How I Use Pinterest Boards to Rewire My Brain and Upgrade My Life
Visualisation is a powerful technique that tells your brain what to focus on. By training your brain to filter out the noise, it supercharges the likelihood you’ll achieve your goals.
There’s one tiny life hack I find myself recommending to my personal brand coaching clients and mentees consistently lately - use Pinterest.
Even in personal branding, I’m not one to encourage others into more online apps if they don’t need them. But for me, Pinterest, as of late, has been life-changing.
I’m certainly not new to Pinterest, but I have started using Pinterest in a new way.
I previously pinned away on Pinterest primarily as a never-ending wish list for my love of home design and decor. Pinterest was also my best pal while planning our wedding. It’s the ultimate digital mood board tool for big projects. But, how often do you use Pinterest to supercharge your personal goals?
To be clear, for this blog, I’m not talking about using Pinterest to build your personal brand publicly. But to embrace its potential as a visual search and curation tool.
This is also a powerful place to build your ‘second brain’ as I shared in my previous blog - a place to capture your ideas and information for when your future self can benefit from it. Think of this as the personal knowledge management of your personal brand.
So, let’s dive into my top tips for leveraging Pinterest to build your personal brand in silence:
1. Create vision boards aligned to your goals
Vision boards are psychology meets creativity at its best. It’s a visualisation technique that science suggests amplifies motivation and the likelihood of achieving your goals.
Visualisation in Neuro-linguistics Programming (NLP) argues that the mind can’t distinguish the difference between vividly imagined and real experience. So, detailed visualisation for desired outcomes becomes a form of mental rehearsal. By consistently visualising, you rewire your subconscious to align your thoughts, emotions and behaviours with your goals. The key is detailed visualisation.
A vision board is not a mood board (more on this next). It’s not all for aesthetic appeal and positive vibes. It’s a visual way to tell your brain very clearly what you want it to focus on.
Vision boarding engages your Reticular Activating System (RAS). Your RAS tells your brain what’s important. For example, you might decide there’s a new car you want. You pinpoint the model and colour you’d choose. All of a sudden, you start to see everyone driving it. In reality, the number of people driving your next car likely hasn’t changed - but your brain has. Your brain is filtering the noise so you can focus on your goals.
So, use Pinterest to get your brain to pay attention. Direct your brain’s focus with clear vision boards. I break my annual vision board into sub-boards on Pinterest. For example, why have one picture of yoga on my vision board when I can have a whole suite of yoga power poses to pick from? Or, why pin a picture to remind me to ‘eat healthy’ when I can carefully curate a whole board where healthy eating never looked so good? Whatever it is, pin precisely to achieve your personal goals.
2. Create short-term seasonal Pinterest mood boards
While vision boards are specific, mood boards create a feeling, style or atmosphere.
Like many people, I used to self-diagnose myself with seasonal depression. A summer lover through and through, I was not a winter person. For me, heavy clouds meant a heavy heart. That all changed this year. For the first time, I was thrilled to welcome winter. And was even sad to bid it farewell. I shocked myself. And it was all thanks to Pinterest. It rewired my brain to appreciate the present moment instead of wishing months, and my life, away chasing the summer sun.
Here’s how I did it. Starting on the first day of autumn here in Australia, I created an autumn mood board to embrace the changing season. To appreciate the little pleasures autumn brings. The leafy streets, the switch back to soul-warming Shiraz and more quintessentially autumn pleasures.
I did the same come winter and spring. I pinned the seasonal fruit and vegetables and the food best served in those seasons, inspiration for any festivities that time of the year brings, and reminders for any yearly goals that might have slipped out of my routine.
As I embrace the popular ’12-week year’ mindset over time, my seasonal mood boards naturally evolved into a vision board of sorts too, with specific references for the season.
3. Use Pinterest to conquer the everyday
While vision boarding, mood boarding and goal setting seem to bring out our best selves, the day-to-day grind has a way of bringing us back to reality - or our comfort zone. So, I’ve learned to plan for overcoming adversity - or pinning for it.
In Grant Cardone’s book, The 10x Rule, he outlines the top mistakes in goal setting:
Setting goals too low
Underestimating the actions, resources, money and energy required
Competing not dominating
Underestimating the resilience required
Knowing resilience is the most likely downfall for my goals, I’ve created a board specifically related to mindset. Text-only quotes I can quickly scroll through each morning. Many of these are subconsciously curated as the antidote to the negative voices my current goals may drum up. It’s affirmations made easy.
With the everyday in mind, avoid a set-and-forget approach to your Pinterest boards. Your brain needs to be trained to remember what’s most important. Build scrolling your Pinterest for a few minutes into your routine. It will be time much better spent than scrolling other social media. Plus, your boards will train the algorithm to give you content aligned with your goals. Watch as even your home feed becomes goal-motivating goodness.
Don’t simply write down your goals. Increase your likelihood of success by ensuring your brain has all the right visual cues. So, what will you start pinning?
