Every single thing I’ve ever put on my vision board has come true.
I realize that sounds like a bold claim. But I’m going to show you exactly why it happens and how to make it happen for you too.
Vision boards have a reputation for being woo-woo. I get it. But they are one of the most underestimated visualization techniques for leaders that exist. And in this post, I’m sharing everything – including the vision board I made on New Year’s Eve 2018, coded in Sauvignon Blanc and tears – and the real reason any of it works.
Visualization Techniques for Leaders: My Story
After my divorce, I was a newly single mom with a five-month-old. I completed my Five-Year Vision exercise, wrote down the life I wanted, pinned it to my board, and forgot about it.
Then I met someone new. We built a vision together. And then I lost him to suicide.
Six months later, New Year’s Eve 2018, I made a vision board through tears and Sauvignon Blanc. I cut images from Pinterest, wrote quotes that resonated, and put together a picture of the life I wanted in 2019.
One thing I included: finding love again. Images of couples holding hands, sharing ice cream at the beach.
The very next day I joined eHarmony. And I met my now husband.
And that original Five-Year Vision? As a single mom of one infant, I’d written I’d be remarried with two more kids and another on the way. My husband was a single dad of two. We had another child during the pandemic. I went from single mom of one to married mom of four – exactly as I’d written.
Why Visualization Techniques for Leaders Actually Work
Here’s what most people get wrong: the vision board itself isn’t what creates results. The Five-Year Vision is.
The vision board is just the anchor. Its job is to keep your goals visible – so your brain is constantly, subconsciously scanning for opportunities that align with what you want.
Every single time you look at your vision board, it reinforces that priority in your brain. And as you go about your day, you start noticing and acting on things you might otherwise have missed. That’s not manifestation. That’s neuroscience.
Think about the eHarmony moment. Had I not seen that visual reminder on my board that morning – I may never have signed up that day. The vision board made me confront what I had committed to. And then I took action.
That’s the key. A vision board without action is just a dream board. The goal isn’t to stare at it and wait. The goal is to let it prompt you to move.
Visualization Techniques for Leaders: Beyond the Vision Board
Vision boards are one type of anchor. But they’re not the only one. Here are the four I use and recommend:
Visual Anchors – Vision Boards
This is the most common and the one I started with. Physical boards work great – but I switched to digital vision boards as my desktop wallpaper and phone screen. I was seeing it every time I opened my laptop or picked up my phone. The exposure was much higher.
Here’s what I like to include on mine, pulled directly from what’s worked:
Places I want to go — travel images that represent destinations on my vision list
Representations of goals achieved — like images of moms with kids outside in summer, which for me represented taking summers off with my family (something I now actually do every year)
Affirmations and quotes — things that remind me of my values and what I’m working toward. Some of my favorites: “Success doesn’t come from what you do occasionally, it comes from what you do consistently” and “You have to do the work in business before it works for you”
Brand logos — I had logos of publications and organizations on my board when I was working toward a book deal and major speaking gigs
Images of goals I want to feel — like the couple holding hands and sharing ice cream that represented finding love again in 2019
A workspace setup — I had an image of a home desk that looks very similar to mine today. That was on my board years before it became my reality.
Don’t be afraid to include whatever will most motivate you. Images, quotes, affirmations, logos – there is no wrong answer. It just needs to visually represent the life you’re building.
Audio Anchors – Affirmations and Music
If visual boards aren’t your thing, audio anchors are just as powerful. This looks like listening to affirmations daily, tuning into podcasts that speak to your goals, or playing music that puts you in the emotional state of already having achieved what you want.
The goal is the same – consistent exposure to the vision so your brain stays aligned with it.
Olfactory Anchors – Scent
This one surprises people – but it works. I have a specific candle I light whenever I’m pitching speaking opportunities or doing big business development work. Over time, that scent has become associated with high energy, confidence and opportunity.
Now when I smell it, I’m immediately in that state. Candles, perfumes and essential oils all work here.
Tactile Anchors – Objects You Can Hold
For a long time I wore a wave necklace that meant “go with the flow” to me. It was a physical reminder of my intention for that season – to release control and trust the process.
Trinkets, jewelry, meaningful objects – anything you can hold or wear that brings your vision back into focus qualifies as a tactile anchor.
The Best Visualization Techniques for Leaders Start Here
Before you make a vision board, do the Five-Year Vision first. That’s the foundation. The board is just how you keep it visible.
Then choose your anchor:
- Visual
- Audio
- Scent
- Tactile
Whatever you’ll actually engage with every single day. Consistency is the point.
And then take action. Look at your board. Let it prompt you. Do the thing.
If you’ve tried vision boards before and nothing happened – ask yourself honestly: what actions did I take to support what I put on it? The board doesn’t do the work. You do. The board just reminds you to.
Design Your Year Like a CEO
If you want the full step-by-step process – the goal setting, the Five-Year Vision and the vision board template I use every year – it’s all inside my Design Your 2026 Like a CEO instant access digital workshop.
You’ll get all the templates, the same exact process I use personally and access to the live workshop I run every November.
Access the Design Your 2026 Like a CEO Workshop here.
Go Deeper With the Book
I cover the Five-Year Vision, vision boards and the full Lack of Clarity Overwhelm Culprit™ in my book – with even more strategies, stories and tools to help you get clear on what you want and actually go after it.
The Five Overwhelm Culprits™: Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success is available now everywhere books are sold.
This is the book for the high-performing woman who is done feeling stuck and ready to build a life and career that actually aligns with what she wants.
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] How much of your vision board actually came true? Can you talk more about visualization? This was a question that I received during a private event Q&A while discussing the Lack of Clarity Overwhelm Culprit, and I realized it’s such a great topic to cover here ‘ cause there’s so much content out there on vision boards in particular, but not enough on why they specifically work.
Because here’s the truth, every single thing I’ve ever put on my vision board has actually come true. So if you’ve ever been interested in creating a vision board or maybe have tried one and didn’t see any results from it, then you’re gonna wanna stick around because by the end of today’s episode, you’ll know why vision boards work, how they help, and how to get the most out of them.
If you’re new here, my name is Corrie LoGiudice, otherwise known as Corrie Lo, and I’m a professional keynote speaker, facilitator, executive leadership strategist and author, and I help leaders transform overwhelm into [00:01:00] confident action, even in times of crisis. So this question came up as part of a workshop audience Q&A and I love it because vision boards in particular have this, I guess you could say, this bad rap.
And because I think people see them kind of as like woo-woo manifestation, like BS. But truth is, they’re an entirely underestimated leadership hack. As I share in my book, The Five Overwhelm Culprits: Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success, I found myself in a situation where I decided to leverage vision boards following my divorce.
I was newly single with a five-month-old, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do basically for the rest of my life. It was a fresh start.
Everything I had thought was gonna be my life suddenly wasn’t, because my partner was no longer in the equation. So it was this beautiful opportunity to get to start from zero, like start from scratch. And so I did this exercise called the Five-Year Vision, which I talk about it in multiple different episodes.
[00:02:00] We’ll link to it below in the show notes. But, I did this Five-Year Vision exercise where I wrote down all the stuff that I thought would be amazing to achieve in five years, but would be somewhat ridiculous. And I honestly forgot about it, and I put it up on my message board and I kinda just forgot about it.
And what happened was after I had gone through this, I had then met somebody new. He was the love of my life at that time. Following my divorce, he was not my ex-husband, he was somebody new that I had met and I lost him to suicide. So this is somebody that I had spent so much kind of building this vision with that he was sharing the Five-Year Vision with me that we’re gonna do all the same stuff and we were totally aligned, then suddenly he was gone.
So I, again, didn’t really know where to start with it. And mind you, I’d forgotten this Five-Year Vision exercise was even on my message board. So six months after all of this, I find myself on New Year’s, and I’m all depressed and I’m upset because everything that my partner and [00:03:00] I had said we were gonna do together isn’t gonna happen.
I’m finding myself starting over again. I didn’t know what I wanted. So I decided, you know what? I’m gonna make the most out of this. I’m going to spend today creating a vision board of how my life is gonna be so in 2019. This happened New Year’s Eve of 2018. That was the worst year.
So I basically, create this vision board, and it’s coded in, I joke all the time, coded in Sauvignon Blanc and tears. Where I went through and I cut out all these pictures from, I think it was Pinterest, and I did different quotes and things like that, things that resonated for me that really kind of visually represented what I hoped I would have in my life in the following year.
The crazy part about this story is one of the things that I had put on there that I really wanted. And we’ll make sure that we include the picture here so you can see, and we’ll scan in on certain parts so that you can see it. But I had put all these different images on how I wanted to find love again.
So I remember a couple getting ice cream, holding hands or hanging out at the beach, that kind of thing. So I knew in the back of my head that I wanted to find another partner, but at this point, it was just this idea [00:04:00] that I was gonna put it on this vision board.
So I create the vision board and the very next day I end up on eHarmony, ultimately meeting my now husband. Now, do vision boards usually work that fast? No, and the reason why the vision board itself isn’t what caused my results, it was actually the five-year vision that did because literally in five years timeframe from when I did it, I achieved one of my goals on the list.
And the way that I explain it, too, it’s usually you do your five-year vision with your four different values and then you imagine what your life looks like for those values. So one of my very, very near and dear to me values is family, and I had written at that time, being newly divorced with a five-month-old, that I was gonna be remarried with two more kids and another one on the way, which meant four kids from where I was starting, which is absolutely impossible.
But what I didn’t know was the day after I made my vision board, when I met my now husband, he was a single dad of two, and then we had another kid together during the pandemic, and during the pandemic, I literally went from being a single mom of [00:05:00] one to a married mom of four. So there’s that story. And I share this story in my keynotes, hence the question popped up, ” Does everything on your vision board happen?”
And truth is, it does. So that was just that example from there, I actually have an example here. This is the last physical board I did. And the reason that I don’t have the original one for 2019 is I would always go over the top of this one and just change the year. But even looking at this one, I’m not a New York Times best seller yet, but I did actually finally write a book.
This one with the mom with the kids outside in the summer, that’s something that I started this year and actually do every single year, where I take off for the summers with my kids. And this was actually 2022 is before I was professionally speaking. So one of the things I wanted was I wanted to travel, I wanted to speak to big audiences, I imagined myself traveling through airports to go to different speaking gigs. All of this happened.
Even with my health and wellness, all of that happened. My zooming in on here, you can’t see it [00:06:00] ’cause I’m sitting at it right now, but I have a desk set up that looks very similar to this. So everything happens when you put it on the board, and there’s a reason for that, and I’m gonna cover that in just a second.
So before I go ahead and dive into that, I would actually love to know, do you utilize a vision board? What’s your thoughts on it? Did anything ever come of it? Leave your comment below. I would love to hear your experiences and your stories.
So as I mentioned before, vision boards are not the first step. They’re how you visualize your goals and the vision that you set here for yourself. So I highly, highly recommend if you haven’t done it yet or checked it out, check out my five-year vision process. We’ll link the video over here, too, as well as the YouTube video below. That’s the very first step that you wanna do, and then you come back to it for vision boards.
Now, vision boards itself, they serve as a visual anchor to your vision. That’s their purpose. They’re not just to manifest your desire. You need to be clear on why and what your overall vision is and all the moving pieces to [00:07:00] it in order to be able to properly manifest it. If we’re speaking woo woo language for business. But that said, vision boards are just one type of anchor. There’s actually multiple different types of anchors that you could use for your goals.
So visions- vision boards are obviously, they’re visual. You put it up. the only reason that I switched from using physical boards like this is I switched to using desktop digital ones, where I see it every time I open my laptop or I look at my phone.
I actually found I had far more exposure, looking to it visually every single day by doing that versus my physical one was only when I was at my desk. So I prefer that. Other types of anchors that you can use, so if vision boards aren’t your thing and they don’t jive, they don’t have to be vision boards.
You could do things like audio, which would be affirmations or listening to podcasts that talk about your goals or listening to music that brings you into the kind of like feeling or mood you wanna feel when you achieve said goal. There’s lots of [00:08:00] different ways that you could do through audio.
There’s also olfactory which is scent. So things like candles, perfumes, scented oils. I have a candle here that I use when I’m pitching sales. For my goal for when I’m doing big speaking engagements and stuff like that, I like to light the candle while I’m doing that kind of work ’cause it creates this really positive environment that when I smell that, I’m automatically brought to this high energy point where I’m out there and I’m pitching opportunities. So olfactory is another way to do it.
And then also you can have tactile anchors. These could be things like clothing, trinkets, things that you can hold and feel. I for a very long time, had a necklace that I wore that was a wave, it meant go with the flow for me. During a year when my goals and my vision were aligned with me wanting reduce my need to have to control everything.
So you don’t have to have it be a vision board. It’s helpful to have any kind of an anchor. But for [00:09:00] the sake of this conversation, let’s talk about vision boards in particular. So what happens and what makes them work is every single time that you see your vision board, it anchors that priority in your brain and helps you subconsciously, as you go throughout your day, identify and determine different opportunities that are gonna help you have or achieve whatever it is you put on the vision board.
So some of my favorite things to include on vision boards are things like places that I wanna go, representations of goals achieved as you saw on the board that I just shared. Affirmations and quotes are a big one that help, and you’ll see I had a lot on here that were really important for me. Success doesn’t come from what you do occasionally, it comes from what you do consistently. You have to do the work in business before it works for you. Granted, this was very early on in my business.
So different kind of affirmations and quotes and things like that, that remind you of your goal and what you’re working towards. Those are very, very helpful. And again, what it does by having it visually accessible all the [00:10:00] time. Let’s just go back to my 2019 board when I said that I was going to, find the new love of my life.
Had I not put that on the board and had that visual reminder that morning, I never may have signed up for eHarmony that day to see who I’d find. You don’t know. Because I had that visual reminder there, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is what I committed to myself to do last night while drowning my sorrows with sauvignon blanc and creating vision boards.
I guess I should actually put some action behind this vision.” And that’s what it does. It’s supposed to be every single day a way to confront you and to keep you accountable towards what you say you’re gonna do. So for folks who have tried vision boards but have never had anything happen from them, I’d love for you to consider and think on what actions did I take to support what I put on the board?
Because putting goals and visions and aspirations on a vision board, but not putting any kind of action behind them, you’re basically just making a dream board instead of a vision board. It has to [00:11:00] have action behind it in order for it to actually come to life for you to manifest it.
So to recap everything that I just shared, vision boards are a tremendous tool. Especially when it comes to business or leadership, when you’re constantly moving forward and you’re expanding yourself outside of your comfort zone and working towards things that are bigger than you are.
Vision boards aren’t necessarily the first step, like I mentioned. First, you wanna make sure that you are effectively going through a good goal-setting routine, that you are creating time and space for you to be able to visualize what you want for the future. And then the vision board is the visual representation of that to anchor you back to that goal that you set for yourself, so it reminds you every day that you look at it to take action on it.
So again, vision boards are great. They could be done via, paper and cutouts like I did. It could be via digital. Even other ways to do it too, it doesn’t have to be a vision board. You can listen to affirmations. You can get a candle and smell it every day. Perfume, scented oils, that kind of [00:12:00] thing.
You could get yourself a necklace or a trinket. There are so many different ways to have anchors. Vision boards are just, I feel, one of the most effective ones because we see things and absorb things every single day, and it’s something that you could take with you, especially in digital form nowadays.
And don’t be afraid to include whatever you feel will most motivate you, whether that be images, it could be quotes, it could be affirmations, it could be any number of things. It could be logos. I had logos for a while when I was trying to get a book deal.
Those are all super helpful. So anyway, hopefully you found my sharing all this today helpful. If you have any questions, whether that be about vision boards or about anything else that I talk about, please feel free to leave a comment. I just may feature it on a future episode. And I also wanted to share too, if you’re interested in this process, whether it be the five-year vision as well as creating vision boards, I actually provide a step-by-step annual goal-setting process in my Design Your 2026 Like a CEO instant access digital workshop.
So you can learn more and buy it in the show [00:13:00] notes. And again, like I said, that’ll give you all of the templates. It’s the same exact template that I use now to create my own vision boards, and it’s also the same goal-setting process that I do. So feel free to check it out. Your access to that will also get you access to the live workshop that I run every year in November.
You could also learn more ways to work with me, whether that be one-on-one through coaching and advisory or through keynotes and workshops for your team or organization by checking out the show notes as well.
So thank you so much for being here, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. I’ll see you next time.
Thanks for checking out The Next Step with Corrie Lo. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review. Together, we’ll transform overwhelm into action, and we’ll keep taking the next step towards confident leadership. See you next time.