Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You imagine if you could see your future. The wild thing is, you actually can. After all, what our lives end up looking like is largely up to us and the choices we make. So how do we know what choices to make? We start the year with resolutions, but what about dreams? What about the bigger picture, the life we really want? Well, that's what we're digging into today. How to start imagining and documenting your dream dreams so that you can start being deliberate about the direction you take, moving toward, and ultimately living the life you really want.
Hey, we're Kim and Rog, and we're here to show couples how to get the best out of their relationship so they can start living their dream life together.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: We're a West Aussie couple who are living the life of our dreams. We don't entertain the word should. We think about the future as a field of possibilities and we let joy be our compass.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: We've taken the simple idea of working as a team and applied it to our marriage, and it's been a game changer, allowing us to work out what truly lights us up in life and to go after it together.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house flipping business, we've achieved some big dreams. And most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Pick conversations from, inspiring couples, thoughts from relationship experts, and tales from our own lives as we help you to gain the wisdom and skills you'll need to turn your relationship into a real team.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: These are relationship conversations for real people, by real people. So sit back, get comfort, whatever tickles you, pickle, and enjoy living the team life.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: You today we're talking about a pretty fun topic. It's about creating a vision board as a couple.
And I know for some of you, you might be thinking this is something you would have done in high school art class.
Maybe you did it as a teenager yourself personally.
Maybe it had some boy bands stuck on it. Who knows?
I know it sounds like it's a little bit naff, but there's actually quite a bit of science behind the power of vision boards, and Roger and I use them a lot, and we really wanted to share today how you guys can create a vision board in quite a simple way and why creating a vision board is a good idea.
So just to give some background on the power of vision boards and really what vision boards are, is an exercise in visualization. And research tells us that the brain interprets vividly imagined experiences similarly to actual experiences. So you actually activate similar neural pathways to what you would if you had actually had the experience, which is pretty wild. You get the benefit or some of the benefits of the experience you're imagining without even having undertaken it, which is such a cool thing the brain can do. That's how powerful visualization is.
The second reason vision boarding is so successful and so powerful. Is that you are spending time aligning your dreams together. We talk about here nonstop, getting on the same page with your partner, aligning with your partner. Because we're all about becoming a team. We here believe that your best relationship, your most powerful relationship, is as a team unit. When you combine together. Not when you seek out independence from one another and put the individual above the unit. But when you put the relationship above the individual, that's the agreement you make as a couple. And that's what the research from experts that we follow, like Gottman and Takin, supports. That concept of making the relationship a priority. Putting it above the individual needs. Looking after the entity, the relationship entity itself. When we do an exercise like vision boarding, you are putting that relationship as a priority. You are working together and aligning on your dreams, making them our dreams. Not my dream, his dreams, her dreams. Whatever it is, it's about becoming a unit.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: With dreams, we also get to tap into those really cool chemicals. That will flood your body. When you do things positive for your relationship. So on a previous episode, how to make the love drugs work for you, we talked about how doing certain activities can help release the bonding chemicals, like oxytocin and vasopressin. So when you do something with your partner, something collaborative, something dreamy, something that binds you, you actually start to release oxytocin. And then when you're starting to talk about a vision of the future. And of course, later on, you talk, well, how are we going to get there? That actually, in men, releases vasopressin? Because vasopressin comes about in men when they feel like they're on a quest, then they're doing something challenging with their partner. So you're actually just getting this big hit of chemicals internally, which are driving you towards your partner. And of course, as a result, when you get that, you start to build that emotional connection.
Often in big corporate organizations, they will do big vision boards up in group activities. They'll have people from different departments or even different companies all coming together in a big room. And there'll be posters up on the wall and colored postits. And they'll say, hey, let's do a vision boarding exercise. Or something very similar. And that's to bond people very quickly in a very short time frame to get them together to understand this is something we need to achieve. And it's exactly the same in your relationship with your partner. You do this activity and all of a sudden you start to bond, you start to get aligned, and of course you start thinking about the future together.
[00:05:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it is a really powerful exercise and hopefully those examples have given you an understanding of just how powerful it can be in contributing positively to your relationship. So let's go through now. That's the why we do vision boarding. Let's go through now just three practical steps that you can take. We want to keep this really high level, really simple so that it's something you could do today. You can take away this podcast and actually talk to your partner about it, get them to have a listen and implement these three steps today.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: So step one, it's all about preparation, time, place and materials. So pick a time and a place where you won't be disturbed with your partner. It can be out on a date night or a date lunch.
You can go out the back while the kids are inside. But you do need to carve out a little bit of time. Give yourselves the time so you're not rushed and so you can let those creative juices flow. Sometimes my creative juices are amber or red depending on what I'm drinking.
But other times I actually need a bit of a prompter from Kim. But as we often say, your environment is key to this as well. You need to make sure that you both pick the right place and time to do this so you don't have distractions. Put your phones away as well. Another one is say you're more digital minded, so maybe you want to jump on your computer, your laptop and do a PowerPoint, or you want to use a canva or something like that. Or you want to go old school with a big piece of paper, some textures and postits and scissors and glue and all that. But whatever you're doing, make sure at least one of you has said, I'm going to bring all this. Can you bring the coffee or bring the wine? I'm going to bring the paper. I'm going to bring the laptop, and also I'm going to drive this as well.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Yes, the preparation for any sort of activity, especially a new one, is actually really important if you want to set yourself up for success finding that time when you won't be disturbed. It could be Sunday morning. Say to the kids, you get this movie this morning or Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. All right, kids, you can watch the movie. You've been wanting to watch. Mum and I are just heading outside for half an hour. We're going to be doing an exercise together. We'll leave you guys.
If you could leave us, unless it's an emergency, that would be great. Setting that time and that expectation up together and as you said, roger, making sure that you've got the materials, who's going to be bringing what? You don't want to rock up and say, well, I thought you were bringing this. Well, I thought we'd do it old school, I thought we'd do it new school. Just get clear on what you're doing, what you're setting up and who's bringing what. In terms of the materials themselves, as Roger use, it might sound silly. You can use cardboard and scissors and glue and cut things out and stick them on. We use both. Roger and I do both types of vision boarding. We use high tech, so digital.
It's not really that high tech, but it is digital based. We do powerpoints mainly where we will. It's as simple as looking up Google images, snip cutting them and then pasting them into a PowerPoint document and creating a collage or whatever it is that spikes interest and enthusiasm from you.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: I haven't heard that word collage in a long, long time.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Great word. Great word.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: Got to implement it into my common speak now. Good.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: So, yes, you can build your collage on PowerPoint, or you could do one old school by hand.
You can take a giant notepad. I have many a two notepads that big that I use for different vision boarding exercises. And I have certainly been known to set a lunch date at a pub and carry in with me the a two notepad and texters, because I very clearly have an agenda to do a vision boarding exercise, an agreed agenda with Roger. And I enjoy that process. Roger enjoys that process. We come out of that process with a clear direction. So don't feel embarrassed about how simple this exercise might sound or what medium you want to use to write down the information. There's no embarrassment in putting effort into your relationship. And vision boarding, whilst it might sound naf and old school, is really, really powerful, I just want everybody to understand that if you sit down with your partner and do this exercise, come at it without any sort of judgment or worry, just come at it like you would. Something that you really enjoy. Just a project, just a fun activity to do together.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: Yeah. There's nothing embarrassing about having a great relationship which plans for the future and dreams of cool stuff.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Absolutely. I love that. All right, so that's step one, preparation time, place, materials, and making sure you're clear on why you're doing it together.
Step two is coming together at the agreed time and place and starting now to start. Vision boarding can be quite overwhelming for people if they haven't done this sort of thing before. And believe us when I say we have had so many couples tell us that they have never sat down and dreamed together in the entirety of their relationship. That is not something that they've done. So do not feel embarrassed if you're in that category. If you've never tried this before, you are absolutely not alone. So when you come together and you say you want to do a vision board together for your dreams, this is very high level dreaming. We're not talking about goal setting or planning here. We are talking just about dreams. Right now.
The easiest way to start something new like this is to use prompter questions. Prompter questions are such a fantastic tool for anything new in life.
They're like having an expert give you a little bit of guidance along the way. Maybe you could think about it like this. Maybe you could talk about this. So what are some of the prompter questions that we would suggest for vision boarding? We really, again, are focusing on high level dreams here. So this is getting your brain to really get up out of the minutiae of planning and goal setting and get into dream life. What in my imagination, in my very vivid and magical imagination, do I have floating around? So questions like, what would a dream day for you look like one year from now?
Another question might be, what adventures or experiences do you dream of us sharing together?
If we had no limitations on our life, what would our life look like today?
What is something you love that you'd like to share together more?
What milestones do you see us achieving over the next year?
How do you see us celebrating these milestones?
What kind of legacy do we want to leave in the world? And you can see these are bigger questions, bigger questions of how you dream of your life being. This is getting in touch with who you see yourself as, as a human and who you see yourself becoming.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I think these prompted questions can often be underestimated, how powerful they are. If someone's interviewing someone important on television or at a big forum, you don't just have them, just the person, just sit there and talk for an hour and a half. Some people are great orators and they can do that, but you need a good interviewer to elicit key items out of them to make sure you stick to the point to make sure you stay on track and to dive into things that they might not ever said of their own will and volition out loud because they might be a bit embarrassed about it, or they want to keep things personal, or they might think, hey, that other person doesn't think that's interesting. So when you're asking these questions, it's really important. Don't sit there and go, oh, these are two now for I could never ask that. Ask them, and ask them in your own way if you feel you need to as well. And whoever's in charge of actually writing down the ideas, and you can both write down your ideas. And I often find that Kim is the one in charge of everything, in charge of the big pad and pen, and I'll have to sit there sometimes. Go, write that down. Write that down. But it's important that you write down all the feelings and thoughts that are coming out in your head. You don't need to be super succinct up front. You can be open. You can have that zero based thinking, that blue sky dreaming in there, anything that comes out, anything that pops into your head. And then after that, that's when you can start to refine the dreams. That's when you can start to discuss the major topics that have come up. And don't just use writing as well, as Kim said, kim often will google on the Internet, search on the Internet, or Pinterest or whatever things that, I guess, evoke thought and evoke feelings. So we have a dream at the moment, one of them, anyway, of a farm a few hours from Perth. Traveling by a plane is very, very difficult for us. And so we want to make sure we have not even a holiday house, but almost a second home on a farm with rolling hills in the valley, a spa out the front. Kim literally has the detail of the type of timber she wants, the chimney and the fireplace, the type of rock that's going to be used. She has all that on her vision board, because what it does is it taps that sort of deeper emotional part of your brain. What I will say is, one of the questions in there, which I think is the most powerful question, is a visualization activity of what would your dream day look like one year from now? Kim and I actually do this in five years, and there are obviously some personal development experts who've been doing this for a long time, who will do it in ten years. What does my next ten years look like? How am I going to frame the next ten years of my life? Kim and I do this at five years. And that's what a lot of big corporations and sporting teams will do as well because they've got a strong background to this. We do five years, but as a start, just start with one year. Don't put too much pressure on yourself. Start small, start easy. If you feel confident, go for five years.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: I think that's a really great unpacking. Roger. Of the power of the prompter questions and how important it is to pick imagery that evokes really strong emotion. Just want to be clear as well. This is a team exercise.
These questions that we're putting out there, these prompter questions, of course, you're each going to individually answer them and you're going to jot that down and then you're going to talk more about it. These are prompter questions to get the conversation started. This is not what do you want? What do I want? Let's write that down. This is. How do you imagine it? How do I imagine it? Okay. How do we then imagine those two things together? What does that look like from the perspective of our team? What's going to be our team dream? And Rodgie described the team dream that we have, which is to have the farm outside of Perth, and that I have very strong imagery for that. But that's imagery we've agreed. We've discussed, us sitting in the spa out the front. We've discussed the stone and the wood that we would imagine in the home. And that's why that imagery is the imagery we've selected. It represents that joint dream that we've agreed we have and are working towards.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Yeah. And that came back from that visualization activity we did together. We closed our eyes and we actually went from when we woke up in the morning to when we went to bed at night, what our day was, know, waking up and driving into the local town and going to the bakery and getting this hot bread. For me, I think I was watching the footy with Kim and our daughter while we had a lamb roasting in the wood fire oven. And in the background there was rolling over the hills and we'd go jump in the pool. So do the visualization and then get visual, because it'll be that sort of cross connection of when you don't feel you're in the mindset to really think about it, but then you've got it up there and so you can think about it. And that's a great segue onto step three, which is choose where you're going to put the vision board. Don't pack it away. I know what you're thinking? You're going to fold it up and pack it away or you were going to save it into a file you might not be able to save and go, oh, Kim and Roger, big tick. We've just done our visualization exercise again. Don't be embarrassed for having big dreams. Some people will see in the movies where someone will have a picture of a house or a holiday destination in their wallet and like, oh, I'm always working towards this. Or the truck driver will have it under the sun visor in his car.
Put it somewhere prominent in your house.
We've got a home office and it's plastered top to bottom with our vision boards and of course, some cool stuff that our daughter's done at school.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: Yeah. It's so important that you see this. That's the whole point of the visualization. It keeps you connected to the dreams. It helps you as a team to stay in a team space when things might be tough and you look over at the vision board and you remember, but we're working towards that joint dream. Okay. All right. This is just a small thing. Let's move past that. Let's stay focused on what we've agreed, that big dream together, that real sense of purpose in life, which is such a beautiful thing.
Now, there's an added bonus to the vision board, and I guess when I talk about that sense of purpose, it sort of brings that up. The added bonus to creating a vision board with your partner, your teammate, is that you're going to work out what your values are.
This is a really great way for you to start working towards more deliberate goals, more deliberate plans to achieve those goals. All of these steps that we need to take if we want to live a more purposeful, deliberate life together. The first thing we would need to make that more detailed planning is to know our values. But it can be very hard to work out what your values are. To sit down and just say, I don't know what I value. I mean, I like my family. And trying to work out higher level what's really important to you. It can be confounding. But when you start by doing a vision board and you just tap into your heart and you get creative and you get imaginative and you use your visualization questions and you can see what really matters to you in your heart, what's on your heart, what are your big dreams, the things that you don't have to think about, all the logistics of. You just imagine you take out all the constraints that you currently see when you then create that vision board and you stand back and you have a look at it, you can start to see what are the themes here, what are the things or the areas of my life that I really value. And that's when you can start to do some of your values work. And we're not going to talk about that today, but I just wanted to touch on how great it is that out of this, you can start to see far more easily without pressuring yourself to try and imagine what your values are. Values are a tricky thing to work out. When we talk about our dreams and get creative and in touch with our hearts and our souls and what we really want out of life, it gives us really strong clues as to what we value. So that's a huge added benefit we see out of doing the vision board, is it links you right on into the next step, which is working out what your values are.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: Yeah, and I really see values, to simplify it a bit, as what really matters to you, what do you really want out of life? And as a first step to actually doing the visualization exercise, when you're dreaming of the future, you'd be surprised how much of it isn't really fancy cars or living in a castle. And if it is, that's fine. If it is living in a castle or a mansion on the beach in Cotterslow, or a big holiday house in Byron Bay, that's 100% fine, as long as you're agreed on it and you understand what you have to give up to get there. But often we'll find that our values are often around our family and our children and our marriage, and also spending time with our friends and having a nice place to live and living in the right areas. But there's a balance there. And I think that dreaming activity or that day in the life, a year from now, five year activities, so much of that will be how you spend your day, not what you have. So, yes, Kim and I are dreaming of a farm, and we're going to have to work to get to it. But so much of that is the feelings we get. Spending time together, relaxed outside of our house in Perth, near the beach. We're out in nature with our daughter, relaxing. And that's where you can start to pull your values out. Or we value downtime with our daughter. We value downtime together. We value being out in nature because it will help our senses and it will help our stress levels.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: I love what you say about balance there, Roj, because I think that's exactly it. We're not saying that people won't be dreaming of growing their wealth or buying the bigger house or anything like that. Sure, for a lot of people, that will be a dream that they have. But we're saying you can think of the other things, how you will feel in that moment, what will really come to the fore for us, buying a farm is something where you do need to grow your wealth to do that. That is part of it. But what do we really want from the farm? We want that sense of peace in nature.
That's what we're really pulling out of that as our deep value, that time away from busy city life, time to be quiet and grounded. Those sorts of things are the things that we're really valuing in that moment. And it's finding that balance between those things, because our brains can get really caught up in driving for achievement and seeing that as what we're valuing. But it's more than just that. It's more that there's more underneath it. And when we do these visualization exercises and reflect on what we've described and what we've pictured, we're able to see what more is underneath that. Roger, what's your gold nugget out of today's show?
[00:25:10] Speaker B: Never losing that childlike wonder. When we were kids, we got creative, we got the paper mashay out, we got the collage out. We did this at school, we did this at home because it got us being creative and imaginative. So yes, we're adults now, but it doesn't mean that these methods won't work today. In fact, they could be far more critical. So don't be afraid to get the clad glue out or the Yoohoo stick and get creative.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Yeah, my gold nugget today is about not bringing any judgment into this exercise.
I think we have a lot of ideas around how adults, in inverted quotes, are supposed to behave and what sort of exercises are worthy of adult attention. There are a lot of really great creative exercises that might seem simple on the outside and perhaps not intellectual enough for some adults. It's just underestimating the power of creative work. Creative work is so powerful, and the research backs this up. So that would be my gold nugget today is not to bring judgment into this exercise and in fact, to bring openness and curiosity to the power of creative and visual work.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: You're amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Feel like you're on a roll. If you want more living the team life, relationship insights and conversations, head over to kimandroge.com, where you can find all the show notes as well as tons of other relationship goodies.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: And if you like today's episode, please hit subscribe or let another couple know where they can find us. It'll make them happy, and it'll make us really happy.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: Until next time, keep on living the team life.
