What if I told you to throw your whole vision board away? Too drastic? Perhaps. But what if I said that taking a step away from your vision board—for just a moment—could ultimately lead you to reaching your goals this year?
Such is the advice of Morgan Ondree, founder and lead web designer at Wild Powerful Design Studio. “I want you to take your vision board and put it away,” she shared in her now-viral video. “Don’t look at it again until you do this.” As a TikTok creator and branding specialist, Morgan is in the business of getting individuals to rebrand their lives like a business.
Still, you may be asking yourself, what could possibly make you step away from the vision board that you spent hours curating and perfecting? The answer can be found in a writing practice known as scripting.
Scripting is a manifestation technique that combines visualization with writing out your dreams and desires as if you already have them. “This is ‘who’ you are as a person,” Morgan explains. The method involves you drafting the life of your dreams, verbatim, in the present tense in order to obtain and attract the change you want to see in your life.
Derived from neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), the visualization approach implies that our thought processes and behaviors influence how we think and the physical results we get. Meaning, in order to become the person you want to be, you must first think and adopt the traits of what that person would embody.
@morgan.ondree Stop wasting your time and ur mamas magazines #scripting #manifestation #rebrand
Back in 2020, amid the enduring time of quarantine, Morgan was in the middle of an identity crisis. After running a skincare brand for six years only to have it put on hold due to supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, Morgan found it difficult to show up for her business and felt lost. “COVID hit and we were in lockdown; I damn near went crazy,” she tells xoNecole. “Something about being forced to really look into who you are, no distractions from your bad habits, can either make or break you, and at the time it was breaking me.”
This period turned Morgan inward, as she began to attend therapy in an effort to get back connected to herself and gain clarity on her next chapter. “After one of my sessions, my therapist and I talked about creating an alter ego to align with whom I wanted to be, and I started this process of rebranding.”
While she was navigating feelings of being depressed, lost, and confused, she decided she would make a complete 360 and close her business, teach herself web design, and follow her true passion by opening her web and branding design firm, Wild Powerful Design Studio. “I started to find love in my work again. I started to feel naturally confident, show up online, and talk about the process of branding. I decided I was going to treat my life as I would a brand and create brand guidelines. These are very clear, concise, and easy-to-follow guides on how a brand communicates, what they believe, and the visuals.”
The key to finding her passions and unlocking her best, 'rebranded-self,' as she explains in her TikTok, was that she, “had a set intention and identity shift attached to her goals.” According to Morgan, in order to begin your rebrand, you must first evaluate what you’re doing that's not getting you to the place that you want to be. “I'm going to be really honest with you; I was creating excuses, allowing the fear of what other people will think to stop me from executing some of my best ideas,” she shares. “So I wrote these things down and decided they’d be things I would no longer do.”
@morgan.ondree Switch it up on em #personalrebrand @Jacklyn Sweet #brandingtips
Getting clear about the identity of the future version of yourself you want to become, is essential to ultimately becoming it. Ask yourself, what does that person (you) do? What are their habits? Their values? Their routine? Visualize it, script it, and begin to incorporate those traits into your daily being. “In the scripting process, you write about your highest and best future self as if it is in the present,” Morgan explains. “This can be hard to do when you are feeling low, so one amazing thing that I learned from my therapist was that your affirmations need to align with what you're doing physically.”
"In the scripting process, you write about your highest and best future self as if it is in the present.”
According to Morgan, it’s important to create affirmations that resonate with where you are until you’re in a space where they reflect who you want to be. “I would say to myself, ‘I am getting stronger every day.’ Then right after that, I would do my morning workout telling myself that I am strong while carrying out the behavior that tells my brain, ‘Oh, you are this.’”
Believing is truly the key to achieving all that you’re destined for. And once you shift your mindset, Morgan shares that’s when it’s time to script your way into your new life. To help you get started, Morgan has supplied a step-by-step guide to script your way into your newly rebranded life!
Step 1: Decide.
“Decide that you will be different. You need to actually be willing to commit to the promise you are about to make to yourself.”
Step 2: Write out your script.
“Rule of thumb: be clear. In my process, I like to script the overall ‘themes’ of my life: the physical, spiritual, emotional, career, friendship, etc. Then I write it down [in detail] who I am in those categories.”
“At the end of doing all of that, I like to have a quick summary sentence; you can refer back to this when you're feeling lost along the new journey. If your behavior or circumstances doesn't align with who you are, let it go.”
Step 3: The grace period.
“Start to implement habits that help you be the person you scripted about. That could be waking up an hour earlier or checking on your mom more; during this time you're going to give yourself grace to mess up and that's okay. You're learning something new, it's not easy to just get rid of bad habits in an instant. During this period, you're learning how to fail and keep going.”
Step 4: Create your digital vision board.
“Everyone knows how to do this already, but I personally like to create my vision board in Pinterest. I title [each section] by the themes of my script, and I save quotes and images that align with what I see in my brain.”
Step 5: Get ready for launch day.
“At this point, you've worked really hard to set the foundation for the rest of your life, so it's time to celebrate. I picked my birthday [as my launch day] because I like to make a big deal out of it—but this can be any day you like. This is not something you have to share with others, it can be a celebration of you and this new journey that you've committed to.”
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Featured image by Delmaine Donson/Getty Images
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