139: Going Beyond In Your Big Thinking Using #FutureBoards with Sarah Centrella

Andrea Liebross: Welcome to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Liebross. Each week, I focus on the systems, strategy, and big thinking you need to CEO your business and life to the next level. Are you ready? Let's go.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I am thrilled to have you here. Today, I'm going to have a conversation with author, speaker, and coach Sarah Centrella. Sarah has written three books. I became familiar with her second book which is called FutureBoards. FutureBoards is a variation of vision boards.

I think way back in the day, I was trying to create a vision board and wanted more direction on it. It wasn't working for me, and I stumbled across her version of vision boards which is very different. I don't even know if it gets you to the same place, I would say it gets you to a place beyond where you are now.

In my series here about thinking big, I thought she was the perfect guest to come on because as you're creating a future board or thinking about what you want your future to be, you must think bigger and beyond where you are right now. At the end of this conversation, I asked her how she defines thinking big and I think the answer she gives is very interesting because I find that it's really hard to do what she says to do in order to think big. We've really got to push past where we are right now and almost wipe it out.

Sit back, buckle up, and listen in to my conversation with Sarah. If you haven't already, I'm going to remind you, go to shethinksbigthebook.com, put your name and email in there, and I'm going to send you the first chapter and intro of my book which is going to be released in September of 2023. It too is going to help you start to think big.

You'll also get a couple of other free goodies including a ticket to my Think Big Insider Session with Author Andrea that helps you go from just being a reader to an implementer in October and you're going to get some weekly emails helping you think big as we approach this book launch. But right now, this is about Sarah and I and our conversation. Sit back, buckle up, and listen in. Here we go.

Hey, Time to Level Up listeners. Welcome back to the podcast. I am thrilled today to have with me Sarah Centrella, I'm going to have her introduce herself, but who I started following probably four or five years ago when I came across her book which is called FutureBoards, one of her books, she has several now, but one of her books called FutureBoards when I was trying to really create a vision board and it wasn't clicking with me.

Of course, I went to the Googles as everybody does and I don't know, up popped her book and that was the beginning. So welcome, Sarah, I am so happy you're here.

Sarah Centrella: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I love that it's coming up on Google.

Andrea Liebross: Yes, there it is.

Sarah Centrella: That's always a great thing. My book FutureBoards came out in 2019 and it was really the culmination I guess of almost 10 years of learning the hacks and the fast track on how to manifest in a very real way. I always say not only has it changed my life, it's changed my kids lives, their future, what we've been able to do as a family.

To give a little bit of background for your listeners, I think probably sharing a little bit of my story helps just to know what we're talking about here, but my story started 14 years ago now, 2008 I guess, time flies, but it started with this really dramatic earthquake moment for me when my life essentially just blew up, hit rock bottom, found out my husband at the time had been living a double life, was having an affair.

We had three little kids, we just foreclosed our house, housing bubble, just gone through bankruptcy, just the worst possible timing for something like this to happen. I had three little babies, hadn't worked in two years, just add the list up, not a dollar to my name, on and on.

In that super, super black moment was really where I had this whatever you want to call it, aha moment like [inaudible] or God, whatever, really just spoke to me because I felt like I just could not survive, I didn't see a way out. I didn't see how I could take care of my kids, just all this stuff. I remember in that darkness, I just had this moment of like, “Well, maybe this is your chance to just create whatever you want.” Because it was the first time in my life that I didn't have a known plan.

I had been with my ex since I was 16 years old so whenever you're married, obviously, you plan on forever in your future and all that stuff and so you think you know what you're dealing with. Literally, I read a text message and ended our marriage in like 10 minutes. It was this really dramatic just explosion of every single part of my life.

I think there was some crazy hope in the idea of, “Well, I have to figure out a way to survive anyway so might as well do all this stuff I wanted to do but didn't ever think I could.” That hope honestly just is what got me up off the ground and helped me try to figure it out. I didn't ever think any of it was going to happen honestly, ever, ever, ever. It was just that lifeline that was keeping me floating, just the idea of like, “Maybe life could be better. I don't know how but just thinking about it makes me feel better.”

That's really the only reason why I did it initially. My very first future board, what I call FutureBoard now, wound up just being me on Google image searching all of these things that I was starting to fantasize about. Now I know it can be a trauma response to creating this happy place in your brain to detach from how bad it was initially but it actually wound up being this amazing hack that the more I focused on what I wanted, the more it actually started happening.

Like I said, I never, in my wildest dreams, thought it ever would but about a year and a half after that and I'm starting to get on my feet and have all these pictures at the first job that I get and whatever, and I'm looking at them all day long and just fantasizing about this great new life that I have all these pictures of, literally 18 months later, it just started showing up just boom, boom, boom all over the place, all these crazy experiences. It was crazy.

One of the first ones that I knew was a manifestation—I didn't even know anything about manifesting back then, but I knew it wasn't random, I'll put it that way—was I'd had a picture of Times Square on that initial board that I had printed out and next to it I wrote, “Yeah, New York City,” or something like that.

This is a picture I've been looking at for the past year plus. Every single day got my little cube at work. Like I said, about a year and a half after he left, I was given my first work trip assignment which was a really big deal. I'd moved up from the closet of inside sales to finally outside sales and getting my first business trip and it was to New York City.

I was there for a week. Still, at a time, I was barely making ends meet but here I am in New York City on the company car whining and dining all my clients and just going, “Holy sh*t. Did I just wake up to Cinderella? What is happening right now?” That was the first time where I was like, “I know this isn't random because I put that picture on before I had the job, before I even had a job.”

I was like, “A lot of people look at this and be like yeah, work trips, whatever,” and I was like, “No, I know I did this. Somehow I did this.” That was what started the whole quest for me. It was like, “Okay, well, if I could do that, what else could I do?’ That was like eight future boards ago, taking my kids to seven countries, flown private jets, been [inaudible] NBA games, you name it, just the list goes on and on of what has manifested from my board since. Plus we got to a book in 2019.

Andrea Liebross: So fun. Okay, that's how it got to the book. Besides looking at pictures, what new thoughts did you have that helped create what you created? Because yes, we can look at pictures, how did your thinking change?

Sarah Centrella: Yeah. That's a great question. The pictures is one component, literally one out of nine, I teach a nine-step method now and that's step five out of nine. But the crazy thing that happens, oh, talk about the picture component first just because it's very different than how most people would do a standard vision board, but typically happens in the vision boards that we were making back whenever, a million years ago, those were to me nothing more than a collage.

When you're a teenager, you make a collage, you cut out magazines like hello, we're grown now, why would we do that? It doesn't make any sense. Number one, to me, that just logically made no sense. Number two, how is an editor of any magazine on the planet going to know what my personal dreams are? It's just not going to happen so it doesn't make any sense again.

Even back when I didn't know anything, I went on Google and matched images with what my head was already creating that mattered to me and that now I know is one of the biggest, I just gave all your listeners one of the biggest hacks that if they did nothing else, that is going to change the game for them because that is my custom-created future reality.

That is what motivates me, Sarah, yours is going to be completely different because right you have experiences you want to live, you have moments you want to create for your family, you have achievements that are unique to you and how you look at those moments is totally different than anyone else.

To be able to find that match is everything that's humongous and no one is doing that, the future board's method is completely unique in that way. Now we find all those pictures on Pinterest, there's the other free tip because Pinterest has all those.

But to your point in thinking, it's humongous and so I think way back when when I didn't know anything, what was starting to change without me even understanding it or doing it intentionally was that my focus was shifting from all day every day focusing on everything that was going wrong and how little I had and I literally lost everything.

We had a big beautiful home, all of a sudden, I'm in a one-bedroom apartment that's getting shot up and on food stamps. It's crazy. I had nothing.

I think thinking about that, letting that go round and round I knew just wasn't mentally healthy for me. Now I know that thank God I didn't do that because that just creates the reality over and over and over again. By me starting to think about things I wanted instead and things that were making me happy and thinking about them in terms of why the vacation would make me happy because I'd be able to have these moments with my family, because I'd be able to have these memories, because all these other things, that allowed me to start slowly thinking it was possible even though I didn't initially when I started at all.

But over time, the more I was surrounded with it, the more just like anything becomes the norm. In lots of ways, we're desensitized in a bad way but this actually works in our favor because you could put a dream that seems completely unrealistic and insane but the more space you give it to grow both in your mind and surrounding yourself with either pictures of it or some types of reminders of it, the more over time it becomes like, “Oh, yeah, well, when that happens.” It just takes a natural progression and you stop questioning it the way that you did in the very beginning.

Now I teach some skills on how to get there faster and really train your brain to get there and hone that in but that really is the progression that happened for me that first year and a half without being very conscious of it and without knowing at all what I was doing or having any exposure to personal development at all.

Andrea Liebross: It's interesting because I talk in my coaching and my clients but also in my book that's coming out in the fall about how when we create a plan, there's an action plan like “These are the things I want to do. There's going to be a timeline. I want to do them in the next year or 10 years,” but then there also has to be a belief plan.

It's almost like the more you started to think about this and give it space to I'll call it bubble up in a good way, not in a cauldron witch pot way, that that was you creating that belief plan and feeding it, fueling it with more and more and more “Yes, this is possible.”

Because I think the alternative to that is if you don't give it that space to grow, then you're allowing almost like the weeds to come in and fear, doubt, and all of those things.

Sarah Centrella: Exactly. I say that most people on average are filtering their dreams out without even knowing it. It's a subconscious filter that's like, “Nope, that's not for you. That's not for you. You don't have the money for that. Who are you to think that? That's cool for other people.” It's happening all day long. It's happening in the shows you watch, the Instagram feed that you're following, you're like, “Oh, wouldn't that be cool? But that's not for me.” Just all day long, you're kiboshing your dreams.

What the rock bottom allowed me to do is I have nothing to lose so I was like, “I don't f*ck*ng care. This makes me happy. It's not hurting anybody. I'm not hurting anybody.” The more that I thought about them, the more space they had, like you said, to grow, and that was absolutely clutch because 99% of the people that I work with do not know how to let something grow like that. They just don't.

We have so many innate blocks in us, worthiness and finances are the two most common, they're the things that almost instantly filter everything we want now, and just tell us that what we have is enough, that the life that we live we should only be grateful for, wanting more is bad. There are just all these various filters that we put on.

All of those are there to protect us in the space that we're in and to keep us there, to keep us from making changes, to keep us from growing. Once you're aware of them, and it takes a while, it takes some training, then all of a sudden you're like, “Whoa, why is my head telling me I can't have that? Why is my head telling me I don't deserve that? That's crazy.”

You start questioning what's been going on in your head and you start allowing these dreams to have the space to grow. I think of them as like a little seed. They need sunlight. They need water. They need protection. They need room to grow.

Andrea Liebross: Right before we got on our call, I had a consult call and this woman clearly knows that this is something that she could benefit from, no uncertain terms, and then she's like, “Well, I don't know.” You said two things, you just said money, finances, and worthiness. They both came up in that five-second conversation.

She's like, “Well, I'm not sure I have the money to do this.” But yet three seconds ago, she told me money wasn't an issue. Then the worthiness set in. She's like, “Well, I probably should be grateful for just where I'm at right now.”

Sarah Centrella: Yeah, very, very common. We're very embedded with those as almost default responses. I really encourage everyone to question them and question them and start to see them as excuses because that's really all they are and they're just excuses with a nicer name that makes us feel warm and fuzzy like, “Oh, but [inaudible] more than I'm a good person. If I don't want more, then I'm being selfless, and isn't that great?”

Andrea Liebross: Yes, or “I’m good with what I have.” So I asked her, she said, “Well, I'm going to need some time to think about this.” I asked for permission first but then I said, “Let me just ask you this, what are you really thinking about? What are you really, really thinking about?” No one has any great answer to that.

Sarah Centrella: Right. It’s coming back to the excuse. To me, just like anything else, whenever I'm dealing with somebody who is like, “I don't really know what I want, I'm feeling a little stuck, or I'm feeling unmotivated,” or any of those things, it is always going to come back around to if you don't know what you want, why you want it, you could talk to that woman every single day and she's going to have the same response.

She has to have that identified, “This is what I want. This is why I want it and if you can help me get there, that makes perfect sense to me. If I don't know what I want to be floating around, then of course, I have no motivation for truly anything.” In FutureBoard, people will ask me a lot like, “Oh, where do you come up with all of this?” For me, the very first step in all of it, like I said I have nine steps, so step one is what I call dream it.

That's where you begin to allow yourself to scope a future that looks absolutely nothing like your current life. That alone is almost impossible for someone to do without coaching. They just cannot do it.

Andrea Liebross: No. It's hard for us to do it.

Sarah Centrella: It is almost impossible because the only thing you're going to come up with is the pre-identified next step to any of anything I ask you. We all think, “Oh, well, my next step in my finances is to pay off my mortgage or my next step is to get the master's.” We know what the next step is. It's already been hanging around our head forever.

But if I ask you what’s step 20 and all you've identified is step 1, you can’t even come up with step 3, just the whole thing is a blank slate. My job is to come in there and say, “Okay, if it's not a cliche and it's actually true that anything is possible, then I need you to give me what your anything is.”

It's usually one version a little bit better than what they have. What I've done in my life using future boards is literally completely revamped my life every two to three years. If you look at my Instagram over the last five or six years and you've been following me for a little while, everything about my life is different because my goal is I want to upgrade every single part of my life continuously for the rest of my life. I want that to always be in alignment with my true self, my happiness, my purpose, centered around my family, the things that I love and care about, but I want all of it to get exponentially better.

Andrea Liebross: Yes, not just one little part.

Sarah Centrella: Exactly. I 100% believe that every single person out there wants that but is too afraid to say it, has been told they can't say it, or has been told it's wrong to say it.

Andrea Liebross: Right, or they don't give themselves I think this time or space, going back to that question what do you want?

Sarah Centrella: It is the hardest question to answer.

Andrea Liebross: It is the hardest question but you do have to start somewhere. But they don't give themselves the space, time, or tools to even explore what do I want. They just don't go there. You brought up something really earlier saying I think sometimes it's easy to easier to come at it from the “So I want X so that I can [blank].”

If you said, “I want to spend more time with my kids,” how is that going to happen? How are we going to make that happen? I want to travel more so that I can create experiences and time and have bonding with my kids. “So that I can” or “in order to” is super important I found.

Sarah Centrella: Yeah. It's critical because the other component that's very unique in what I teach when it comes to manifesting and future boards specifically is that every picture we choose represents a moment in time. In other words, if you even look at the pictures behind me, they're all off Pinterest and so all of them are pictures of real people doing whatever the thing is.

Whether it's a travel picture or a speaking picture, whatever, someone took a picture of the person living that moment. That is representative of, in my mind, the exact moment that my brain is playing out. In other words, a lot of people do this, whenever someone says, “Hey, I made my future board,” and they tag me on social media and it has words on it, I'm like, “But you didn't. You clearly didn’t. You didn't read the book. You didn't follow the instructions.”

Andrea Liebross: That was one of the things I loved about your book. No little sayings, no words. I love that.

Sarah Centrella: Yeah, there are no words. We do words in the other steps but the board is a visual representation of the movies created in my mind already so that all they do is trigger the movie. That's the greatest part. Every picture is a moment or an experience.

When you look at my board, you don't see the random mansion, the Lambo, or the ship that people cut out of magazines. You see, look at the one right behind me and there's a college kid graduating walking across the stage and that's representing that moment when my son does that, what a full circle that's going to feel like, and from where we started as a single mom being able to hope my son live his dream.

That is what that represents. It's not just this random thing. It’s the moment that I want to feel the way that kid feels in that picture. Those are always how I'm finding out what it is I want is I'm looking at it through that lens. Those are the moments and experiences that I want.

One of the memories, [inaudible] and I'm looking back over my life, what are my top 30 memories, the ones that I'm just like, “Oh, my God, I can't believe I was able to do that with whoever,” my kids, people that I love, what are those things? Sometimes that helps me get there, do that reverse engineering a little bit. That experience would be amazing, I would never forget that.

Then what happens is when you start to manifest it, you are living those moments, the real-life version of it is so heightened and so intense that there's no feeling like it on the planet. You are present and you're in the moment. You're overwhelmed with gratitude. Versus, and I know we've all probably done this, worked really hard for something, got it, and we're like, “Why is this day a letdown? This sucks. This day isn’t how I thought it would be.”

Or when it’s over we're like, “Ugh!” There's nothing worse than working really hard for a goal or whatever that you wanted, getting it, and being completely let down by how it actually felt. This, because we're looking at it for those moments, experiences, the memories, and how it's going to feel to be there when it happens, it's that times 10. It's a total addiction.

Andrea Liebross: It is. What's on your board right now?

Sarah Centrella: Oh, my gosh, all the boards have five categories, they represent all five categories of your life so that we are holistically moving our life forward like we were talking about earlier. Again, most people have only scoped out their career and maybe a little bit of finance and then have a vague idea of what the future holds for their family. Super vague.

You talk to any mom and you ask her what her kids are going to be like in five years, and she's like, “What are you talking about? I never thought my kids were actually going to be teenagers,” or whatever, they're stuck in today. But that forward planning, we do that in all areas of our life.

We do it in finance and abundance, we do it in career, of course, in mind and body, which is really important. I have to move that forward the same way I'm moving everything else forward, I have to be very conscious of it, and then we have this category that nobody has that is the balance key, if you're looking for a balanced happy life, which is your passions and joys. What do you do just for fun?

That’s the whole purpose, that’s the whole reason, that’s the hardest. People stare at me like I've lost my mind and I'm like, “What are your hobbies? What do you schedule a couple of times a week just for fun?” Like, “I don't have time for that. I don't have money for that. What are you talking about?” I'm like, “But do you make your kids do it?” “Well, of course. My kids are in every sport. They're in every language learning. They're in this, that, and the other thing.”

Andrea Liebross: They're traveling, they're going on the trips.

Sarah Centrella: Yeah, we quit doing that as adults. We understand the value that we're supposed to do it for our kids because it helps them grow, be rounded, and all these things. Hello, we still need it as adults too.

Andrea Liebross: Yes, we do. We totally do. So cool. Well, this has been very fun to talk about all this. I could talk about this for days and days. Tell my listeners, you've got two other books out there now too, don't you?

Sarah Centrella: I do, yes. FutureBoards is the one that we've been talking about. This is the middle book. My newest one is All the Things I Wish I Knew, and that is life lessons for women, covers everything. Then my original one, Hustle Believe Receive has eight of the nine steps that I teach now.

Andrea Liebross: Awesome. What is the best way for someone to find you?

Sarah Centrella: They can just go to sarahcentrella.com and find everything and more there and follow on Insta @sarahcentrella.

Andrea Liebross: Awesome. All that will be in the show notes. Well, this has been great. Let me ask you one more question. What do you think thinking big really means? How would you define thinking big?

Sarah Centrella: Most people can't, just as I was talking about, again, they're just going to come up with the next version which is already in their mind. To me thinking big is completely wiping the slate clean of everything that's known and brainstorming all the unknown. That is of enormous stretch for people. Again, if you're looking at it on the scale of how you want to advance through your life and you maybe know what the next two steps are, thinking big is step 20, step 30. It's out there.

But you have to do that, and I think of dreaming as a balloon. That one or two steps is like trying to blow up that tiny little balloon that makes you feel you’ll have a brain aneurysm trying to do it, but then over time what starts to happen, it gets looser and looser and then you get the full things. That's what we're talking about here. It's a muscle, it will push, it will open, it will expand. It just needs a lot of work, in the beginning, to force that to happen.

Andrea Liebross: Well, let's get blowing up that balloon. Think big. Alright, well, thank you for being here. It has been a pleasure. Remember, listeners, check out Sarah's Instagram and all of her books and she's just fun to follow too. I'll put a plug-in for that to see where she's going next.

Sarah Centrella: Great chat and thanks so much for having me on the show.

Andrea Liebross: You are welcome. So what did you think of that conversation? What do you think of wiping out everything you already know and really zoning into what could be possible or what you don't even think is possible but what you want to happen? I want to go back to that word want. What do you want to happen in your future? What do you want to happen?

This is one of the hardest questions that I ask my clients, the hardest questions for them to answer. It's hard sometimes for me to answer that. As she mentioned, it's really hard to do this without a coach. It's so true.

Today, I was doing a Vision to Action Intensive and I was asking my clients to imagine, “What is it going to be like 10 years from now? What do you want your life to look like 10 years from now?” Oh, my goodness, all they could really go with was what year it would be, how old they'd be, maybe where they want to be living. Other than that, an empty blank slate.

I found it really interesting how she walked us through that process of how she created what she really, really wanted and you can do that too. Check out her links in the show notes. If you haven't gone to shethinksbigthebook.com to get your intro or first chapter of She Thinks Big, the book, if you're listening to this before September 2023 when the book launches, I encourage you to go there.

If the book has already launched, if we're past that, go there and get the book, the real book, the whole book, and nothing but the book. Alright, my friends, reach out. Let me know how you're thinking big or if you're having trouble thinking big. Schedule a call, let's chat about it. You can find the link to schedule a call on my website or at andreaslinks.com. Let's do it. Talk to you soon.

Hey, listening to podcasts is great. But you also have to do something to kick your business up a notch. You need to take some action, right? So go to andreaslinks.com and take the quiz. I guarantee you'll walk away knowing exactly what your next best step is to level up.