Greenville Gains Podcast: Episode 4

The speaker discusses the importance of mindset in fitness and emphasizes the need to create a vision board. They suggest closing your eyes and imagining your perfect life, being as specific as possible. They recommend finding pictures and words that represent your vision and creating a vision board using a cork board and thumbtacks. They also suggest having an accomplishment board to reflect on past achievements. The speaker shares their own vision board, which includes sections for accomplishments, transformations, travel, calendar, and future vision. They explain that they look at their vision board every morning before getting out of bed, along with practicing gratitude and deep breathing exercises. They believe that this practice helps start the day on a positive note and handle whatever challenges come up. They highly recommend creating a vision board to stay motivated and focused. Yo! What's up, Gains Fam? This is Evan Levy and welcome to the official Greenville Gains Podcast. Here we'll be discussing lifting, nutrition, business, and mindset along with other topics in the future. Now, today we'll be talking about mindset. When it comes to fitness, people tend to focus on the physical aspect of it, but I think mental health is just as important, if not more important, than the physical, so it's essential to talk about. So today we're going to be talking about how to create a vision board, okay? I'm a big believer that we should all have one. I've had one for many years and it's really helped me get to where I need to go. So let's do a little exercise here. I want you guys to close your eyes. If you're driving, please don't do this. Please don't close your eyes, but just kind of play along and imagine. But if you're sitting at home and listening, what I want you to do is close your eyes and kind of get in a meditative state and visualize your perfect life. What do you see? What do you picture? What do you imagine? Where do you live? What kind of house do you have? What car do you drive? What kind of relationship do you have? Do you have kids? What are they like? Do you have a dog? What job do you have? Do you have a business? What kind of business is it? How does your bank account look? Where do you want to travel or where have you traveled and where do you want to go next? How do you look and how do you feel? The more detailed you can get, the more accurate and the more likely that you're going to get to your vision, right? You have to cover as many details as possible, instead of just saying, oh yeah, I want a Mustang or whatever car you like, you can say, yeah, I want a 2023 Ford Mustang GT with a 5.0 V8. The more specific you are, oh and make sure it's a red car, right? The more specific you are, the more likely you'll get to your goal. So next, what do you want to do? Now that you have this deep vision in your head, and you can write it down, but if it's intense enough, you might not have to, it's just going to be in your head. What I want you to do next is come up with some pictures and words that represent this perfect vision of your life. So what you can do is go on Google and type in a picture or search a picture, image search of each thing that you can picture in your head. So your dream house, your dream car, your dream relationship, dream dog, dream investments, dream travel, whatever you want it to be. And come up with some pictures and you can also do words, some people are more verbal. I tend to be more visual, so I like pictures, words don't do much for me, but some people get more motivated with words too. So you can do a combination of both. Anyway, come up with a list of pictures and words that represent this perfect vision, and you're going to print out hard copies with your printer, or what you could do, what I do actually is order them from Shutterfly to get the glossy prints, like actual photos. Now once you get the photos, and the shipping is pretty quick, you'll get them in a couple of days, once you get the photos, go to Michaels or some kind of local arts and crafts store and you're going to get a cork board. Take your photos and words, and you're going to use thumbtacks to make your vision board on the cork board. Now there are a few different ways to do this. You can have the vision board, which implies your future, right? I would at least recommend an accomplishment board and a vision board. So basically your accomplishment board is going to be the things in the past that you've done and the things that you're proud and grateful for. So it could be, I don't know, your health, your family, places you've gone to, competitions you've done, accomplishments, anything that you look at and you say, wow, I'm the man, I'm the woman, I feel proud of this, and it makes me feel good. I would at least recommend that and a future vision board, because then on bad days you can look back and say, wow, I actually did that, I feel good about myself. And then you have the future, which is going to pull you forward and motivate you to keep working hard. So for me, I actually have, my vision board is kind of five parts. So I have my accomplishment, and these are all in my bedroom by the way, so it's getting a little bit personal, most people probably haven't seen it, but just trying to kind of paint you guys a picture here. So I have my number one accomplishment board, things I've done in the past that I'm proud of. Number two is my transformation board. So a lot of my clients over the years who I'm proud of helping, and that reminds me of who I've helped and the changes they've made and the lives I've made an impact on and it reminds me why I do what I do. I have another vision board for travel specifically, so I love to travel in case you don't know. Travel is my second biggest passion outside of fitness, so I have a separate vision board for travel. So a lot of the places that I've been to already, and it reminds me of wow, look at all these cool places I've been to, I want to keep traveling and doing more. And then I have the calendar, this year's calendar 2023 laid out, not like a flip calendar, but what I did was I got one of those and I ripped out all the pages, or cut them out, and I laid out all 12 months on the wall so I could see the full year in one shot. And I put all the events on there, things that's coming up, things I'm looking forward to, accomplishments, important birthdays, things like that. I can see the full year, also like monthly and yearly goals and trips and that sort of thing. So I can picture the whole year right in front of me and I can see how much the year has gone by and what I've done, and I see how much time I have left in the year and know exactly what's coming up. And then lastly, which is really the main point of this conversation, is the future vision board. So these are all the things that I got to mention before about what you picture for your future. Dream house, dream home, dream car, dream family, travel, whatever it may be. So those together comprise my complete vision board. You don't have to do all of these, I would recommend it, but I would say at minimum at least do your accomplishment board to see the past that you've done and your future vision board so you can see what to look forward to in the future and remind yourself what you're working towards. Now I look at this every single morning before I get out of bed. So I wake up, do a little bit of stretching, and then I get in this meditative state and I look at each one, one by one, each picture by each picture, and you know, I get excited, I get motivated, and then I go through my gratitude list. So I close my eyes and I have my list that I go through of all the things in my life that I'm grateful for. So it could be related to your accomplishment board, but it doesn't have to be. I'm talking about more general things like your health, your family, your mindset, you know, your friends and connections and dog and things like that. So I go through my gratitude list to put me in that positive mindset, and then I do some deep breathing exercises to really help my heart slow down and relax before the day starts. And I got to tell you guys, I've been doing this for probably five to six years now, it really starts the day and puts you in a positive mindset, starts the day on a good note, and just makes you feel really good, physically and mentally. You're preparing yourself for the day, so before you check your phone or you put on the TV or whatever it is, or you know, talk to your partner, whoever, I would actually recommend doing this because you're putting yourself in a positive state instead of going right to the outside world and putting yourself in a reactionary state, right? So if you grab your phone, for example, right away when you wake up, you can grab it to turn off your alarm or whatever, but then put it away. But I wouldn't recommend checking it right away because then you're seeing notifications pop up, you know, text, Instagram, whatever, and you start going through and you're reacting to all these things instead of being proactive with your day and putting yourself in that positive mindset first in order to deal with those things. So like I said, I've been doing this for years and it really helps, and the days that I do it, I do it almost all the time, I'm not perfect, but the days that I do it, I feel much better mentally and physically and I'm more prepared to handle whatever comes up in the day. Because look, we know how life is, bullshit's going to happen, you know, your car's going to break down or you're going to hurt yourself or whatever it is. People are going to be late, you have to deal with, you know, people being annoying or not showing up, ghosting, whatever. So if your mindset is already in a good, positive place and relaxed, you're going to be better able to handle whatever life throws at you for that day. And on the other hand, the days that I skip all this, you know, this whole exercise, I feel a lot more anxious and stressed and like, I can literally feel it in my chest and I feel different. It just doesn't, I just don't feel relaxed and mentally, I don't know, not mentally stable, but I just feel a lot better when I do this exercise and this practice. So I would highly, highly, highly recommend this to everyone. So if you don't have this already, go out, get your corkboard, create your vision board, print out your pictures and put that up on your wall because it's, I'm telling you, it motivates you so much to keep working harder and keep focusing and it really makes you feel good on the days that maybe you don't feel so good. Anyway, guys, thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. If you liked it and got value out of it, please do me a huge favor and share this show with your friends and your family who might benefit from it as well. Have a great day and let's keep getting those mental and physical gains.