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Vision board and house cleaning.
What do the two have to do with each other?
We're going to talk about that today.
Hi there. I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question
and I get to help you find an answer.
Now today's show is brought to us by MyCleaningConnection.com
which is a resource hub for a bunch of really cool cleaning stuff.
And on there-there are a bunch of blogs that delve into very different areas of house cleaning
and building your own house cleaning business and finding your steps to success.
But what we want to talk about today is vision boards.
All right.
Now, back in the 1990s when I was starting my house cleaning business there were coaches
and they were motivational coaches and motivational speakers and they were people who would help
you get from Point A to Point B. And the big thing at the time were to create what were
called vision boards.
The vision board was like, imagine a great big cork board that's on the side of your
wall, and then you go through magazines and you cut out pictures and you find pictures
that represent things that you want to have and you post those up on the board.
Then every day when you show up for the day, you look at your vision board and you say
to yourself, "That's for me", and you imagine those things in your life.
Now at the time, I was living in a trailer.
It was a single wide trailer, and I had a small, old, rundown, pre-owned Honda that
I was driving and I loved looking at the luxurious things in life, and I would cut out pictures
and post them up there and say, "That's for me."
One of the things that was important to me was having a sewing machine and a serger,
because growing up in a large family I sewed a lot of my own clothing.
So, one day when I grew up, I was going to be a clothing designer.
That was my destination.
Anyway, I wanted a sewing machine and a serger along with some other things that I wanted
and I cut out and hung on this vision board.
Well, what was interesting is I didn't have a picture of a house, but I knew that I did
not want to live in a single wide trailer for the rest of my life.
And because I was cleaning in homes, and I was cleaning in modest sized homes, but I
wanted to live in a really nice house.
So, what I did was I got in the car and I drove around to different neighborhoods and
I found a neighborhood that spoke to me, and as I drove in the neighborhood all of the
yards were very well manicured.
There were people out walking their dogs and people pushing their kids in the strollers.
There was a community center that had a swimming pool and kids were playing outside.
There were tennis courts and people were playing tennis and badminton or whatever.
And as I drove through the neighborhood and I looked at the houses, I found a house, and
I don't know why, but it caught my attention.
And I was like, "That is for me."
And at the time I had this little tiny snap shot camera.
The kind you take in and have the film developed.
I took a picture of this house so that I would have a picture
that I could put on my vision board.
So, I went home and I got the picture developed and I hung it up on my board, and I looked
at it for years, and whatever.
Years went by, and as the years went by, all the things on the board started coming true
for me.
One of the biggest most exciting cars that I was going to have on my vision board was
a Honda Accord.
It was way out of my price range, but I knew that it was the fancy version of the Honda,
and I knew that I could put a vacuum cleaner on the back seat of it so that I could still
get to and from my cleaning jobs.
When I got my Honda Accord that meant I was going to arrive in style.
All right.
So, anyway the years go by and as things grew in my life and I was able to get some of those
things on the board, I would take the pictures off and would upgrade them with new pictures
like, "This is the next step", but I kept that picture of the house up there for many years.
Anyway, one day I was moving and it's interesting because I took the board down, but as I took
the board down, I took a picture of the board so that I would never forget what my goals
were back in the 90s when I started.
It was interesting because that went on a flash drive and as we upgraded computers and
whatever, I made a digital version of that, and I saved it.
Well, in recent times, I came across a whole bunch of CDs that I was transferring back
to a hard disk on my computer, and as I was transferring it over, I found some old photos,
and one of the photos was my vision board.
As I was looking over my vision board, I had a really freaky moment.
Where, as I looked at the vision board, I saw the picture of the house that was on my
vision board that I had been looking at since the 90s, and I took a copy of the picture
and its grainy cause the quality that we had in our photos back then isn't very good, and
I sent the picture to my husband.
I said, "What does this remind you of?"
He said, "That's our house.
Why?
Oh, wait, that's not our house.
We have a side load garage and this is a front load garage.
Oh, my gosh though, that's our house."
And I looked at it and I said, 'That is exactly our house."
It was the same design of the house, the same elevation with the exception that we had a
side load garage and this was a front load garage.
But the house itself, the little windows, where everything was set up, the elevation,
the door, the walkway up to the door.
It looked like the house that I live in right now.
And I sat there going, "Oh, isn't that interesting."
Because I haven't seen this picture now.
It's been ten or 15 years since that board came down and we moved from other houses or
whatever.
But the reality is in the back of my mind, my mind was still working on that vision board.
It's interesting because all the stuff that was once on my vision board, I now own and
it's now a part of my life, or I've moved on from it and gone to the next upgraded version.
Here's how it works.
You get a visual picture of what you want and you become very crystal clear on what
that is and what it looks like for you, because it's hard to arrive at a destination if you
don't know what the destination is.
It's like if you get in your car, and you're going to go from here to your friend's house,
but you don't know where your friend lives.
And you want to type in your friend's address, just having the friend's address is not good enough.
You have to know where your starting point is, so that it can map a route from here to there.
And once you have the coordinates, then you can get there.
Now, our minds work a lot like Google.
It's just amazing.
When you plug something in, your unconscious mind starts to find situations and scenarios
to make that true.
It's like making a request on Google.
Google goes out and tries to find an answer and brings it back to you.
It's not sure, so it brings you back six or ten choices.
Did you mean this, did you mean this, did you mean this or this?
Then if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the Google page, there are more suggestions.
Well, our unconscious mind does the same thing.
And it keeps presenting opportunities.
Did you mean this?
Did you mean this?
Did you mean this?
And then what's interesting is even when you dream at night, you're unconscious mind is
still in a state of presenting ideas to you.
Is this what you mean?
For example, did you ever have to go to the bathroom in the night?
And you're dreaming of you're at some public place and you're looking for a bathroom and
you can't find a bathroom.
And so, then finally you wake up, because your unconscious mind says now that's not
the right scenario.
Don't go now.
Wait, because we can't find one.
Because you can't find one, that's when it wakes you up and it brings you back to the
conscious world.
So it's an example of your unconscious mind is still searching and it's always searching
until you turn that off.
So, if you want success in the house cleaning business what I recommend you doing is creating
a vision board.
What does success look like to you?
And where are you starting from?
If you're starting from right here, right now, that's important to know.
What is your next step?
What is your next car?
What is your next house?
What is involved in your live that you don't have right now that you want to have.
And I'm going to go one step further to say that if want you want are happy customers,
put pictures of happy customers up there.
Put pictures of a happy staff up there.
Put pictures of company cars with logos on the side, or whatever it is that you want
to see your business achieve in the future.
Because if you can't envision it and you can't find the coordinates from here to there, if
your unconscious mind doesn't know what it's looking for, you're never going to arrive.
There are a whole bunch of people that sabotage their success in the house cleaning business,
because they have no game plan.
They have no goal, they have no vision board, they don't know what they're after.
What they think they're after is a little bit of money today that pays their bills and
if that's as far as you can see, that's all you're going to get.
But if you can paint a bigger picture and you can get your unconscious mind involved
it will start looking for scenarios in order to make that true.
So that is what vision boards have to do with house cleaning, and my recommendation is that
you not walk but run to the nearest office supply store and either get a cork board so
that you can pin pictures up or find a way that you can create a website that hold all
of these pictures, but my request is that you visit and revisit that destination board
at least twice a day.
First thing in the morning when you get up, last thing at night before you go to bed.
You want to remind yourself through the day, "Everything that I do is going to lead me
towards these destinations."
And as I go to bed at night, all the unconscious thoughts that I have are going to try to find
solutions so that I can arrive at these destinations.
Once you do that, it is amazing what's going to happen in your life, because it starts
to come true.
Almost without you.
Situations will unfold and they will piece themselves together that will, present exactly
what you were envisioning.
All right.
That's my two cents for today, and until we met again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.