Episode 2 - Vision boards vs old lady hobbies. Science + sparkle?

This week on Call Her Brilliant

• Do you block arts and crafts time every week? If not, it’s time to start. I’ll show you why your brain needs old lady hobbies in 2026 if you want to reach bigger in your business and your life

• Time to break out the magazines and glue sticks. We’re creating vision boards. But not the glitter covered vision boards you see on instagram. Ones that elite entrepreneurs use to unlock your brilliance on demand. Don’t worry, you can still add glitter, but with a splash of science

• What I learned about brilliance from Taylor Swift and her sourdough starter

Transcript:

This week on Call Her Brilliant. Do you block arts and crafts time every week? If not, it's time to start.

I'll show you why your brain needs old lady hobbies in 2026 if you want to reach bigger in your business and your life. Time to break out the magazines and glue sticks. We're creating vision boards.

But not the glitter covered vision boards you see on Instagram, ones that elite entrepreneurs use to unlock your brilliance on demand. And don't worry, you can still add glitter, but with a splash of science.

And what I learned about brilliance from Taylor Swift and her sourdough starter. Let's do this. Welcome to Call Her Brilliant, the podcast for ambitious women building businesses and lives that refuse to be average.

You got the gold stars and turn that grit into step-by-step success. But you're ready for more. If only your capacity wasn't the bottleneck.

You want focus, freedom, and a brain that can actually keep up with your ambition. That's more than mindset, more than strategy. From athletes to entrepreneurs, we're trading burnout for peak performance science.

So you can create a life that's brilliant by design.

For three years, I purposefully avoided volunteering for any of my daughter's activities. She was a COVID kid, right? She started daycare and preschool during the pandemic.

I stopped traveling for work at the time. She was around us a lot. And she was always kind of a clingy kid.

I blame the pandemic, but she also loved to be held, and she wouldn't sleep for the first year unless one of us was holding her. And yes, we tried all the techniques like putting them down half asleep and blah, blah, blah. Didn't work.

Only holding her. My point is, I wanted her to learn some independence. So she started Sparks in kindergarten, which is girl guides for like the really little ones.

And she did ask me to volunteer. Being the good parent and the psychologist that I am, of course, I lied to her and said they didn't need any more volunteers, which to be fair was partly true.

They had a lot of volunteers and they probably didn't need me, but I also didn't ask. I didn't volunteer for Sparks for two years or for the first bit of Embers, which is girl guides for the middle years. I also did not volunteer at school.

Her dad does that. I did not join any of the cheer mom groups. I avoided all volunteer activities.

At the time, I was also working a lot. I had started my private practice. I was building my consulting business.

I was running the podcast. I ran before this one. I was busy.

I didn't really want to volunteer. That's partly why I was working so much. Right.

I remember when we were little for gymnastics, we had to volunteer at so many bingos every year. And this was back in the 90s when you could still smoke in bingo halls and underage children were allowed to be in there.

So I remember being like 15, 16 in the bingo hall, coming home smelling like cigarette smoke for days, right? And I always wished that my parents had enough money that they could just pay the fee to not have to volunteer.

So I was very excited that now that I'm a grown up and running my own business, I could afford to not volunteer, right? I didn't really want to do it.

Then when Alison was in her first year of Embers, so last year, I did volunteer for a couple of events, like one community event where they needed some extra parents around.

Then her Embers leader, Brown Owl, comes up to me and says, Oh, Nicole, we need more leaders next year. I'll send you the application. She was lovely about strong arming me into volunteering.

The good news was this might have been the best business decision I have made in years. Before Alison was born, eight, nine years ago now, before I started my business, before I got crazy busy, I had hobbies. I painted.

Remember when paint nights were a big thing, like 10 years ago? Yeah, I went to them all the time with my friends and my colleagues. Super fun.

I did yoga every day at lunch when I was working at the hospital with a colleague. I went to the gym regularly. I had a real workout routine.

I learned to crochet. I painted by myself on the weekend just for fun. I wasn't very good at it, but I still have some of my paintings that I did up around the house.

Then I had a kid. I started my business. I built my private practice, and all of my hobbies started collecting dust.

I remember my mom telling me that before I was born, she started knitting this baby blanket for me with the goal of having it done before I was born. She gave it to me when Allison was born.

Thirty-three years later, her knitting needles had also been collecting dust for 30 years. The other side of it was at the time, it felt really selfish to have a hobby that was just for fun. Even going to the gym was last on my priority list.

Doing something creative, something just for fun, something like sitting down to paint or pull out my crochet. Needles honestly felt ridiculous when I had 56 emails that I needed to reply to and hours of paperwork to catch up on.

And I hadn't really sat down with my family to do anything where I wasn't checking my phone frantically for messages from clients in months, right? It felt insanely selfish just to have a hobby for fun.

I talked in the last episode of this podcast about Monica and Phoebe skills. If you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to it. It's great.

I was firmly in my Monica energy at that time. I was doing the responsible thing. And at the time, it made sense because, like we talked about last week, Monica skills were what built me, built my career, built my business.

They probably built yours too. But I was at the point where those things weren't enough anymore. I needed something new, a different approach.

So back to Embers. I get strong-armed into volunteering as an Embers leader this year. Went through the whole application process, which involves an interview and reference checks and all these things.

Honestly, I think it was harder to get approved as a volunteer leader for Girl Guides than it was to get approved as a consultant with the NHL, which I'm doing this year.

But I got approved, and suddenly I'm spending 90 minutes a week every Monday corralling 24 eight-year-olds. And it is exhausting. I don't know how teachers do this every day.

Honestly, there are five or six of us leaders that are there every night for these 24 kids, and we all look tired by the end of the night. But I noticed something really interesting.

My creativity was starting to come back, and I was getting interested in more of these hobbies that I'd put on the back burner for like eight years at that point.

I was doing less of sitting and trying to watch a movie, but also pulling out my phone to scroll because I couldn't just sit, right? It felt weird. I was able to actually sit and focus.

I was having fun planning the crafts and doing them every week with the girls. And it impacted my business too. This fall, I wrote and pitched more articles in 30 days than I had in the past 12 months.

Making cardboard s'mores every week sparked something in my brain. It wasn't just fun. We know doing fun things is good for our brains, right?

It helps us sleep better. It helps our mood. It helps our bodies.

It helps our brilliance. But making those cardboard s'mores and all the other crafts, with 24 8-year-olds, was also helping my business.

Women in leadership, we need to start blocking arts and crafts time. We need to block old lady hobbies. We need to pick them up again.

You probably had some hobbies before, right? And they've slid like mine. Here's the neuroscience of why this is so important.

Neuroscience for 90s kids. Which brings us to this week's edition of Neuroscience for 90s kids. Where we unpack the brain science behind the beliefs we had growing up.

You know, the ones that told us success meant getting straight A's and collecting gold stars and never needing a break. In this segment, we separate what the 90s taught you about brilliance, success, and time from what your brain actually needs.

Remember back in the 90s when being left or right brained was a really big thing? It was all in the pop psychology news, right? Are you left or right brained?

Left brained is more analytical, the one who makes lists and has all these super planned out itineraries for vacations, what I'd call Monica skills, right? If you're right brained, you're more creative.

You're the one who goes on vacation with just a plain ticket and no plan and wings it. More of those Phoebe energy, right? In the last episode, I shared that those are different neural networks.

The skills that mediate things like creativity versus things like organization and planning are different in our brain. That default mode network versus the executive control network. But it's not separate halves of your brain.

Here's a science. You do have a left and right side of your brain. Your brain is divided into two hemispheres.

The left side of your brain controls the right side of your body. So for example, if I lift my right hand right now and I scratch my nose, the left side of my brain, my left hemisphere, is going to be activated in my left primary motor cortex.

But if I use my left hand to pick up my coffee mug and take a drink, the right side of my brain is going to be active. So you do have two sides of your brain. They're connected at two places.

One is called your optic chiasm, which is right behind your eyes, and the other is called your corpus callosum, which is a bundle of white matter fibers that connects to hemispheres. Interestingly, I have met a truly left and right brained woman.

I met two women with half of a brain.

Back in grad school, I got the opportunity to work with these two incredible women who, when they were younger, they had a surgery called a hemispherectomy, which is just like it sounds, where half of their brain was removed.

One woman, we'll call her Laurie, she had really bad seizures. They both had really bad seizure disorders when they were younger. Laurie had seizures that involved most of the left side of her brain.

The other woman, Robin, her seizures involved most of the right side of her brain. And her, their teams, tried everything when they were younger to control these seizures.

All different medications, all different adaptations to their day, trying to get the seizures under control, and they couldn't. And they were dangerous for their health and well-being.

So they had to do this procedure where they removed the parts of the brain that were involved in the seizures.

Often in epilepsy, there's a really discrete or small part of your brain that's causing the seizures, and your team might be really good at figuring out where that is, and it's not as complicated to remove.

But for Lori and Robin, because whole halves of their brain were removed, they had to have these intense procedures called hemisperectomy where the left or right side of their brains were cut out.

They were pretty young when these surgeries happened in grade school, like eight or nine years old. I met them when they were grown women in their 60s, and they were pretty amazing.

So Lori, who had the left side of her brain removed, someone who was truly right brained, she worked at a grocery store for over 30 years, she had this close group of friends in the community, she had hobbies she did just for fun.

Robin, who was missing the right side of her brain, so truly the left brain person, she wrote poetry, she volunteered regularly, she made these deadpan jokes that caught me by surprise whenever we talked.

They were both independent and funny, but they did have differences. So Robin, who's missing the right half of her brain, she was really eloquent.

When she spoke, her speech made sense, she had no trouble carrying on a conversation, but her speech was monotone. It lacked inflection. It was all the same tempo, speed, pitch, almost robotic.

Laurie, in contrast, who was missing the left side of her brain, when she spoke, it sounded like normal speech. Her inflection would go up and down.

When she told stories, she had humor and tone, but sometimes she missed words, or the way she put her sentences together was a bit off.

And they did struggle with some everyday tasks, like Robin had trouble using her left hand and her leg, and she struggled sometimes to make and keep friends.

Laurie, in contrast, had difficulty staying focused, and like I said, coming up with words that she wanted to use.

Why I'm bringing these two women up, not only because it was amazing to get to work with them and to meet them and to see what they were able to accomplish, but to highlight that, yes, we do have a left and right side of our brain.

Yes, there is some ability for that brain to compensate, but we don't want to be pop psychology version of left or right brained, right?

What we want is to create stronger connections between the hemispheres, because that is what the science says leads to success.

For instance, there was a study done at Duke where they use neuroimaging to examine different parts of your brain, while people did creative tasks.

What they did is they put individuals in this neuroimaging device, they monitored brain activity where they were doing different creative activities, what's called divergent thinking skills, like outside the box thinking.

For example, they would say, how many designs can you create in five minutes? Or list as many new uses for a common object that you could. For example, they're like, how many ways could you use this paper clip?

If you came up with, use it to hold paper together, that's pretty basic, right?

But if you come up with, stretch it out and attach an elastic to it and make it into a little bow to fling paper across the room like we used to do when we were kids, that's more creative, right?

Interesting finding, the people who scored in the top 15% on those creative tasks, they had stronger, more connections between the right and left hemispheres, those sides of their brain.

When we have stronger connections between those sides of the brain, we are more creative. Here's why this matters for you. A really great way to strengthen the connections between the sides of your brain to build that brain strength and fitness.

Old lady hobbies, especially ones that use both your hands, crochet, knitting, gardening, woodworking, scrapbooking, when we are using both hands together, it activates both sides of our brain.

They have to work in collaboration, so we are strengthening those connections. Old lady hobbies are also a great way to turn on that default mode network we talked about in the last episode, that creative driver of your success.

We know when you have stronger connections in your brain, your thinking is sharper and faster. When you can turn on that default mode network, your ideas spark easier, not just randomly when you're driving or in the shower.

Another benefit of old lady hobbies, they give the hard working parts of your brain space to breathe, without that frustration of forcing yourself to sit and do nothing. I don't know about you, but I am terrible at sitting and doing nothing.

It feels wildly uncomfortable. I know all the science, I know all the research that we're supposed to be able to just sit there and be with our thoughts to just sit there and do nothing is so great for our brains. I'm not good at it.

Makes me feel uncomfortable. Most of us who are ambitious overachievers, recovering Monica's, it is really uncomfortable for us to sit and do nothing. We are used to doing, we are used to taking action, we are used to getting stuff done.

Our brain does not like to feel uncomfortable. It is actually the primary driver of everything you do. Your brain does not like being uncomfortable.

So it doesn't want to sit and do nothing.

That's why I always recommend for the clients and the women that I work with, active hobbies, like these old lady hobbies, where we can give those problem solving, critical thinking, focused, active focused parts of our brain space to relax, where we

can do something that doesn't take as much of that type of brain power, where we can do something where we're more hands on, it's more tangible, we're using the more creative parts of our brain. Really great for our brain health, and feels much more

acceptable to your brain than the advice to sit and do nothing. This has been Neuroscience for 90s Kids. Neuroscience for 90s Kids.

Okay. Next, I want to dive into our segment, Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Smart Women Doing Smart Things.

And today, we're going to talk about Taylor Swift and her sourdough. We all watched that episode of the New Heights podcast, right?

Where Taylor was on with Travis and Jason Kelsey. I wasn't a giant Taylor Swift fan before. I did like her music.

My eight-year-old loves it. We played it all the time, but I didn't really know that much about her as a person. I loved her on that podcast.

Go watch it if you haven't. Not only is she funny in like an awkward way that I love as a fellow very awkward person, but she's clever and so brilliant at what she does in business and with her music.

My favorite part of that whole podcast was listening to her nerd out about her sourdough starters.

She is so into them, and she's talking about how she has these different versions and different flavors and how everyone she knows gets sourdough for every event and holiday, right?

I myself did not jump on the sourdough trend, but this is a really amazing example of a smart woman doing a very smart thing. Taylor Swift works hard. We know that.

There is a new documentary on Disney right now as I'm recording this, all about how hard she planned and prepped for the heiress tour. Taylor Swift is part Monica, but she is also a Phoebe. She is creative.

She shared before how she writes down words and phrases that she loves in a little notebook to use later for lyrics, and she geeks out over things like sourdough. If Taylor Swift makes time for creative old lady hobbies, we all should too.

Doesn't have to be sourdough. So sourdough is another one that's great because it's going to involve both your hands in mixing the ingredients and trying more things and being creative. But find an old lady hobby.

Smart women doing smart things get an old lady hobby. Smart women doing smart things. Back to me getting strong-armed into volunteering for Embers.

Girl Guides is here with my daughter. Interestingly, I created time by saying yes to more. Sounds counterintuitive, right?

Aren't we all supposed to be saying no more? That's the thing, right? We say yes too much.

We need to protect our boundaries. We need to set limits. Yes, boundaries are important.

But it's also important to say yes to things that charge your brain and your brilliance. I said yes to being a Girl Guide leader.

I am tired every Monday night after spending 90 minutes with a gaggle of third graders who want to tell me why an oxalotl is their favorite animal.

But I also get to spend 90 minutes every week making bird feeders or dog toys for the local Humane Society or cardboard and cotton ball s'mores.

Arts and crafts were good for our brain when we were little, and they're good for your brain as an adult too. We know that when we push our brain beyond our limits, we burn out, right?

That is why burnout happens, is we have overextended our brain's capacity. Building that capacity, creating a life, a business that is brilliant by design means working with how your brain is naturally wired to function best.

That means, yes, lean into your Monica skills. Yes, be organized. Yes, be driven.

And also lean into Phoebe energy. Lean into your creativity. Get a hobby just for fun, especially an old lady hobby.

More than mindset, this is neuroscience.

Now I want to play a round of brain fact or fluff. Brain fact or brain fluff? Where we separate neuroscience from nonsense, whether that viral brain hack is backed by science or just Instagram sparkle.

And of course, I'll bust a few wellness myths, your brain wishes you'd stop believing. Today, we're talking about the neuroscience of vision boards. Firstly, I googled neuroscience of vision boards when I was prepping for this episode.

And the first thing that came up was how they activate your reticular activating system. And I went, oh, for fuck's sake, under my breath. So let's start here.

Neuropsychologists, neurologists, neuroscientists, do not care about your reticular activating system. I actually went and looked this up in my neuroanatomy Bible to make sure I wasn't making this up.

This neuroanatomy book I have, I've had for 15 years at least. It is so worn and highlighted that the cover is splitting. I carried it around with me from Saskatoon to Halifax, back to Calgary, even once on a trip to Mexico.

In this Bible, neuroanatomy Bible, the RAS, your reticular activating system, is mentioned once in passing, talking about how a midline brainstem tumor could impair RAS function. And someone could fall into a coma.

My neuroanatomy Bible does spend half a chapter talking about your reticular formation, which is this core of nuclei cells in your brainstem responsible for alertness, attention, and awareness.

But its role in attention is more about how it collaborates with other systems in your brain, like your frontal parietal association cortex, your higher level cortical skills.

But that whole section about your reticular formation is really about comas and how someone can have reduced arousal.

What that part of your brain, your brainstem, is really responsible for is transitioning from sleep to awake, helping you be able to wake up. If it does not work, you stay asleep. And that is not a good thing.

I think it was Tony Robbins that made the RIS this popular pop psychology thing, like this region that apparently only these gurus know about and none of the neuropsychologists or neurologists I meet ever talk about know this thing that you can

magically direct your attention and you should be focusing on it. It is not the magic bullet. Like I said, your brainstem, the part where your reticular system is, is mostly responsible for what's called autonomic brain functions.

We don't have a lot of control over those, like heart rate, breathing. Yes, you can hold your breath for a little bit, but eventually you will pass out and start breathing again.

The RAS is not the magic system that some of the influencers make it out to be. Okay. Neuroscience fluff, the RAS.

We're supposed to be talking about vision boards, but it bugged me. I need to get up on my soapbox for a minute here. Okay, back to vision boards.

So other than this mythical RAS that's supposed to be great for focusing our attention, there actually isn't a lot of scientific research on whether vision boards work.

And by work, I mean, does creating a vision board make you more likely to achieve your goals? There are a lot of anecdotal articles. Lots of people saying about how they make a vision board and they feel like it helps, right?

There are a few research studies, but they're really small samples and mostly done on teens and students. So because there wasn't a lot of direct research, what I did is I took a look at the main arguments for and against vision boards.

Here's the science. Argument number one. Vision boards work like manifesting.

They direct your attention. You're training your brain to focus on these goals, so you'll be more likely to achieve them. Evidence?

Maybe. Couple of weeks ago, I was trying to explain to my eight-year-old what a punch buggy was, but I hadn't seen a Volkswagen Beetle in forever, and I was trying to describe one to her, and she had no idea what I was talking about.

The next day, I saw two of them, right? This happens to us all the time.

Really well-talked-about phenomenon called the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon, also called the frequency illusion, where you buy a yellow car, and all of a sudden everyone's buying yellow cars, right?

Or you make this Instagram reel about this really clever thing that you think no one else is talking about, and all of a sudden you see 56 other reels talking about the same thing. This happens because of our brains.

Maybe because of the algorithm in the Instagram incidents, but also because of our brains. Two reasons. Your brain has what's called a selective attention system.

So your brain starts noticing and filtering more yellow cars because you've bought one. I was talking about Volkswagen Beetles. All of a sudden my brain is going to be paying more attention to those.

I'm more likely to notice them. Your brain also has what's called a confirmation bias.

Once you notice a yellow car once or a Volkswagen bug, your brain looks for more evidence to confirm that observation, which starts to reinforce the idea that they're everywhere. They were probably everywhere before.

There are probably lots of yellow cars. There are probably a bunch of bugs out there that I never noticed before. There's probably other people that have posted a similar reel to you before, but your brain wasn't focusing attention on that.

So yes, making a vision board might prime your brain to reach your goals by focusing your attention.

If I make this vision board with my goals for the year, I put them all down, I look at it all the time, I might be more likely to notice evidence that aligns with those goals, more likely to notice that I'm making progress on those wins.

But that brings us to argument number two in favor of vision boards, that goal setting is good. This is fundamental to things like vision boards, right?

The premise that goal setting is a good thing, and the actual evidence for that is a little bit mixed, which sounds bizarre, right? But here it is.

So, there was this 2008 neuroimaging study where they used what's called functional imaging, fMRI and PET, which are, instead of taking a picture like an x-ray of your brain, they can monitor your brain and see what it's doing in real time, okay?

So what they found was that when participants in the study were put in this imaging device, the brain was monitored when they were anticipating that they were going to get a reward, even before they got the reward for doing things, the parts of the

brain that release dopamine were more active. So the argument is, well, we know that dopamine can boost motivation.

So if we have this vision board, it's telling our brain to anticipate this reward that might happen in the future, maybe it's going to boost this dopamine and I'm more likely to act. Except dopamine is not that straightforward.

There was a randomized control trial done in 2020. What that means is that participants were either randomly assigned to a group where they got a placebo, like a sugar pill, or artificial dopamine that they took.

Then they were given five pounds, like British pounds, and told to invest in this simulated stock program.

What they analyzed was participants had the choice to pay some of that money to see their portfolio, to see how they were doing and to get feedback.

Participants who were given the placebo, the sugar pill, they sought out more information about their gains and their losses. So they were motivated to pay more to learn why they were succeeding. And that's a good thing, right?

But the people who were given artificial dopamine, they were less likely to ask for feedback on their performance. The argument being that they already had this boost of dopamine, so they were satisfied, so they were less likely to take action.

In 2009, there was a series of studies done that showed when you say your goals out loud, you're actually less likely to follow through compared to if you just keep them in your head. Here's the takeaway for argument two.

Don't count on the vision board to do the work for you. And maybe keep that goal private. Maybe don't show off your vision board.

Argument three, that we should all make vision boards. Vision boards train your brain to win. So, there is really compelling research that mental rehearsal visualization have big benefits for performance.

For example, when we hook up athletes to measures that monitor things like their brain waves, their skin conductivity, their respiration rate, how their muscles contract.

When athletes are mentally rehearsing their performance, their brains and their bodies respond as if they're actually doing the activity.

So when a swimmer imagines himself doing the perfect stroke, their brain and their body respond as if they're actually swimming, which is good, because we know athletes who do more of this mental practice perform better at competition time.

Visualization, mental rehearsal, really good for our brains and performance. Does this actually apply to vision boards? Depends how you're using your vision board.

In general, vision boards tend to be more passive, right? I cut out all these things, I paste them on my board, I slap it up on my wall, the end. To make the vision board work, do this.

Imagine potential barriers to each goal that you put on that board and how you're going to overcome them, because there is some good research that when we do vision boards this way, when we create the vision board, we imagine the obstacles we might

have to overcome, and we envision ourself overcoming them, that is what trains our brain, not the vision board itself. have to overcome, and we envision ourself overcoming them, that is what trains our brain, not the vision board itself.

Here's my two cents about vision boards. Arts and crafts are good. We know that it stimulates your creative brain, can even help benefit your speed, your efficiency, your business, especially in this world where so much of our time is digital.

Creating that analog hour where you make a vision board is going to have a lot of benefits that we've talked about already. If you want the vision board to actually help with your goals, it needs to be more interactive though.

Like I said, we need to envision those obstacles and how you'd overcome them. Instead of putting the goal on your vision board, these seem to work better if you put an image of the process.

For instance, if you put an image up of someone exercising, instead of putting an image up of the ideal body that you want.

If your goal is to write a book this year, putting an image of someone writing regularly rather than a picture of a published book. Those more active images tend to work better.

Here's how I'm creating what I call a reverse vision board or a wow board. The ambitious women that I work with are the good girls. We are really bad at noticing our wins.

I remember when my daughter was in kindergarten, that's when I did my TEDx talk, and I'm pretty sure my husband dropped a hint to her teacher that this was happening or that's why I was away that week.

Anyways, I come back and she is gushing about me doing this TED talk, and I was so embarrassed, right? If you have ever brushed off a compliment, you know what I mean here.

So instead of creating a vision board that's your goals, create a vision board of your wins, the things that you have done as victories over the past year. Think about a few categories when you're doing this. You want to think about your wins?

Absolutely. Wins not just at work or in your business, but wins in your life. Were there health habits that you started, books that you read, hobbies you pursued, vacations, fun experiences you did with your family?

Put all of that on your reverse vision board. But not just your wins and your achievements, put what you learned this year on your vision board, because that is a really great way to prime our brain, to focus on growth and momentum.

Rather than focusing on the outcome, we focus on the growth that we've had in learning to get to that achievement. So that's your assignment for this week. Create your own reverse vision board, your WOW board.

Because this isn't just mindset, it's neurological.

Thanks so much for joining me. I'm Dr. Nicole Byers, and this is the Call Her Brilliant podcast.