Visioning® through Collage and Non-Dominant Hand Writing

In my book Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams, I present my method of life and career creation, which I originated and share in my private coaching practice. The Visioning® process includes the making of collage Vision Boards followed by Creative Journal writing to remove blocks and deepen one’s understanding of the images. Almost all of the writing prompts involve using the non-dominant hand or both hands alternately.

I have observed that we all have natural intuitive abilities to sense what is coming next in our lives. We have hunches or premonitions. We may even have a nocturnal dream that plays itself out in our daily life. This intuitive ability is often buried inside our heart’s desire, which is the core of Visioning®. That is what we are illustrating with our Vision Board. Intuition and the ability to sense the future can be developed with a combination of collage work and non-dominant handwriting. By writing dialogues with the images and words in the Vision Board, we often find much deeper meaning in the visuals than we ever imagined when we tore them out of the magazine. In reviewing our Vision Boards a few weeks or months down the line, we frequently find images and words that are specifically prophetic about what was to come.

A great example is my Vision Board for 2019 and how it manifested.

When I started putting this six-panel Vision Board together in January of last year, I was thinking about a spring and summer book tour for The Power of Your Other Hand. I knew I would be going all over California as well as Texas and New Mexico. Two panels show southwestern scenes as well as seaside areas near where I live on the central coast. That all made perfect sense. It was already part of the “plan.”

I also had some thoughts about a possible vacation later in the year in a favorite spot on the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. People having fun on beaches and in swimming pools conveyed that idea, as well as couples dining out. Again, it all made perfect sense.

However, as the process of selecting photos and words for the Vision Board evolved, I found myself including other images that, quite frankly, surprised me. But they “felt right” and I knew I had to include them. One was the image of Helen Mirren, one of my favorite actresses, along with the words.

 Love who you see in the mirror
Look closer and you’ll see
Renewal happens
Get brighter eyes in a blink
See for yourself
Just as you imagined

In an adjacent section of the collage there is a woman and little girl painting and a palette with many colors. At the time, the palette seemed very important to me, but I wasn’t sure why. I hoped I would be able to do more painting just for fun in the new year, although I didn’t know when I’d find time for that. There were also images of gardens and gardeners in a nearby section. I took that to mean that my garden, especially my pride and joy - iris garden - would flourish this year.

I did go on the book tour, as shown in the Vision Board, which was very successful and most enjoyable. And we did go on a short getaway on the central coast and a longer one in Cabo San Lucas, also shown on the Vision Board. No surprise there. But wait, there’s more!

New eyes

In the spring after I made this Vision Board, at a regular check-up with my optometrist, I was told I needed to have cataracts removed. When I made the collage I never anticipated needing cataract surgery. I got the surgery, which was highly successful, and no longer need distance glasses, only glasses for reading and computer work. After revisiting my collage, the words in the first panel I did took on a whole new meaning.

Love who you see in the mirror (I can literally see myself better in the mirror now.)

Look closer and you’ll see (I no longer need distance glasses, and only have glasses for reading and computer work.)

Renewal happens (I can see color in a way I hadn’t for years: without the yellowish caste that cataracts cause.)

Get brighter eyes in a blink (The surgery was painless and fast, each eye done a week apart.)

See for yourself (I am amazed at my “new eyes”.)

Probably the most amazing aspect of cataract surgery for me was the new intensity of color. Without realizing it over the years, white had become yellowish, blue had become dull and greenish, purples looked maroon, and reds looked brownish. I felt like a I had a new wardrobe. Certain articles of clothing were very different in hue than I thought when I bought them. Get brighter eyes in a blink became a reality, in the sense that I got brighter colors in a blink.

And that brings us to the image of the color palette in the collage. Here’s what I wrote about color in my journal while reviewing my Vision Board on April 8, after the surgery:

New eyes, new colors,
New blues, new reds, new purples, new whites, new pinks.

One day while driving around town on errands and marveling at how blue the sky was, I found myself singing the old song, “On a clear day you can see forever.” I hadn’t really seen the true color of the sky and white clouds for quite a few years, it seems. With my non-dominant hand I did a lot of journaling with and about my “new eyes” and what I was seeing. Without realizing it, all those words about seeing had been a preview of coming attractions,

The artist within

Based on the prophetic images in my collage, there was another surprise in store. In the spring I heard about some masters of Chinese Brush Painting who were coming to our area. I immediately registered for classes and workshops with them. This was the manifestation of the image of the woman and girl painting together.

Why is the girl there? I had wondered, when I selected the image. Why not just the woman? As it turned out, taking these art classes took me back to when I began studying art in the 8th grade at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles on Saturdays. My collage really reflected this experience of being a novice in this particular genre of art. As a teenager I had discovered Japanese and Chinese brushes, and I have painted with them all my life (see my earlier post on Zenga Art). However, I had never taken formal instructions in how to use these particular types of brushes. Nor did I know much about Chinese art. These traditional techniques of Chinese painting were new to me. So I did feel like that 8th grader starting all over again.

A new garden design

In relation to the garden section of my collage, we had another surprise in the spring. This one wasn’t pleasant at all. When the irises started blooming, they were eaten by wild bunnies invading our property from the nearby pine forest. They were chewing on the stems and destroying some of the plants. In all my years of growing irises, this had never happened before. I was beside myself about the damage these bunnies were doing. We sprayed the plants, powdered them with cayenne pepper, and tried every deterrent on the market. All to no avail.

 So we redesigned and rearranged the placement of some of the plants, and built a fence to protect them. As pictured in the collage, we did do lots of gardening in 2019, but not the kind we had anticipated. I’m happy to say that most of the plants survived and we are looking forward to a “renewal” in the spring.

If you are interested in learning this process, contact me about one-on-one Visioning® Coaching via Skype.

Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams by Lucia Capaccchione (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000)

VisioningCoach.blogspot.com

Lucia

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Mapping Your Ideal Career: Guidance From Your Other Hand

As an art and expressive arts therapist, I did career work for years with private clients who needed help with career and life direction. Some of them had done Inner Child work with me and benefited greatly. They had healed many of the wounds of childhood and removed blocks to listening to their true heart’s desire. They had learned how to confront their Inner Bully, the self-critical thoughts in their own mind that had inflicted low energy and sometimes depression. Armed with these tools, they were ready to move on with their lives.

The first step was to listen to their true heart’s desire about the life and career they truly wanted. I included those exercises in Chapter 3 of The Power of Your Other Hand. These journal prompts involve answering back to the Critic and standing up on behalf of one’s heart’s desire in the face of blocks such as perfectionism, pessimism, self-doubt, and pressure from within to perform.

I later taught them the Visioning® process, which is the focus of my book: Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams (Tarcher/Putnam 2000). This involves creating a collage of one’s true heart’s desire, often called a vision board. This is followed by journaling with inner blocks and dialoguing with images in the collage using the non-dominant hand to allow the pictures to speak.

In using the Visioning® process in job and career development we start with a focus phrase that represents the true heart’s desire. It might be something like “getting paid to do what I love to do,” “being creative and enjoying my work,” or “loving what I do, doing what I love.” This focus phrase becomes the title of the collage or vision board and provides the hook on which picture selections are made. In finding images and words in magazines, or in one’s own photo collection, the question we ask is “does it illustrate my focus phrase?” If not, it gets tossed or saved for another collage.

What makes the Visioning® process different from techniques like “treasure mapping” or simply making a vision board is the journaling. We dialogue with the images using the non-dominant hand to speak for people, places and objects that appear in the collage. In right-hand left-hand interviews the dominant hand asks questions and the non-dominant hand answers for whichever image is being focused on. The levels of meaning that emerge from these images are nothing short of amazing. My clients and students report that they had no idea what the true meaning of these images were in their lives until they began giving them a voice through journaling. Many have commented that is was a lot like doing dream work because they were exploring areas of their creative unconsciousness that they were not in touch with before. For example, dialoguing with the image of a personal hero often brings deep inner guidance and encouragement for the individual embarking on a new career direction or project. People’s lives are often transformed in the process of engaging with their collages through journaling with their non-dominant hand.

This process has worked effectively in corporate and organizational settings such as schools, business, and industry. For example, in 1983 I was hired to do career development work for Walt Disney Imagineering, the division responsible for designing and building Disney theme parks and retail stores. I was asked to work with the creative division in the company where hundreds had been laid off after Epcot and Tokyo Disneyland were completed. The company brought in outplacement consultants to assist these recently terminated employees with career development and job finding skills.

In my work with these creative individuals, I suggested the idea of creating vision boards. The technique attracted them and was helpful in their career transition. Many of them started new businesses or went into entirely new fields of endeavor.

After 8 months of doing outplacement work I proposed an "in placement career development program" for the survivors of this traumatic experience. I was hired to offer weekly sessions and one-on-one consulting with managers and staff. My program lasted for 10 years in which we constantly created new programs for changing needs. Our goal was to maximize creativity, and I introduced Visioning® and dialoguing with the non-dominant hand in many workshops for managers and staff. The division not only survived layoffs, but also built back up to several thousand employees in 10 years. Imagineering came back to life, built EuroDisneyland and California Adventure at the Anaheim Disneyland, and created the Disney retail stores during my time there.

The woman who brought me into Disney, the late Peggy Val Pelt, and I worked together the whole time at Imagineering to create programs that were relevant for each stage of new growth after the 1982-83 lay-offs. We trained managers and oriented new hires to the work and culture of Imagineering. We went on to co-author Putting Your Talent to Work: Identifying, Cultivating and Marketing Your Natural Talents (HCI, 1998) in which I first introduced the Visioning® technique. I went on to author Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams, and more recently 2 workbooks: The Talent Workbook and Talent2Work for youth (field tested in our local middle and high school).

Please visit VisioningCoach.org for more information on the Visioning® process, and a list of trained, certified coaches using my methods.Visioning® Coach Training is a graduate course open only to Certified Creative Journal Expressive Arts Instructors.

Lucia

Let us know what you think of this post in the comments below. Follow us and be updated by email when new blog posts are published.
 
www.luciac.com
www.visioningcoach.org
Order The Power of Your Other Hand (Conari Press 2019) at Amazon.com