successfully maintained her own network marketing income. And we’re really excited to have Marian here today to share with us some ways that you can use vision boards as a tool to help you in your goal setting. So, Marian welcome to the show.

Marian: Good Morning Tina. Great to be here.

Tina: So share with us a little bit about what is a vision board? I know a lot of people might not have heard about it or think it is just a bunch a pictures on a piece of paper, but what is it really?

Marian: Exactly a lot of people really think a vision board is a collection or a collage of pictures and images. And it’s a little bit more. It can be that collection or the collage that’s really the visual representation of what our goals, dreams and aspirations are. And I think when I do vision boards especially for use in business, they really go beyond dreams. Sometimes dreams have that connotation of being unrealistic or even fantasy. I think a vision board can really be more concrete than that and also sometimes they are called treasure maps. Using the vision board in business is going to be more concrete because you as the creator are defining that treasure and then you’re finding your own path to attain it. It’s not just something randomly hidden there for other people or by other people for you.

Tina: Alright. So how exactly would they start creating one?

Marian: Oh sure. I think it’s really important  for people to take a broader look at the vision board and collect up a lot of pictures that represent what they want and try to get into their real heart’s desire. And make that decision of what is defining success especially if they are going to be using it for business. I think you really need to look at what you want to get out of your business but you also need to look at it from what I call the holistic point of view.

Especially for women, and those in direct sales, your business is also part of your life and I think sometimes we just make a vision board for one area or we make the vision board and segment it off kind of like the goal setting devices we see. Write 5 goals for your business. Write 5 goals for your personal life. Write 5 goals for your health. Well really we are all of those things in our life and we pull all of those together into our business building vision board because that’s what’s going to motivate us forward. When we leave one piece out that piece may creep into our life and it’s going to overflow to our vision board. And if it’s not on there our vision board is not going to be used. So I think it’s very important that we do kind of combine everything in there.

Three things that I see most commonly missing from vision boards when I’m working with people is that they don’t include themselves on the vision board. A lot of times it’s a lot of pictures without them and they really need to be the center of their vision board. They created it. It needs to belong to them. And by putting that picture of them there that makes it real. Every day they look at it and they are part of that vision. I tell women make sure you put a picture there that you like. Don’t put a picture there that you are going to wake up every day and criticize or not feel happy about.  Have somebody just take a quick shot of you someplace having fun or doing what you love. Put that picture there.

I also think, I mean it’s very common, is that we choose what I call, Joyce Schwarz, of The Vision Board book talks about as well, is a power word or a couple of key words that are really what you’re focusing on this year. This year for me personally, I used the word balance. A lot of times we can get over focused in one area and we forget to focus on some of the other areas in our life. So balance, life, happiness, love. Those kinds of things that we can really tie into. Using words like financial freedom or success. Those aren’t really defined. We really need to pick a word that is very powerful and has a definition that you know what it is.

I even used the word connect. And by doing that my focus was connecting to real people. All of us get caught behind our computer screen all day and we’re never out there really connecting with people on that relationship building level. And then the third thing I see missing a lot is emotion. And again for women especially we’re driven by our emotions. And a lot of times vision boards, and you’ve seen them too, are just pictures of material things. And I always us the example in a workshop a woman found a picture of a beautiful coach purse and she’s immediately said “oh I love this” and smacked it on her vision board. Then every woman in the room decided she wanted a coach purse, that’s not really true. We all didn’t want coach purses. But for that moment we did. And when we get home that coach purse doesn’t have meaning for us. And when it doesn’t have meaning and we’re really not looking for that, we’re not going to be driven by our vision board; we’re not going to be motivated by it.

When we’re using the vision board for business it really needs to be a motivational tool. It needs to be something that is going to make us take that next step, or lead us to want to take those next steps. It can’t be something that we look at we’re think “yeah that is nice, but I don’t need it. I’m not going to do what it takes.”

The 3 key points when we’re doing these vision boards, especially for our business, that we want to make sure we’re including: your picture of yourself, your power words and emotion. How is it going to make you feel to have that coach purse? It’s going to give you that satisfaction; it’s going to make you feel happy. An accomplishment. A picture of a person that’s going to the top of the mountain. That is a very moving and emotional picture and when you can connect that to your goals, that’s what will help you use your vision board to reach your business goals.

Tina: Great. Absolutely. You’re right if you just have pictures of stuff, it’s just stuff. You really want to connect with it in a powerful, meaningful way. It’s so funny what you said about including a picture of yourself because I recently updated a project vision board and I realized that I did not have any pictures of me. I had a great picture recently from speaking at an event a few months ago and I put that on there. I kind of forgot like oh where am I?

Marian: And that’s a happy time and a satisfaction you got from speaking and when you see that, it’s  going to empower you to be able to do more especially if more speaking is what you want to do. You’re going to be able to look at that and know you accomplished it and it’s going to motivate you to go forward in building your accomplishments.

I’ve got a little acronym when I talk about vision boards for business that I tell people they need to create a R.E.A.L. vision board. And what that stands for is real, it needs to be Realistic. Okay and I’ll go back over these again. It needs to be Emotion Charged. It needs to be Action Oriented. And it needs to be Livable. When you look at those 4 points, that’s what’s going to create that powerful vision board.

It needs to be number one, Realistic. And I think its okay to put to put the big picture ideas out there. The big home, the fancy car – those things are really great to have on there but it also needs to have some of those smaller realistic goals. You know if you’re setting a goal to make a million dollars you’re probably not going to do that next week. It would be probably a little unrealistic that you are going to earn that much money that fast. Or you’re going to get 500 clients. That’s a good goal long term but you also need smaller realistic goals. If you’re in direct sales maybe you’re building a team and you need 5 team members this year. Have a picture representing 5 new team members. That’s very realistic and that’s going to be very focused for your business vision board.

Then it needs to have Emotion. You know the material things are great but they are not always going to be the motivators behind what we do, especially as women. We need to show the emotion. How are we going to feel when we have 5 members on our team? How are we going to feel when we’ve got the 5 members but that means that our kids can go to summer camp this year without needing to worry about the money? And that’s what’s going to drive us. We’re going to get up every morning and we’re going to move forward when we see what an attainable vision board is and we’re going to start living it.

The other is being Action Oriented. We need to show not only emotion but action in that board. Because if we’re just staying with the material objects it’s not going to help us go forward. We need to have some action in there. And one thing I really stress is that people understand the difference between action and activity. You need to be in action in your business. Not just activity. The difference is you get a case of catalogs and your activity for the day is putting your labels on them. It’s a very necessary need for your business. However, if you just spend 6 hours labeling catalogs that’s not an action. The action is when you actually give somebody else the catalog. The same thing I know a lot of gals spend a lot of time on Facebook and that’s an activity. Yes you are talking to people and kind of building those relationships but that’s just keeping you in activity. The action is when you actually approach someone to book a party or you actually talk to someone about becoming a client. Or like we did, we acted and our activity was some of the talking we did to build our relationship. But the action is when we are finally here on the show. So we want to show those action steps.

And then we want to make our vision board Livable. We want to know it’s something we can look at every day and we can feel ourselves in that board. We want to be in the present with the board. We don’t want to say in 6 months I’m going to feel great at this ideal weight. We want to have that phrase and that saying I am feeling great at my ideal weight. I am proud to be leading a team of 10 members. We want to put ourselves in that moment and that’s what’s going to draw our vision board to us. And help us attain those goals.

Tina: Wow this is so amazing. I’m so excited to have these great steps for creating a real vision board. I want to make sure we get in your contact information as we wrap up. Your website Marian is www.AchieveMoreCoaching.com, correct?

Marian: Correct.

Tina: And is there another great way they can find you?

Marian: I’m on Facebook. My fan page on Facebook is www.facebook.com/achievemorecoaching and they can also just friend me by going to my name Marian Brown.

Tina: So thank you so much for joining us today. I recommend listening to this recording again! I’ve been taking notes and I think our listeners are going to want to take notes on how to create this realistic, emotion based, action oriented and livable vision board. So thank you for joining us, Maria, and be sure to look for her on Facebook and visit her website www.AcheiveMoreCoaching.com. Thank you so much.

Marian: Thanks Tina, have a great day.