Visioning Step 4: Composing the Design

When I am facilitating a Visioning (R) workshop, this is the step where I end up taking someone's glue away.

After all the photos are collected, after the words are in place, now it's time to place the images together on the page. This is designing the composition—and because we are the designers, there is no wrong answer!!! But designing and gluing are two different steps. Here's what Lucia has to say,

In putting your Vision collage together, you'll let your creative conscience lead the way. You'll mix and match individual elements, fitting pictures with words to find meaning. Like Alice in Wonderland, things will mean what you want them to mean. The significance you assign to the pictures will be personal and specific to your heart's desire. When you have the right match, your heart will say, yes. When the pieces of your dream find each other, you will feel it in your body. - page 91, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

Ann Beazer explained it like this in the following excerpt from her letter to Lucia.
(Minor editing for continuity.)

“In the visioning session you led in June 2001 when I first met you-- I recall being so thrilled with my collage - something I had never done before - because it was a pleasure to look at.  That was a break through beyond my inhibitions of drawing or painting.   I realize that I still feel the same today having made dozens and dozens of collages since. Since the invitation to attend that event was from someone who leads a nutritional organization for women I had assumed our June 2001 evening would be about health; not so for me.   The focus phrase of my vision board was My New Future. That evening I immediately decided that I wanted to learn with you - so I took details of your CJEA accreditation and was with you in Cambria in March 2002.  The rest is history as they say!  I have never looked back. I love teaching Creative Journaling and liberating people from all the rules and releasing them from the boredom of writing all the time.”

The wonderful thing about this letter was that Ann actually put Lucia's logo in her collage (image at the top left) before she knew what the Creative Journal logo was.



Ann Beazer's collage: My New Future.


Click here to see Lucia's logo at the top right.

Step Four is about allowing your heart's desire lead the way to the design of your life.

Ann Beazer is a Certified Creative Journal facilitator and Visioning (R) coach.in the United Kingdom.Her core workshops are Creative Journal, Work with Passion, Visioning and Living Well. Each workshop is supported with complete sets of materials to use during the workshop and afterwards. Contact her at ann.beazer@me.com

Dorothy Segovia is the Visioning Coach blog manager and certified  Creative Journal facilitator and Visioning(R) Coach. She specializes in collaging your way through obstacles. Her how-to book with music CD, My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Accidents, is available at www.writeinside.com.

Visioning® Coaching: Support for Dreams Coming True

One-on-One: The Visioning® Coach Process

Rooted in my 30 plus years of work with private clients as well corporate and job outplacement consulting, I've developed a method of one-on-one coaching based on my book, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams. Few things are more exciting than being mid-wife to other people's dreams coming true. Some clients work with me in person. They get to see the fruits of my own personal Visioning®: the very environment I live and work in. Clients who work with me on the phone, use my book which includes the illustrated story of how I Visioned my home and studio and the nearby coastline (see previous blogs). I also have a consortium of Certified Visioning® Coaches I have trained (listed on VisioningCoach.org)

One-on-one Visioning® Coaching always starts with the client making a collage, either at home or in the first double (2 hour) session. Again, coaching is done in person or by phone. Afterward, the client is guided through a simple interview during each session and given assignments to be done during the week between. Sessions are usually a half hour in length in a 13 week series. In these sessions, a certified Visioning® Coach also leads the client through journaling activities, Voice Dialogue, Embodiment exercises, and much more. There is "homework", such as journaling and regular viewing of the collage-as-visual-affirmation for keeping the momentum going. Clients move through the 10 steps described in the book with support and a sense of accountability to themselves.

Tobey Crockett, an artist living in the Cambria area, worked privately with me a couple of years back. As is so common with one-on-one clients, she discovered wonderful surprises and new talents as she engaged in the Visioning® coaching process. Starting with collage-making on her own, she did movement and Voice Dialogue in sessions with me based on images in the collages. This helps to make the dream more physical and open up personality traits and aspects longing to come out in relation to the dream.

At home Tobey did art and writing in her journal with the content of her collages, which led to a delightful series of paintings of her Inner Brat. She has gone on to create 3-D versions of this character as well. The energy and immense outpouring of Tobey's innate creativity was really something to behold. Once she got started, there was no holding her back. This was a whole new direction for Tobey as she discovered her Inner Brat, an aspect of our personalities which we all have but which we often squelch in the name of propriety and convention.

Tobey's celebration of her Inner Brat grew out of my Inner Child Work, which is part of the Visioning® process. The Inner Child work was presented in my bestseller, Recovery of Your Inner Child and brings a playful and creative dimension to Visioning®. And that is the richness and uniqueness of this process: it incorporates so many expressive arts techniques, like the Creative Journal, Voice Dialogue with art, embodiment through role-laying and more. See LuciaC.com for more on the full array of methods. These methods all blend together naturally in the Visioning® coach process. That's why certified Visioning® Coaches are first trained in my Creative Journal Expressive Arts program. In order to help client's find hidden talents and new ideas and directions from the deepest well of creativity and innovation, the coach uses many expressive arts techniques. And this works for everyone. Not just artists and so-called creative people. We are all creative. We just need to tap into what is already there.

When Tobey (in gray in the photo here) joined me in sharing one of her fabulous Brat paintings at a Visioning® Coach Training Intensive, the group was so inspired by her story of discovery and deeper creative expression. For more about Tobey and her work, go to www.tobeycrockett.com.

There is an enthusiasm in the air when people tell about how their fondest dreams came true. You can experience this for yourself. Why not give it a try? You have nothing to lose but the blues. Get more inspiration from the dozens of career change, job and business stories in my book Visioning. (LuciaC.com)