For the last few years I’ve been creating a vision board without knowing this term. It’s a great tool that helps you navigate through life, set clear expectations for your future, your path, understand who you are and who you want to be as well as help you find meaning in life. It helps you create the best version of your life and yourself.
From my research and personal experience, I would like to share with you the following:
What is a vision board?
Why do you need a vision board?
What is a vision statement?
Types of vision boards
How to create your vision board
Elements to include in your vision board
Using your vision board
What is a vision board?
My idea of what a vision board is it’s a big picture of how you envision your life, what inspires you, what your goals are, what drives you, what makes you happy. It’s a collage of pictures, images, quotes, ideas that describe the life you want. This is it in a nutshell, I’ll talk more about the types of vision boards and how it may look like for you later in this article.
Why do you need a vision board?
Now, the question is why do you need a vision board, let’s see… Do you ever find yourself feeling lost? Do you ever feel like you are just going through the motions of every day routine losing the understanding of why you do what you do? Do you ever feel sad without being able to point out why? Can small details of everyday life irritate you easily? Are you unable to feel happy unless certain criteria is met?
A vision board is about creating a bigger picture for yourself that will constantly remind you of your bigger purpose, your reason and what happiness means to you. When we forget about that big picture and get lost in the intricacies of everyday life, we tend to feel down and get irritated over small unimportant details in our daily lives.
The vision board provides a direction, filling all your daily activities with purpose. It helps you become more grateful, calm, positive, inspired and being able to inspire others, as well as attracting people who have a positive effect on you.
Letting a vision board guide you, helps you remove any activities and habits that prevent you from living the life of your dream. It helps you plan and go through your days and weeks living and creating the life you want. It helps you establish positive habits and practice them continuously.
What is a vision statement?
My blog, my life and my vision are closely intertwined. Over the past year I’ve spent a decent amount of time creating the vision for my blog which pushed me to create a vision statement not only for my blog but also for my life (or my life purpose), although I’ve had a basic vision statement since I was about 16. While reading “The Vision Board” by Joyce Schwarz as part of my research for this blog article, I came across a similar thought - start with a vision statement.
Your vision statement should be a simple 1-2 sentence summary of the main idea and purpose for your life. Think of what truly makes you happy, what fills your life with meaning, what motivates you and excites you. Try to set aside any ideas that may have been seeded into your brain by society, family and close circle. Your happiness may be different from what society and social media tells you would make you happy. In other words, listen to your heart - try meditation, or just take a break from everything for a day, take a walk or just lay somewhere peaceful, let your mind wander about things far larger than your daily chores and your to-do list - all this would help you hear your inner voice.
You could also start by looking for the strong words that resonate with you and quotes that have a deep meaning for you and guide you through your life. You may collect enough words and quotes to fill an entire page, which should serve as your initial inspiration. Then, narrow them down to what’s most important. The length of 1-2 sentences would make it easy for you to memorize it, have it as your own quote on your phone screen, printed as a note on your desk, your bedroom wall, or even your mirror, so you can be reminded of it daily. Take the time to put it together, but don’t stress over not being able to project a “life-long” idea. Your vision statement may and will change over time.
Types of vision boards
I hope you are now warmed up and ready to start working on a vision board.
The first step is to pick the type of vision board you want to create.
First and main categorization is digital versus material board.
1. Digital. There are various websites as well as phone apps that offer preset layouts and guidance on creating your vision board. The benefits of digital boards include:
The simplicity of creating one including looking for pictures, ideas quotes on the web and easily dropping them onto the digital board.
You also don’t need to worry about getting any materials for it, just use your laptop, phone or table, and that’d be all you need
Finally, it’s easy to have your digital vision board handy, it’s especially useful for nomads and travelers.
2 . Material vision board with all the inspirational elements printed or hand-written attached to a wall, cardboard, or magnetic board. Main benefits of this type of a vision board are:
You can put it somewhere where you spend a lot of your time, so you can always have it in front of you. This allows for the best effect the vision board would have on you. It will constantly remind you of your path and where you want to be so you don’t get side-tracked.
Also, since you’d put more time and effort into creating a material board, it will stick in your memory better even during the times when you don’t have it in front of your eyes.
Personal, family/ couple, and even work team boards is another possible categorization. You can have one of each, but ideally start with the one for yourself. Then it would be easier to create one with your family or your partner to have a better vision of the ideal situation for the two, or a group, of you. Similar idea would be to have a vision board with your team, especially if you are in a leadership position. It depends on the type of environment you work in, and perhaps it suits best in a start-up business. It would be narrower than your personal board since it would only touch the work aspects rather than a full life with different areas and aspects of it.
Lastly, the types of vision boards may be for different aspects of your life. For example, you may create just your career vision board, or a personal/relationships vision board, or maybe even your hobbies vision board. If you are to follow my approach, create one that includes all of those aspects of your life, but feel free to start with a specific area if you feel like it.
How to create your vision board
Of all the above options, I decided to start with a personal material board that would include all aspects of my life. A material board would have more impact on me and would deliver better results than a digital board. I take my vision board seriously and I’m willing to invest a good deal of time into it. I suggest you do the same, but again, it’s your choice.
The supplies for my board included a large piece of carton paper, push pins, colorful sticky notes, pens and highlighters, laptop and access to a color printer. As I mentioned earlier, you may want to use cardboard or a magnetic board. Other supplies may include magazines, embellishments, stickers, or anything else that you may want to use based on your imagination and preference.
First, I divided my board into sections each of which represented my life-long priorities. Those are my health and well-being, activities I engage in, my career, my hobbies, my love life, my friends and family. Some of you may want to add a place where you live (location, type of place, and maybe even interior style), but I left that out of my board.
It may be hard to pursue all directions and areas of life full-on at once, so as a part of a vision board creation it is important to determine what your priorities are and which aspects of life matter to you most. Maybe you don’t want to have some of the ones I listed above in your life or on your vision board at all, and that’s totally fine.
Elements to include in your vision board
Next, for each section I determined what matters to me and added sections/ideas within each main section. Then for each idea I have written up how I envision each idea blooming in my life, I looked up images and quotes to support those ideas, printed them and added them to the board.
Important notes and items to include in your vision board:
Think big. Very important that you think big, and believe that ANYTHING is possible. Don’t get caught up in thoughts of how you would make all that happen. If it’s something your heart desires, you’ll find a way no matter how hard it may seem. On the other hand, if it’s something you don’t really want, you might not have the drive and motivation to pursue it, even if it seems easy or if it’s something that the society assures that you should pursue.
I suggest leaving out material things and small details - those are not as important and in the vision board we want to keep it to a big picture. Set importance to your feelings, experiences, self-growth, and large meaningful ideas.
Gratitude and acknowledgement. Remember to include gratitude and acknowledgement for what you already have and what makes you happy today. Amazing things go unnoticed in many people’s lives when they don’t acknowledge and appreciate those moments. The more blessings you pay attention to, the more you will see around.
Use of colors. Each color represents an area of your life and a certain type of energy. For example, I used red in my love life section, green in my health section, and blue in my career section.
Give back. Ideally, your vision board ideas have elements of giving back and caring for others. If not, spell out how you’re going to give back to the world. I believe the more energy you give the more you get, just as long as you don’t burn yourself out - make sure you keep that flame going inside of you. If you help others, the help will come your way - the more good there is out there, the more there will be for you too. We are all responsible for creating blessings and happiness around.
Using your vision board
Once you have your vision board ready, both your conscious and subconscious mind will do the work of creating a path towards that vision. Your subconscious mind gathers information outside of verbal signs, and it will look for cues and opportunities, and will hint you when to act to pursue your dreams. Your conscious mind will allow you to think of what needs to be done and what habits need to be established, based on the vision board. In tandem, two parts of your mind will help you create this beautiful life of yours. It is important to learn to listen to them.
From this article you already have quite some homework to do, so when your board is ready - come back to read my next article where I will talk in detail about how you can use your vision board and how you can create your plans and schedule based on the vision board, and most importantly how you can establish necessary habits to improve your life.
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