Lucia Capacchione Presents Visioning:: 10 Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams

My first career was as a designer and artist. When I was a freshman at Immaculate Heart College, I was introduced to the films of Charles and Ray Eames. By that time, in 1955, Charles was already very well-known for his furniture, but what people don't know is that he was also a really wonderful filmmaker. Having been raised in the industry, I was hooked on films from infancy, but I had never seen films like these. They were fabulous. I wanted to work for the Eames design team.

So, throughout my college career, I did what Shakti Gawain later told me is called visualization. All artists and designers do it, but I was doing it with my life, because I kept visualizing myself at the Eames' Office, and at the Eames' House. Every time I had an opportunity to run errands over there-say to collect stuff they'd borrowed from the Immaculate Heart Folk Art Collection-I'd be down there in a flash, because I wanted to keep experiencing the place. Next thing I knew, I was working in their office during the summer. Now, those jobs were not easy to get, but I know in my heart that besides the fact that I worked very hard under the tutelage of the Sisters of Immaculate Heart, I had very focused intentions and I practiced what all designers practice: I kept seeing in my mind what I wanted to bring about in three-dimensional reality. I did it until it became a habit for me. That is what got me what I wanted.

As a professional artist and designer, I used this technique constantly. I would get an idea for a silk-screen print, I would do a rough mock-up, I would paint the glue on to the silk-screen-which is how you make your stencil-then push the ink through and make 20, 50, or however many prints I needed.

My book discusses the concept of materializing our visions and our dreams in terms of a design process. Everything in this room was designed by somebody who had a thought, and then brought it into physical reality. Many of you in this room have created things-whether it's clothing, or sculpture, or a written report-and, whatever it is, the process is the same.

So, in order to apply it to every area of life, I took the design process and broke it down into ten steps that I learned from mentors like Charles Eames and Buckminster Fuller. In my career, I started out studying with a nun who's most famous piece of work is a postage stamp that says '"Love" on it, and the last big design gig I had was designing theme parks for Disney, which involves every possible design discipline possible.

The first step is to get the vision, and to ask yourself what you want-not what you think you want, or what somebody else wants for you, but what your heart really wants. In design parlance, it is to get your idea. Sometimes the design is presented to you as a problem. Charles Eames did not talk about creativity, but about problem-solving. So, when he was designing a chair, he was thinking about what materials he was going to use, how the chair was going to be produced, how much the production process was going to cost . . . there were many factors involved. The plastic chairs you're sitting in would never have been made if it hadn't been for his innovations. Whether it's an idea for something you want, or a problem that needs to be solved, this process works.

One of my students worked under a hospital manager who was, to put it mildly, emotionally disturbed-a pathological liar, irresponsible, and vicious. One day Marissa came into one of our collage groups and said, "You know, I am so plagued with this manager at work that I can't even deal with my heart's desires." So, she did a collage of chaos, depicting the way things were at work. It had a lot of brushstrokes, little photographs all over the place, phrases about mountains of paperwork and, you know, all this stuff that you hate about work. Since it was her design problem, she felt her task was to look at it first. It's almost like moving into a ratty old house. You've got to do a major remodel. She didn't want to leave the job but she wanted to change it. After the "before" painting, she did another one that related more to her feelings about it. For example, she had pictures of endangered animals, because she felt that she and her fellow workers were in danger of becoming extinct due to the way this manager was operating. Then, in her third collage, she pictured how she wanted things to be. It had beautiful tropical scenes: the ocean and a large lion's face in the lower left-hand corner, representing strength. It was a beautiful, calming collage.

It wasn't long before the staff-without knowing what she was doing-started to pick-up the vibe that things could change. They got together and sent a letter to the corporation that owns the hospital, and to make a long story short, they got the woman removed. The whole place changed. The staff started to work together as a team. Marissa was able to stay in her job, in fact, she said it was fabulous afterwards. She said the miracle was that the staff got worked up to the point where they could take action. Before, they would sit and complain about things, but they would never take the step forward.

You see, if only one person in the group does this kind of process, it can affect everybody at some subconscious level. I've seen it over and over again, and not only in work situations, but in families too.

Another woman came to me and said, "My husband and I would really like to have a child, and we have spent $10,000 on a fertility program for in-vitro fertilization. We've had two tries, and failed both times. We've spent all this money and I only have one more try and . . ." We did some inner child work, and one thing I sensed was her anxiety about getting pregnant or not. Then I left Los Angeles. Three or four years later, when I returned here to do some consulting at the company where she worked, she walked up to me and handed me an out-of-date baby announcement. She had mailed it to my old address, and it had come back. They adopted a child. She said, "I went home and I did the collage, and realized that getting pregnant and biological birth was not the focus, but what I really wanted was to love and raise a child. And when I realized this, everything fell into place."

That's the key point about this work-it can help you to become clear about what you really want, instead of being confused, or mixing up the means with the end. For her, beyond having a child, the real end was simply to have more love in her life.

In fact, what we really want is an experience. Just think about it for a minute. Anything you've ever wanted was because you wanted the experience of it. Once she became clear about the experience she wanted, things started moving very quickly for her.

The mantra in the research phase is, "Grab what grabs you." That's the only rule of thumb. If the photograph or the phrase doesn't have a charge, then your heart is not speaking. It's an electrical charge. Call it chi, call it prana, call it whatever you want-it's creative energy and it gets ignited when you see or hear or feel something that really rings true to you.

But the trouble is, once you've collected all your photographs and phrases, then the inner art critic usually jumps out and says things like, "You don't have any talent. You don't know how to make a collage. Oh, don't put that there. That looks really stupid. You can't have that. Who do you think you are, thinking you're going to get that? Put it in the trash!" When I created the collages that led to my house in Cambria, my inner critic drove me insane. At the time, my father was ill with cancer, and I was doing a lot of work for Disney, so my finances, my family and my personal life were very tied to Los Angeles. Fortunately, however, I have learned to listen to my heart and not ask questions and, especially, not to try to figure out how my desire is going to manifest. That's the key factor here. The things that will happen that bring the opportunities to manifest your dreams are so far-out and weird, you can't even think about them in advance.

So, I went ahead and put the collage up on the wall in my walk-in closet. I saw it when I woke up in the morning, I saw it when I went to sleep, I saw it when I got dressed, I saw it when I went into the filing cabinet in the closet-so I was reinforcing my idea all day and every day. Then my whole life started changing. My father passed away and left me enough money for the down payment, and then a lot of the other work I'd been doing in L.A. started dwindling away. Within five months, I was in escrow on my new house, and I didn't even go looking for it. One day, when I was up in Cambria on unrelated business, I asked a realtor to show me around. We walked into the house, and I said, "Omigod, this is what I've been looking at in the collages."

The house has French doors overlooking a forest, overlooking an ocean, just as I had in the collage. It has a Jacuzzi/bathtub with a window beyond it exactly like the one in the collage. There is a skylight over the French doors, exactly like the one in the collage . . . I could go on and on. There was no confusion. It was like the universe was saying, "This is what you asked for; here it is."

I tell people, "Don't get all left-brain logical and linear when you've done these collages because if you do that, you will probably circumvent the most magical and wonderful and unforeseen ways for your dream to manifest. Get your grubby little hands out of there and let it compute." Charles Eames used to get ideas for things he wanted to do and the next thing you knew, somebody like IBM was knocking on the door and saying, "Oh, we want a training film about X, Y and Z," and it would be exactly what Charles had been thinking about. I've seen it happen a lot of places that I've worked. When you listen to what you truly want, there is a magnetic quality at a very deep psychological level, and it draws to you the opportunities that will allow it to manifest. You don't have to work so hard to bring it about.

However, you do have to put a support system in place, in order to circumvent your inner critic. Every design office that I've ever worked in has absolutely thrived on project teams. When Walt Disney wanted to build Disneyland, the banks wouldn't touch it. They thought he was cuckoo. So he and his brother-and whoever else was on that team-came up with the brilliant idea of getting sponsors. Carnation built a building, which they used for advertising and selling ice cream, and Dow Chemical had an early pavilion and so on and so forth.

A support system will help you through all the self-doubt. I teach people how to do a journal process that lets the critic write in the second person, as if it were a separate individual, which it is, because it's a programmed voice. All the voices that say "no" are learned voices, and we need to separate from them.

The real self is the creative self, the part of us that is going to pull through our divine destiny. One reason why we don't get what we want is that we often aren't clear about what we want. Believe me, when the creative self is speaking to you and you're listening, incredible things happen. I didn't sit down and say, "I want a house now." When I did that collage, my theme was not "house," my theme was, "Creative self, show me the year ahead. I'm open for anything. You just show me. I'm going to grab the pictures that grab me, and you're going show me where I'm headed."

At the same time, you don't have to construct a mental picture of what you want before you start. Personally, I feel that doing the collage work and the visioning posters is much more effective than sitting around, just visualizing . Artists don't do that.. Never. They sit over lunch and draw pictures on their napkins. The first flicker of an idea, they put it down. Make a model, do a blueprint. Make a mock-up. Do something physical. If you want to make something, get your hands busy. So you want to make it? Make it. Do you think artists do affirmations? They do not. Do you think Charles Eames sat around affirming that he was going to design a chair? He didn't sit around with little 3x5 cards all over the house, saying, 'I'm designing a chair.' He was right there in the studio, designing the damn thing.