Why Habits Won't Bring Your Vision Board to Life (Do This Instead)

 In this episode, I'm breaking down why the habit approach to manifestation backfires and what actually works instead: aligned action. Stop forcing yourself to perform the same actions every day and start making organic choices in real situations that reinforce your new belief. That's what brings your vision board to life. 

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Transcript

Welcome And Problem With Habit Hype

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to Manifest She. I am Shannon, and this is where we talk about all things vision boards and manifestation, because you really do deserve to live your dream life without exhausting yourself to get there. Y'all, life shouldn't be all about constant sacrifice and struggle. We're here to enjoy and live life. And that's why I kind of want to call out something today that came to me as I was sipping my morning coffee, enjoying life on a Sunday morning. And that is something that the entire self-help industry has really been obsessed with for as long as I can remember. And that is habits. Build better habits, create a morning routine, do this every single day, and your life will change. And I feel like it's even more so now. Like it just keeps getting more built in to where if you think about every habit you're supposed to have and all the things you're supposed to do with these habits and these routines to have your best possible life, it's like, is there even enough time in the day for all of that? And habits sound great in theory. They sound disciplined and productive. They sound like the answer to everything. If I just can do this consistently every single day, life will feel good. I'll have what I want, whether that's the skincare routine or the health routine or the eating routine or how I get dressed routine, any type of habit of how I think, how I scroll, how I read, it can, we can go on and on and on, right? And these things are gonna magically change our life if we have enough discipline to do so. But a habit can't change your life in that way. A habit can't take you from what's on your vision board or your desire or what you want to manifest. Because when you're doing that, you're talking about identity and you're talking about belief. We're not talking about doing the same predictable thing every day. As a matter of fact, that can actually sabotage your manifestation work, your vision board work. And so I want to talk about what to do instead. Because most people approach your vision board and your mindset work like it's a goal, right? I'm gonna make a plan. What habits do I need to build to become this person? What do I need to be consistent in? And you put it into a little system, a predictable system. And I know it's hard to hear. I'm a very planned out, predictable, gotta know, gotta know, step-by-step person. I get it. But what I've had to learn is bringing my vision board to life is not predictable. Manifestation is not predictable. It's unpredictable because it's something we haven't done before. So I want to give sort of like this example, right? Of how we see this play out in our life. Maybe if you want more confidence, you think, well, I'm gonna dress up every single day so I have more confidence, or I'm gonna journal, you know, every morning about gratitude, or I'm gonna say affirmations in the mirror and smile at myself every single night. And so now you're approaching this idea of, okay, maybe I want more confidence as a habit, right? Now my vision board, now what I want, now my desire is a habit guide. And we treat it like that, like if we do specific things once again, consistently enough on the day, then now I'm gonna become this person that's on the board. And then what happens is that we do it for a few days or maybe a week, and then we mess up and we skip a day and we forget about our morning routine, or we forget about dressing up, or I just don't feel like dressing up today because I want to lounge around and be comfortable and binge watch the last bit of Bridgerton. Okay. And then you feel like you failed, or like you have to start over, or like you're not committed, or maybe you're just not disciplined, and maybe it's for somebody else, but this just isn't for you. And now you're beating yourself up and you're forcing yourself into this state of feeling guilty. Then you're like, no, no, no, I'm gonna push through and I'm gonna keep going. So you either take that route and then you, you know, you're harder on yourself, or you just give up entirely. And either way, nothing is actually changing because you're approaching it wrong from the start. And I'm not saying habits don't have a place, but not with your vision board, not with your manifestation. Because the problem with the habit approach is that habits are actions that are built on predictable situations. They're things that you can do every single day, whether you feel like it or not, in the same way at the same time, like brushing your teeth or going to the gym. But that doesn't work for identity transformation. And that's what needs to happen to fill the gap between what is on your vision board, what you desire, and where you are now. Habits don't work for belief work. It doesn't work for bringing that vision to life. Because when you're forcing yourself to pretend, when you're forcing yourself to perform a habit every day, when you make yourself dress up even when you don't feel confident, or when you're saying affirmations but you don't believe them, you're not building belief. You're just going through the motions. So you can dress up every day and still not feel confident because the action isn't coming from belief. It's from force. I have to do this to be her. And that actually makes you doubt the belief you're trying to build because it feels fake. It feels like you're pretending. It feels like you're trying to convince yourself of something that isn't true. And so the belief isn't being solidified. And that's really where the habit approach is backfiring in this work. Because when you force yourself to act a certain way every day, when you build habits around the person on your vision board, you're reinforcing that gap instead of closing it. Every time you're forcing yourself to dress up, you remind yourself that you naturally don't feel confident. Or every time you're saying an affirmation, you're reminding yourself that you don't believe that. You can walk around saying, I'm rich, I'm rich, I'm rich, until you're blue in the face as a habit that you're going to look at yourself every single morning in the mirror and say, I'm wealthy, I'm abundant.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

But if you feel like you're faking it, you're making the gap bigger. When you perform a habit, you reinforce, I'm not this person. Instead of this is who I'm trying to become.

Habits Vs Aligned Choices Defined

Grocery Store Compliment Reframe

How Beliefs Form Situationally

Building New Beliefs On Purpose

Work With The Subconscious 95 Percent

Let Life Be Easy And Automatic

Where Habits Fit And Where They Don’t

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Once again, not building the belief and mindset work and your vision board coming to life, all of that boils down to belief. And so we don't want to reinforce doubt. So you're probably like, well, Shannon, what the hell am I supposed to do? Do I just sit back and wait and hope? How am I building these beliefs if I'm not putting some action? It's a different kind of action. It's aligned choices. And there's a difference between habits and aligned choices because habits are forced, predictable, they rely on willpower for you to perform regardless of the situation that you're in. Aligned choices are organic, they are situational. You take in the moment and you reinforce your new belief. So I'm gonna really hone in on this example of confidence. So if you're working to become confident, your habit approach would be I'm gonna dress up every single day to embody confidence. And I bring that in as the example because I feel like we see this a lot online and in social media. Like, girl, if you want to feel it, you got to dress the part. You know, we've seen that. And so we think, okay, that's the way. And so you're forcing yourself to do it, even when you don't feel like it, it feels fake. But this is aligned action instead. Aligned action is you're at the grocery store and you're just in, you know, some yoga pants and a t-shirt, you're going to grab something real quick, and someone gives you a random compliment. And in that moment, instead of brushing it off or saying, Oh, this is my gym clothes, you pause and you think, what would confident me do right now? And you say thank you and you accept the compliment. That is the action that was predictable. You couldn't have planned that into your day. You couldn't have said, I know no matter how I show up at the grocery store, somebody's gonna give me a compliment today. No, no, no, no. You didn't know that. But that was an aligned action because the choice was made in a moment to reinforce belief in your confidence. That no matter how I show up, I can feel good about myself and I can accept it. That I don't have to downplay it. That I'm just gonna say thank you. Because that's what a confident woman would do is say thank you and not talk about how her outfit is old or from the gym or anything to dismiss that. And that's not a habit. That's not a part of, oh, in my, you know, 7 a.m. morning routine, I'm gonna accept compliments. No, you make a choice in a specific situation that's now aligning to the belief that you're building. And this is why it works better than habits, because aligned action is organic. Okay, I want you to think of this. Is just a big one. I maybe in my life, or maybe when I was growing up, I felt like this was a common phrase. Maybe it's just where I come from. I don't know. Money doesn't grow on trees. Well, our parents didn't wake up every single day as part of our morning routine to say, money doesn't grow on trees. It happened in specific organic situations. And I use this example a lot because I want you to understand that belief formation is tied to experience and situations, just as much as your thoughts and your feelings, and then we tie bring those into situational actions as we go. Okay, so it's organic. Your parents told you money didn't grow on trees when you were asking for the toy you saw on the commercial. It was situational and organic. But they didn't just repeat that to you over and over and over again, like how we try to repeat affirmations to ourselves over and over again. But something about that made that belief stick with you. And then you grow up and you're like, oh no, I can't do X, Y, and Z because money doesn't grow on trees. And you carry that with you. But you had that belief. So you make it situational and not habit and not forced. Because it's more believable when it happens in situations that you can't predict, right? You didn't predict your parents were gonna tell you that, but then you somehow held on to that belief. Or maybe you did the opposite, like they say it doesn't grow on trees, but I'm gonna show them when I get old, right? Like we can take it either way. But do you see what I'm saying? That's more so how belief is built. Because I can guarantee you you have beliefs in your brain and you're like, why do I even believe that? Because something happened to me one time, but it was so situational and such an experience that it stuck one way or another. So when you're building new beliefs on purpose to get your desire, to have what's on your vision board, to close that gap so that you're actually living those photos, it's about making aligned choices and aligned actions. And I think a lot of people think aligned action equals habit. Aligned action means I'm gonna do this every single day until it just sticks. And what I want you to understand is that belief formation doesn't have to be that complicated. Once you have awareness and bringing it to the surface of what you want, it's situational. You have your your thoughts that support the belief and the feelings, oh, the feelings that this is what happens in my life. All of these things are important. But I think sometimes we try to force and use sheer willpower. But that's why, like in the vision lab, the members, we don't rely on willpower. We rely on belief building, and there's a big difference. Because you don't have to make it something so dreadful that you burn out and you can't do it on willpower alone. Y'all, that's only 5% of your brain. You're gonna constantly be treading water. True belief building like this, where you let it be situational, engages the 95% of your brain. On how, in that moment in the store, when someone gives you that compliment, or for whatever it is, for whatever your belief is, for you to pause, because what does the initial subconscious 95% say? Say these words to downplay the compliment. But that pause and that reframe of just a simple thank you is it's going to be retraining the 95%. And that's what we want to work with because that's what makes life easy, is when your 95% is which does your life automatically for you, your subconscious is doing the work to where you get to a point where you don't even have to pause when somebody compliments you, you just say thank you. It becomes automatic instead of forcing yourself to do something every single day. Because you can't predict every situation where you need to make an aligned choice. You can't turn that into a habit because it happens differently. And once again, if I'm going from here to there and there is somewhere I've never been before, how can I predict? I can't predict. Remember, it's the unknown, and I have to be open to the unknown. And how and what would I do in that unknown? And that's why it's more powerful than habits. Because now you're building belief through real experiences, small and large. And I just use confidence as a little example, I guess you could say, but it can be a very big example. Because I want you to think if I believed I was confident, if you had that belief, what would change in your life in all areas of your life? And that's why we focus on belief work and not try to just work on singular desires, but we take the desire to then fuel belief work. Because if you believe something, not only are you allowing the desire you want to come through, but then that expands to so many other areas of your life to make it so good. And so those things build up, but you can't be open to those situational experiences to even come to you if you're too hell-bent on being stuck in your habits. Because if you were forcing yourself to dress up every day and then you got a compliment at the grocery store, you're gonna be like, oh, okay, thank you. But you feel shitty because you don't even want to be in that outfit. It's not comfortable for you, right? But you're trying to tie your confidence to outside things instead of an internal way of being. But if you can just be who you are whenever you are, and somebody says something kind to you no matter what, that makes more of an impact. And so I'm not saying you don't need action. You absolutely need action. You have to act on it, right? You have to make that pause, like we talked about in the example, and building that evidence, but it doesn't have to be a habit. And I think people think for mindset work, you have to monitor your thoughts 24 hours a day and feel a certain way and stay high vibe and all that. No, that's not how it works. You didn't get your beliefs that way. The beliefs you have now that you don't want, that's not how you got them. You didn't get them by making them pretty and positive and all. No, that to you right there is proof, whether it's a belief that serves me or a belief that doesn't, I don't need to be high vibe to get it. Action is subtle and it's organic, and it's aligning with your new beliefs in the moments where it actually matters when the situations come up in your real life. And that can look different every day. But the aligned action is still there and it's still building your belief, just in different ways and different avenues and unexpected ones. And I've seen both approaches play out because I've worked with women who do the habit approach and try to force themselves. And they always fall off because that's not how we build beliefs. They're either burnt out or feeling like they're a fraud, or they just keep reinforcing this gap of what I don't have. And then people who take the aligned approach, it's just easier. Easier the fact that I had one client who was like, wait a minute, is the other shoe gonna drop? It can't be this easy because she never experienced it being that easy before. And then, of course, we worked on the belief that it can be that easy. It can be that automatic. And that's what's transformative. So habits have a place. But when we're trying to put the pressure on habits to be the transformational thing that changes our lives, that's when they fail. Because we're human, willpower, motivation, all of that stuff is only going to take you so far. So having true aligned moments to build beliefs in the background that run in the background to make things automatic in your life, that's what changes your life. Because we can't always exert the effort or the energy, and life just life, and things get disrupted. Belief keeps them on track. If you want to learn how to build belief, how to use belief to change your life, that's what the vision lab is for. That's what members do inside the vision lab every single day. Because we're not focused on building habits or routines or five-step plans. We're building belief that requires aligned actions instead of force, instead of exhausting ourselves. That's the manifesting method. That's the method that I want for all women, because we have enough on our plates as it is. And it's time that life be easy and automatic in a way that feels good, where you're not always adding to your plate with new habits and new routines, but that you're getting what you want because it's running in the background automatic. So this week, if you're thinking of habits or maybe how you fell off on the routine you set for yourself in January, don't feel bad about it. Because I know everybody does new habit routines. I'm gonna go to the gym every single day. Don't feel bad. Instead, that desire you had that forced you into a habit, I want you to think about that. And what belief would make that automatic in your life, right? What belief would make way for that to be something that you can achieve naturally, not by habit, just by aligned action and belief. And once again, if you're ready to learn how to do that, I want you to get into the vision lab today. You can start today. Because you can't habit your way into manifestation. You can't habit your way into bringing to life what's on your vision board. Because you're here and it's there, and it's only belief that's going to bridge the gap. This week I want you to stop thinking, what habit should I build? And I want you to start thinking, what would she do in this moment? I'll chat with you next week.