Is Your Vision for Partner Misleading You?

David Essel

David Essel, Counselor

Expertise: Counselor

David Essel, M.S. is the best selling author of 9 books, a counselor and master life coach and inspirational speaker whose work is endorsed by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy,... Read more

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Updated: 27 Mar, 2023

Table of Contents

Vision boards trap you when they chase looks and wealth, and they can derail deeper love, so choose to value emotional connection and shared life goals to grow closer.
Move beyond appearances and prioritize core traits like optimism, humor, honesty, and loyalty, then build criteria from emotional connection and communication so you attract a partner who truly fits your life.
Let go of the past and drop jaded beliefs about perfection, because real love grows when you release the fantasy and stay open to a partner who shows up with loyalty and care.

Over the years, the practice of putting photos of your potential love partner that you cut out of magazines onto a vision board has become very, very popular in the world of personal growth.

But it’s a trap.

By staying highly focused on the attractiveness of a potential partner, we could be missing out big time in learning how to select the right partner for us.

Removing the actual blocks that keep you from finding deep love

For the last 29 years, number one best-selling author, counselor and life coach David Essel has been helping people to remove the actual blocks, that keep them from finding deep love, and to base their desires of the type of person they want to date, not some type of magical, mystical, fantastical thinking, but rather on the reality of what type of person would be best for you?

Below, David shares several stories about several people who found deep love in very unexpected places.

“Over the past 12 years, the idea of selecting the physical characteristics of our “hopeful soulmate“, and finding pictures that match those characteristics has become very fashionable in the world of love and dating.

But hold on. Is it really the best way to go?

Or is it filled with landmines, that will knock us off our tracks when it comes to finding a great partner who is a wonderful match for ourselves?

Creating a delusional vision board and falling into its trap

A number of years ago, a woman selected me to be her counselor and life coach in helping her to find the man of her dreams.

In our number one best-selling book, “Positive thinking will never change your life, but this book will!“, I tell the complete story from the minute she walked into my office until she found the love of her life.

But those two moments in her life could not have been more separated, and the reality of her partner became quite a shock to her.

She had done exactly everything that these mystical books tell her to do, she created a vision board, she was looking for a man that was 6 foot two, blonde hair, blue eyes, made a minimum of $150,000 a year and loved to shower his girlfriend with gifts.

I’m not kidding, that’s exactly what she had been focusing on for about four years before I met her.

She explained to me that she had gone to many soulmate workshops, had read all of the recent books on how to find a soulmate, and had been following these practices even though it had been unsuccessful for a number of years.

Coming up with the characteristics from a life interest point of view

So I gave her some writing exercises, to come up with the characteristics from an emotional, communication, and life interest point of view that would be a good match for her versus just the physical and financial traits that she thought she was looking for in a partner.

After several weeks of following my advice, and creating a list that included someone who was optimistic, funny, happy, driven, honest, loyal and more, she came in and said she didn’t want to work with me anymore because she wanted to go back to her “fun idea of soulmates“, and she was going to find the perfect guy who was exactly what she had been looking for: 6 foot two, blonde hair, blue eyes, and earning enough money to buy her gifts regularly.

A funny thing happened on her way to finding her soulmate. I ran into her a number of years later at a conference I was speaking at and she told me that everything she had been doing regarding her “vision board soulmate“, had never come to reality.

So she said after she left my office several months later, she went back to following my advice, and was shocked to find out that her husband of four years would be short, bald, not in the greatest of shapes but he was funny, loyal, interesting, communicative, and probably the most grounded man she had ever met in her life.

Getting blinded by the false notion sold to us

So many times in our quest for love, we get blinded by best-selling books and weekend workshops that tell us “you can have anything you want, as long as you create the affirmation and the correct vision board to bring it to you.“

Ridiculous. Yes I know it’s ridiculous, but so many people are still following this nonsense.

What about you? Could you ever see yourself with someone who had a physical handicap?

Could you ever see yourself with someone who wasn’t perfect? That didn’t fit your “ideal man and or woman“ profile?

When I went to write my most recent book “Angel on a surfboard: a mystical romance novel that offers the keys to deep love“, I never thought that in that book this very topic could become a central theme.

Letting go of the jadedness that creeps in after a failed relationship

The lead character, writer Sandy Tavish, runs into a beautiful former surf queen on the beach and they begin to have a very deep, and inspirational conversation about what it means to be in love, and how it’s easy to become jaded once you’ve been hurt once or twice to relationships.

The former surf queen that he meets, Jenn, begins to push Sandy in regards to beliefs about men, and within a short period of time Sandy can tell that she’s extremely jaded in regards to the whole relationship thing, and isn’t trusting of any man that she meets.

Her physical attractiveness is quite apparent, but Sandy is soon to find out that she has a major physical handicap, and because several men in her past had left her because of this handicap, she had become incredibly negative about men in the world of dating.

Learning to release the past

Sandy eloquently leads her down a different path, a path to open her mind, and to let go of her jaded approach to dating, when he mentions to her that if she can change her attitude and release the past, she will attract a man who will love her with all of his heart, regardless of her physical handicap.

It is one of the most moving chapters of the book, and one I think we need to talk about more.

The more you pay attention to magazines and the Internet, the more you can be sucked into the vortex that your partner has to fit this perfect mold, financially, physically, and more and in our narrowmindedness, we could be missing a perfect match standing right at our front door.

Are you willing to challenge yourself?

Are you willing to challenge your own beliefs about love, and this whole soulmate thing?

If you are, you’re on your way to attracting an amazing partner, let go of the fantastical thinking and wishful thinking that surrounds all of this nonsense regarding attracting the perfect partner via your thoughts and vision boards.

Instead, challenge yourself to change, and watch your world change around you.

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David Essel Counselor

David Essel, M.S. is the best selling author of 9 books, a counselor and master life coach and inspirational speaker whose work is endorsed by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy,... Read more Wayne Dyer, Kenny Loggins and Mark Victor Hansen. David accepts new clients monthly via Skype and phone sessions from anywhere. Read less

(David Essel is also listed in Best Marriage Therapists in Fort Myers)