How to get clear and put your energy into building a life you love with a vision board.

Soon we'll be swooped up into another busy holiday season and the New Year will be ushered in. Before the chaos of holiday plans, packing, traveling, vacation days, cooking special meals, and extra time with family and friends takes up all of your spare time, let's take a look at how making a simple piece of art, a vision board, can bring to reality your goals for the year ahead.

Make a wish

When is the last time you made a list of things you wish for in your life? As a child, you might have done this pretty regularly at Christmas for Santa Claus and maybe again when it was close to your birthday so you could be sure to get just what you wanted. As an adult, we don't have as many people in our lives eager to shower us with gifts and so this practice may have fallen by the wayside for you. There's real power in naming the things or experiences you want to have in your life. So let's get started!

Get out some paper and make an adult wish list!

Use your imagination

I recommend setting a timer for this part of the creation of your vision board. It helps to have categories of wishes as well. Think about the areas in your life where you want to see significant change. Some categories that I make lists for are:

Health/Fitness

Career

Family Relationships

Friendships

Hobbies

Self Improvement

Finances

Faith

Before you move on to the next step, take a moment to pause and think about how you feel about the things you've written on your wish list. Did you come up with ideas easily or was it a struggle? Were you able to write without hesitation or did you find yourself holding back? Take some time to add to your list anything that you may have passed up before and take note of what thoughts or feelings came up around those things.

Cut and Paste

The concept of a vision board isn't a new one. It's simply using pictures torn from magazines to make a visual guide to all of your intangible wishes. Some add actual images of possessions they'd like to acquire, that's great too, but for the most part, the vision board exercise is about bringing the ideas out of your mind and onto paper where you can SEE them.

You don't have to go out and buy a bunch of new magazines to do this project, in fact, you can often get a cache of magazines for free by simply calling up your dentist, physician, or even your hairdresser and offering to clear out the old issues of magazines to recycle. Another idea is to search through google images or Pinterest for images of things that match your wish list visually and print them out.

Choose to get creative with your vision board and overlap pictures, titles of categories, deadlines, and names of people that your wishes include in a collage. Alternatively, you can write titles or cut out letters to create titles and then paste the images directly under those categories. Do what feels best to you. This is for you to look at and be inspired by.

A story: My personal experiences with vision boards

I've made vision boards since I was younger and in Girl Scouts. At the time my images were about having a family, a nice home, friends to share my life with, and being able to go on vacation. In my Girl Scout days, I also included the prizes I wanted to be rewarded with from my cookie sales.

As I got older I did the exercise less frequently and usually only as a group activity at work or while attending a retreat. The images may have changed but the visual concept was the same. Family, home, friends, vacation.

Making a vision board as therapy

In December 2018 I experienced my first acute panic attack combined with suicidal ideation. It was extremely unsettling to me as I'd always thought of myself being strong, easy to adapt, and a happy person. Thankfully, I was able to get medical treatment right away so I could begin to recover from the way my brain chemistry was changing, but part of that recovery was spent in hospitalization.

During my hospitalization, I spent my 2019 New Year's day celebration in a room with 15 strangers. Our group therapy session activity was creating a vision board.

Something changed for me that day when I participated in the timed exercise. Quickly I sorted through the magazines for images of things that were so much more specific to my core vision. Now I had a woman with curly hair, to express how I wanted to embrace the natural state of my hair. I chose a picture of two couples sitting at a restaurant table drinking wine and smiling to express how I wanted to go on date nights with friends. A woman sleeping expressed my goal of getting 7+hours of sleep each day. You get the point. 

How my vision board helped me heal

My life was different in so many ways over the next year, most greatly impacted by the change to my work. I discovered I had lost sight of how much my identity had been enmeshed with my work. Now that my work was gone (I resigned due to my hospitalization), I was redesigning my identity.

I used my vision board, created in that hospital group therapy session, to guide me through the year. It was the place I could look to when I wasn't sure what to do next. I realized it didn't matter exactly what I did, as long as those choices put me moving toward the vision I had in the pictures on that board.

Do This For You

Becoming clear, and becoming very specific about why you want to do something is the greatest action you can take when redesigning your lifestyle. You may have had a curiosity about becoming more profitable in your business, but WHY is that important to you? You owe it to yourself to express those emotions around your reasons.

If you haven't yet downloaded the workbook guide the Top 3 Secrets to a Profitable Transportation Business make sure to start it today. When you answer the questions in your workbook guide, you are building a strong foundation for a future that you can look forward to waking up each morning to receive.

I want to hear from you! 

How will you measure the success of your vision? Is it an amount of money or an amount of time spent doing things or being with people you love?