ABC's of Money with Alan Akina - Lesson 8: How to Build Your Own Dream Board

Good morning or good afternoon, everyone. Uncle Alan here with another edition of the ABCs of Money. Welcome back. Lesson number 8 today, which is called How to Build a Dream Board. This is gonna be really fun. It's gonna be exciting. This will be an activity. That you can do with your parents. Now, your projects. I had 2 projects for you. The first project was to research your number one dream school. What is your number one dream school? The second project that I gave you is to research a career of your choice. With that being said, I appreciate all of the entries that we have for— 2022. Our stockpile gift cards. Okay, we're giving out stockpile gift cards every week. These are $25 gift cards to go and buy stock. Okay, so we buy stock, not stuff. Remember that. Now, for today's winner here on Facebook, we have a cute, cute little girl. Her name is Genesis Diaz. Genesis has her her charts here, and I'm gonna show it to you. Genesis, make sure your parents message me with your email. Now we're going to jump into how to build a dream board, lesson number 8. Now, remember that movie Space Jam? Well, the theme song is like one of my all-time favorite songs. In fact, you should look it up on YouTube later today. It's, it's by R. Kelly and it's called I Believe I Can Fly. And that is what we're going to talk about today. That's the foundation of of the dream board is based on that. So I want you to write these words down, okay? From this is from the song "I Believe I Can Fly." If I can see it, then I can do it. If I just believe it, there's nothing to it. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So number one. Number one, what is a dream board? Okay, so a dream board is basically— I'll show you a couple examples here— it's basically a collage of pictures, typically like material things. Okay, so these are things like maybe houses or cars, or, uh, here's my, my 4-year-old's You know, things that you can visualize. Okay. And they could be experiences as well. Maybe you want to go on a trip. I have a son that put a safari on there or he wants to go to a certain golf course. So these are things that we can get you to see. You're going to put this collage together. Okay. Could be spiritual things. I had some of my kids put some spiritual things or they put their future family in there. What, how many kids they'd want to have. And so these are all things that you're going to Be able to foresee in your future. Okay. Now, I want— when we talk about building a dream board, this is where you let your mind wander and put no restrictions on it. Okay? No restrictions, no limitations on your mind. Let it open up. Okay. And that collage of pictures will start to make sense. Why? Because it's you. This is your dream board. Not your parents, not your brother or your sister. It's custom made for you. And that's what we're going to do today. We're going to make a custom dream board for you. Now, the second thing, why do you need a dream board? So I want you to write this word down. Okay? It's called visualization. Visualization is one of the most powerful things that you all have. So visualization is being able to imagine things, to see things in your mind, to create emotions and feelings when you start to visualize things. Now, these emotions can be created because of the power of your mind, which we're going to talk about in a little bit. Okay. So visualization is the key. And here's the thing. Probably everybody uses visualization every day. Unfortunately, most people use it for the wrong thing. Why? What do I mean by that? So instead of visualizing being happy, having a great life, being able to go to this college, right? Some of you put University of Hawaii, great school, right? Instead of visualizing having a great life there, Most people are saying, "I'm not smart enough to get in. I can't do that." Oh, I'm not. I'm too dumb to get here to go here, or because I come from a small island, I can't do this. So most people are visualizing bad things, negative things, things that aren't good. So guess what happens? The power of visual visualization actually works. Because what they start to envision for themselves starts to come true. And that happens every single day all around us. But there's some people that learn this technique, visualization, early on, and they use it for positive things— to be successful in life, to be a great student, to be a great athlete, to be a great business owner, or to be a great mom or dad. They're visualizing these things. Professional athletes do this all the time. In fact, most major colleges have like sports psychologists to help people train just their mind. These athletes just to train their mind and to help them to visualize things. So visualization is very, very important, kids. And so I want to give you a formula for visualization. Okay? Very, very simple. And it has to do with my song. So the first step is you have to see it. Once you see it in your mind, then you'll start to believe it, and then you'll go and do it. You see, for almost 100% of things, if you can't see it in your mind, like see yourself doing that, if you can't see yourself getting an A on the next test, if you can't see yourself, if you play basketball, hitting that 3-pointer, Then you're not going to believe it. And it's not just going to happen when you go on the court or go on the field. You have to be able to see it here. Then you will believe it. And once you start to believe it, you get confidence. Then you're going to have a greater chance of doing it. So this is the basic formula. There's more to it behind the scenes, and we'll talk a little bit about it, but very simple formula: see it, believe it, and do it. And now number three, we're going to lock it in. So what is locking in? So we're going to repeat. So we're going to repeat the process. Okay, you're going to repeat seeing it, believing it, and then you're going to do it. And you're going to repeat this over and over and over again. And that is why we have a dream board. Because the dream board is going to give you access to being able to see those things that you want to achieve in life every single day. That is how you lock it in your mind. So I want to talk about the power of your mind. So write this down, kids. The power of your mind. I'm going to teach you a new word. It's called neural plasticity. Neural plasticity. Okay, kids, I know some of you are young. You might not understand that. Okay, but what's happening right now is in your brain when you start to do something. Okay, so let's say you visualize yourself getting an A on your final For this year, okay? So you're going to visualize it. You're going to see it. You're going to see it over and over. You're going to practice it every single day. You're going to repeat it every single day. I'm going to get A. I'm going to get A. I'm going to get A. And you're doing all the work behind it. Then you'll start to believe it. And once you start to train your mind to do that, in your brain there's these neurons and things in your brain that start to create a pathway, and they start to get stronger and stronger and stronger. So you're working out your brain to get to where you have an A. Or if you're a basketball player, you're working on that jump shot. Okay, if you do it over and over and you're visualizing it going in, in your brain it's creating these pathways. It starts to become stronger and the pathway becomes more clear. That's called neuroplasticity. So I'll give you 2 examples. For those of you that are young kids, remember when you first started riding a bike how hard that was? I remember my kids, these are my kids, like, oh, boom, fall down. Okay, let's go again. Ride again, ride again. Boom, fall. It was scary. We were shaky. We couldn't balance. We couldn't, we couldn't balance and pedal at the same time. But after a couple of weeks of doing that and falling down and trying, getting up and doing it over and over and over again, you start to believe. Once you went, you went 5 feet, you went 10 feet, then you went 20, 30, 40, 50 feet down the, down the sidewalk. Then you started to believe it. Then you start to do it more. Why? Because you're, you're creating neuroplasticity in your mind. You're strengthening these pathways to do things. Now you ride a bike, no problem. You jump on it, boom, you're gone. That's the power of your mind. And we're going to strengthen your mind today. Okay, so let's start to build. Okay, kids, let's start to build a dream board. And I brought my daughter Keeley, who is fantastic at this. So she's going to help you today. Hi. And she's going to walk you through building a dream board. Okay, so what's the first thing we need?

A poster board.

So we need a poster board. So you get one like this or maybe a little bigger.

Um, papers of like stuff that you'd want to put on your poster board.

So you— so what, what you're going to do is you're going to print things out, right? Print out a car, print out your school logo that you want to go to, that college. Okay, so So that way you don't need magazines. You just need to print stuff out. You can print anything out in this world, anything that comes to your mind. Okay, so Keely printed out a few things. So what do you do with those things now?

We glue it on. We cut them out and we glue them on the poster board.

Okay, so let's glue one of them on. So you start to assemble this and then what happens is you end up building a dream board. Let's see your other board. And this is what Keely made the other night.

I want to live in Hawaii and I want to be a photographer, and this is my dream car, Ferrari.

You let me borrow that car? Okay, so you see how Keely just came up with this and she made it really nice and pretty, and now she's going to put it where?

In my room.

You put it in your room. Okay, so let's give Keely a big hand, kids. Give her a round of applause. Thank you very much, Keely. Appreciate that. Good job. Okay, so first thing you need is poster board, right? Just to review, you need poster board. Next, you're going to need to— you're going to need to print, print out your things that you want, right? You're going to print those things out. Then you're going to glue it, glue it up, and then you're going to decorate it. So you can put glitter, you can, you can write things on it. And then what I want you to do on the back of your dream board, is put your signature and the date that you built that board. Okay? And this is, this is a really cool family activity. So we did this the other night with all of our kids, and then after they were done, we had them do number 6, which was share their board. So very similar to what Keely did for you today. We did that with each of our kids and we talked about what they wanted to do and what they wanted to accomplish. And we weren't laughing or teasing each other because this is a custom board made for each Of you. Okay? So this is what you see in your future. Here's the thing. This visualization stuff, the dream stuff really works in several ways. Number one, it gets you to open up your mind. It gets you to take off those limitations that we as humans can put on ourselves because we think we're not good enough. Now, I built my first dream board. Get this, in 1999. How long ago was that? Because that is like so— I'm like so old. Okay. 1999. And one of the things I put on my board— I had a bunch of things— one of the things I put on there was Ink 500. So it was a magazine called Ink 500. I didn't even have my own company at that time. 101 wasn't even started until late 2002. But by 2009, so exactly 10 years from the date that I built my board, 101 Financial became Hawaii's second company to ever hit the Inc. 500 list. 70% of what I put on that board became a reality. It is just crazy what can happen when you visualize things, when you let your mind— the mind is the most powerful thing that you have, kids. And if you use that, you let it go and, and don't let anything shrink your mind or hurt your mind. I'm going to leave you with this. Okay? Surround yourself with positive people. Okay? Positive people. Why? Because we can use visualization for good or bad. We can visualize great things happening in our life, or we can visualize bad things. And when you're around positive people, you tend to visualize more great things. When you're around negative people— when I say negative, these are people that complain a lot, They don't believe in your dreams. They talk down to you. They don't challenge you to do better. Those are not the kind of people you want to be around. Those could be family, could be friends. Now, we love them for, for who they are, but we have to realize that those types of people don't encourage your dreams. That's who you want to surround yourself with, is positive, positive people. Okay, so in closing, keywords today. Visualization. Remember that visualization, being able to imagine things and see it in your mind. Okay. Visualization. And then, of course, neuroplasticity. Remember that neuroplasticity is just practicing something over and over and over again, repeating that in your mind. So you build up strong pathways, just that muscle in your, your brain becomes stronger. So that thing that you're trying to do becomes easier and easier and easier. Everything you will do will start out hard, but as you do it over and over and over again and you see the formula— remember the formula? You have to see it, then you believe it, then you could do it. And that is the power of having a dream board. It's as simple as a couple sheets of paper can literally change the course of your, your financial life and your Your life in general. Okay, so in closing, I'm going to give you a couple assignments. Here's your financial projects. Okay, just one thing: build a board. Get your boards out, print stuff up on your computer, and have that ready. Then I want you to tag Uncle Alan. Okay, and put the hashtags money ABCs and hashtag one on financial. You can do that right here on Facebook. And again, folks, thank you for being on. I'm wishing you the best. Be safe, be healthy. God bless you all, and I'll see you on Thursday. Aloha.