If you want to know how to become a feng shui practitioner then my book is for you. I’m excited to announce that Yin Yang and Prosper: How to Create a Thriving Feng Shui Practice, has been published on Amazon and through Draft2Digital books. It’s available as an e-book and print-on-demand paperback for your e-reader or bookshelf.  (Those of you who’ve heard me speak at workshops or classes know that in the feng shui world we pronounce yang like it rhymes with song, not sang!  Now, trying saying that title again out loud: Yin Yang and Prosper!)

A call to action.

The book was inspired by a retreat focused on how to create and run a heart-centered business. Most of the attendees were feng shui practitioners like me, but several were starting their own organizing businesses or therapeutic health practices. I spoke about marketing and quickly realized that everyone wanted more information on how to get established, how to find clients, how to stay energized and how to hone their services. I answered this call to action by writing a book about how to become a feng shui practitioner — or any heart-centered entrepreneur — by using my own practice as the blueprint.

I used my own practice as the blueprint.

As readers of my blog know, I have been offering residential and commercial feng shui consulting services, teaching workshops, and writing about feng shui through my Denver-based business, Thriving Spaces Feng Shui, since 2009.  Using my consulting practice and experience as a guide, I structured the book around the feng shui Bagua—a tool practitioners use to balance, organize, and enhance areas of their homes and offices to create a more balanced, organized, and enhanced life.  The book covers all aspects of creating a heart-centered business, from defining your mission and creating your brand to selecting essential marketing tools and deciding which services to provide. Yin Yang and Prosper: How to Create a Thriving Feng Shui Practice is a book about how to create a heart-centered practice as an entrepreneurial journey of abundance, harmony, and joy.

Thrilled and grateful to be endorsed!

I’m thrilled and grateful that my mentor and colleague, Terah Kathryn Collins of the Western School of Feng Shui™ in Solano Beach, California, enjoyed and endorsed my book.  She is also an internationally recognized consultant, speaker, teacher, and best-selling author of several books on feng shui.  About Yin Yang and Prosper: How to Create a Thriving Feng Shui Practice, Collins says, “This book is pure gold! Now, Feng Shui practitioners and independent consultants have the template and expert guidance they need to create and enjoy a professional practice. Lorrie’s business acumen and pure generosity light up every page with clear, concise, step-by-step advice on manifesting a successful practice that harmonizes with your goals and lifestyle. Yin Yang and Prosper: How to Create a Thriving Feng Shui Practice will be your go-to reference book for years to come!”

Contact me if you want to learn more about the book or get the book on Amazon or through this link to other booksellers.

While you’re prepping for the holidays stop a moment and give yourself the gift of envisioning your year ahead.  Sign up for a vision board workshop to help you envision, then manifest a fabulous 2020.

You can:

• Sign up today for your 2020 Vision Board workshop (see dates, times and locations below) by emailing me: lwgrillo@thrivingspaces.com.
• Host your own vision board workshop for employees, clients, friends and/or family. Contact me for more information or read more here.
• Take the workshop on your own this year, by registering for my online version of this workshop called Create A Vision Board That Works Using Feng Shui.  Learn more here.  Register here.

Two workshops to choose from in Denver:

Sunday, 1/5/20 Schlessman Family Library, 1^st & Quebec St., Denver, CO, 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Sunday, 1/19/20 Lowry Print & Ship, Lowry Town Center, Denver, CO, 1 – 4 PM

The title of this year’s workshop is Communicate and Co-Create because a vision board is about transformation. It’s about listening to a calling deep inside to transform yourself and your year.  Who makes a Vision Board? Anyone who wants to envision their future, seeks clarity, and is brave enough to ask for what they want.

A Vision Board is a collection of images that represents the hopes, goals, and dreams you have for your future, often created around the New Year. The images are mounted on a poster board and hung in a place that you can see every day. Vision Boards are proactive, intentional, and fun. And, best of all, they work!

We will use Feng Shui organizing principles — the Bagua, Five Elements and Yin/Yang balance — to design and make our boards. With Feng Shui guiding us, we will make sure to balance our visions with work, rest, and play.

The workshop includes materials (including your board, scissors, tape, glue and extra magazines) but attendees are encouraged to bring their own folder of images.  Upon registering, each attendee will receive a how-to-get-started list, an FAQ and payment instructions.  You must register in advance for this workshop.  Registration is $30 through 12/31/19, $35 after 1/1/20. Contact Lorrie Webb Grillo, Thriving Spaces Feng Shui @ lwgrillo@thrivingspaces.com.

Here’s what a Vision Board workshop participant said about the workshop:

I just wanted to drop you a note and thank you so much for the opportunity to attend your Vision Board workshop!  I have not been so excited or inspired about co-creating the life I want for myself in such a long time.  I have not used my imagination in that way in a long time and came home and finished my Board.  You were absolutely wonderful in leading the workshop and I so much appreciated the context and background you shared on creating a vision board. 

Sue, Workshop Attendee

Register for the workshop of your choice by emailing lwgrillo@thrivingspaces.com — be sure and specify which workshop you’d like to attend.

Host your own private vision board workshop

If you are interested in hosting a private Vision Board workshop for your employees, clients, friends, book group, work colleagues or fellow board members, just contact me.  I like to have a minimum of 10 participants.  You choose the place and I come to you!

Take my online vision board course

Can’t make the above dates?  Take my online course on your own time schedule.  Here’s what one online workshop registrant said about the course:

I love this course!  Great content!  It ended up being an amazing exercise that everybody should do.  Before going through the course and having to work on my board, I thought it would be just a fun activity.  What I realized is that this is a powerful and eye-opening exercise as you face different areas of your life and hard questions to answer.  Do it! You’ll learn important things!

Andi, online workshop registrant.

Learn more about my online course here.

I can’t wait to help you create and manifest a magical, magnificent year ahead!  If you have any questions, just email me:  lwgrillo@thrivingspaces.com.

I love my clients! They are a perfect fit for me, and I for them. It is such a pleasure and a privilege to work with them and I am grateful for them everyday. Just who, you may be wondering, are they? And, what makes them so perfect? 

I believe we attract the people we want in our lives by being very clear about who they are and what we have in common. If we want to intentionally draw to us what we need and want, we have to be able to articulate what that is. I have been drawing my perfect customers into my life and business in the past few years. It’s not magic, even though it sometimes feels like it, but it does take intention and practice.

I learned how to do this with help from the book Attracting Perfect Customers, by Jan Hall and Stacey Brogniez. It’s a good and interesting read, but an even greater handbook on how to actually attract your perfect customer or client. The caveat? You have to do the work in the tasks outlined at the end of each chapter. If that sounds like “homework,” you’re right. In fact, I read this book through a couple of times thinking how brilliant it was but I didn’t do the exercises. Those perfect clients did not show up. No surprise. But then I did my “homework,” which BTW is really fun to do, and the clients started emailing and calling me.

I’m not going to tell you everything in the book (that’s for you to find out!) but I will share with you one of the assignments, that has become part of my morning ritual of intentionally “calling” my perfect clients into my life everyday. This exercise asks you to write out all the things that you have in common with your perfect clients. Because I don’t know you – yet – I have to describe you! And, because we humans like to work with people who share common beliefs and values a lot of those descriptors are about the values we share. This is the shorthand to find people who are comfortable with each other, and speak the same language. I am not talking about surface things – where you went to school, where you grew up, what you drive. That doesn’t matter at all in this relationship. I’m speaking about motivation and inspiration. Please understand that there is no judgment involved in creating your list. We are all unique souls looking for connections – one common value is no better than another.

Here is what my perfect clients and me share:

We know and believe that change is possible through learning something new and applying it to your life. We create our lives through our visions, thoughts and actions.

Are you my perfect client? Here’s how I would describe you:

Why do you get up in the morning? Because

• you have a passion and purpose for your life
• you are a seeker
• you believe that your thoughts and actions make a difference
• you are grateful for another day

Who is the most important person/s in your world?

• family
• friends
• your own client or customer base

What is most important to you?

• kindness in your family, your work and in the world
• creating value with your life – either raising your families and/or through your work
• seeking a higher path – harmony and balance over strife and “being right”
• creating your own happiness and “luck”
• achieving your goals with integrity

What do you want to achieve before you leave this world?

• raising good people (if you have children)
• being responsible for your thoughts and actions
• teaching others by example
• providing valuable service through your work and receiving abundant compensation for it
• kindness to others and yourself

What do you really love about your life?

• having an opportunity to be here, now and make a difference
• your family
• our beautiful planet
• giving and receiving positivity and hope
• creating peace and prosperity for anyone who seeks it

Do you see yourself in this list? If so, please call, email or FB message me and introduce yourself! I want to know you. And, if the time is right for you, it would be my privilege to share feng shui with you and help you experience whatever shifts in your life that new, positive energy could bring. In the meantime, join my mailing list here so that you are aware of classes (live and online) or speaking engagements and other treats that I have coming up.

Let’s connect and find out if we are a fit.

There are many ways to create a vision board. Find one that inspires you.

There are many ways to make a vision board. You can tag and curate photos from Pinterest and create one on their app. There are software programs now that will help you create one on any of your devices. I’ve seen examples of people who have created multi-media vision boards with photos and video and scrolling text that they can pull up and play whenever. There is a way out there for you to create a vision board in any medium and form you like!

The key is to find one that will work for you. And, by “work for you” I mean it helps you to successfully manifest your visions!

Feng shui principles can power up your vision board.

The key that has worked for me, and my clients, is using feng shui principles to organize their vision boards.

As a feng shui practitioner, I use the principles and practices of this ancient Chinese design and placement philosophy and program – the Bagua, the 5 Elements, and yin/yang balance — to help my clients reach their goals by arranging their environments to support them. I use those same principles and practices to help my vision board workshop attendees arrange their vision boards to help them manifest their dreams.

We start our organization with the Bagua, which identifies areas of our lives and locates them in space. The Bagua areas for each of us are:

• the journey (can be a career, life’s work or current activity)
• self-knowledge and learning
• health and family connections
• wealth and prosperity
• fame and reputation
• love and marriage
• creativity and children
• connecting with others (helpful people) and travel

And they are organized in space like this:

Your life is a multi-faceted jewel! Honor and balance it.

The Bagua helps us to place images that represent our life areas in the correct placement on the board. This helps us to intentionally honor and balance our dreams and create vision boards that are not just focused on one area of life, like a job or a romance. The board literally shows you that your life is multi-faceted, like the beautiful jewel that it is. And when we balance and harmonize all areas of our lives, we often find that the goals we hope to achieve in one area begin to manifest. This makes sense. If we get too focused on one aspect of life, a job, for instance, doesn’t something often fall through the cracks?

When we remember to be ourselves and balance our lives with work, rest and play, usually things work out. Countless books and movies express my point here. Working Girl is one of my favorites. Shy but brilliant assistant, Tess (played by Melanie Griffith) doesn’t get the big job until she starts being herself. She allows herself to enjoy the process and fall in love with Jack, (Harrison Ford) who’s already fallen in love with her. OK, you get this.

In addition to the organization of the vision board around the Bagua, I also recommend balancing the board with a variety of color, in both light and dark, and different shapes. Some folks love a vision board that has picture overlapping picture and others like space between their images.This is a personal choice. I like a board that is big enough to capture all your dreams.  I recommend a 20” x 30” (at least) vision board on a rigid poster board that you can place around your home or office to find just the right space to put it so you’ll engage with it every day. (See an example here.)

This one action is crucial.

The last and arguably most important key for how to make a vision board that works is actually looking at every day. Yep, soak up those selected images that represent your dreams, revel in them and enjoy your creation. This act alone is important because you are changing the neural pathways in your mind while you’re looking at your board. You are feeding those dreams directly into your brain, whose job is it to figure out how to make them come to life.*

Now that your board is finished, place it in an area where you’ll see it and engage with it every day. I like to stand in front of mine in what author Amy Cuddy (Presence, Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges) calls the Power Position. You may know this stance from yoga as Star pose: arms raised and reaching up and out, feet apart for support, head held high and straight ahead, focused on your masterpiece. Now that’s engagement with your board!

One of my dreams every year is to share the powerful organizing principles of feng shui and help my workshop attendees to use them to create and complete their vision boards for the year.

*For a wonderful explanation about how the brain works to do this read John Assarof and Murray Smith’s excellent book The Answer, Chapter 4, The Universe inside Your Brain. Yep, this is the same John Assarof you may have met when reading The Secret (or watching the film) who tells the story about manifesting his beautiful new home from his vision board.

Looking for a different way to plan and manifest a great future? Read on.

Are you a planner extraordinaire, or a goal setter and realizer, or maybe even a resolution-maker and keeper? Good for you! Have you ever done a vision board? A vision board is different than making resolutions or setting goals. Most of us have planned, set goals and made resolutions before. We have the lists to prove it! And, even if we plan, set goals and make resolutions, sometimes plans fall apart, our goals are not realistic, and our resolutions just peter out. (Witness the echo in a fitness club in February.) If our plan, goal or resolution doesn’t look like the end we had in mind, we feel bad or defeated. Worse, we compare ourselves to others and the whole process can make us feel hopeless. And we start again the next year, sometimes even by writing out the very same plans, goals and resolutions on our lists! Ouch.

Looking for a different way to plan and manifest a great future? Read on.

A vision board is a powerful picture of the year ahead.

Scheduling plans, setting goals and making resolutions are all great strategies for organizing your life and making things happen. I know that they are crucial in business and life. I encourage you to do what works for you – any or all of them! But they aren’t the only way to envision and experience the future, particularly your best future. A vision board is another way of looking at your year and it doesn’t include making to-do lists or creating Excel files or calendars that need to be updated. A vision board is visual, not verbal; artistic, not data-driven; hopeful, not admonishing — and once completed is so unique it cannot be compared to anyone else’s life!.

If I ask you which comes first, the vision board or the plan, goal or resolution, the answer is hands down: the vision board. It is your over-arching picture of your year that inspires you to take action. And that action might be to make plans, set goals and even, if you must, make resolutions.

The difference is in the definition, and your brain.

These different tools that help you think about your future work with different areas of your brain (and one works with your heart). Let’s look at their differences by starting with their definitions:

Definition of a New Year’s Resolution (from Cambridge Dictionary.org): a promise that you make to yourself to start doing something good or stop doing something bad on the first day of the year.

Definition of a plan (from Oxford Living Dictionary): a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something.

Definition of goal setting (from Your Dictionary.com): the process of identifying something that you want to accomplish and establishing measureable goals and timeframes. Goal setting is a process that starts with careful consideration of what you want to achieve and ends with a lot of hard work to actually do it.

Definition of a vision board (from English Oxford Living Dictionaries.com): a collage of images and words representing a person’s wishes or goals, intended to serve as inspiration or motivation. (Read my definition here.)

Here’s the thing: humans are predominately visual creatures. More than one third of our brain is devoted to processing visual information. This is far more than that devoted to understanding sound, smell, language and movement!* Vision boards use pictures; plans, goals and resolutions use words and data and much too often, pounds (as in desired weight lost).

If you want to create something new in your life,  get creative, and put those dreams on a vision board so you can actually SEE them. That’s what vision boards do differently than planning, setting goals or making resolutions.

* Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep, Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams