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A Vision Board is a very efficient tool to help you to achieve your goals.
Creating it will force you to think about what is important to you.
Revisiting it will help you to take the actions that will take you there.
Redoing it regularly (I do it once per year) will help you to adjust your plans as your living conditions change.
So what is a vision board?
It is a place – a paper, a wall, a PowerPoint presentation – where you place images of what you want for yourself and your life in the future.
The idea is that by visualizing what you want to achieve you will get the inspiration and will to do what needs to be done to take you there.
Do you know when people put a picture of themselves when they were super fit on the refrigerator to keep them away from it when they are above their wished weight? Same logic, in a much more comprehensive approach.
A Vision Board should cover all relevant areas of your life. It should show the places you want to go, the type of activity you want to do, and the people you want around you.
Don’t know where to start? A super nice way to get inspired is browsing a magazine (real or virtual).
What are the images that attract you? What is the life you would like to live, that makes sense to you? How would you like to spend your free time? How the house where you would like to live looks like? Do you want to spend time with a lot of people or just those few friends you prefer?
Find images and pictures that help you to visualize who you want to be, put them together in your paper or PowerPoint slide, and try to look at them every now and then.
When you do it, reflect on what you are doing TODAY that will help you to get there.
Can it really help me to achieve what I want?
It helps me!
I created my first Vision Board at the end of 2014.
At that time, I just wanted something to help me to achieve the goals I had for the following year: completing a specialization course I was taking, getting married, moving to Germany, spending time with family and friends, and having a healthier lifestyle.
This is what my vision board looked like:
I named that PowerPoint presentation “Happiness”.
By the end of the year, I had achieved all I was aiming for. And that gave me the pleasure and energy to repeat the exercise before the start of 2016.
I have been doing it every year since then.
Some goals change, and some stay the same. For example, every single year I have an image inspiring me to exercise regularly. The image sometimes changes (the running image has stayed, and the pilates image comes and goes).
I usually have from 5 to 7 goals per year. Sometimes I achieve everything I visualized. Sometimes just half of my goals. And it’s ok. I take it as a sign that either the goal was too ambitious (when I get almost there) or that the goal was, in fact, not really important to me.
For example: in my vision board of 2018 I visualized flowers in my house. I was never good with plants, but I think it is really nice when you visit a friend and the house has natural flowers all around.
The year ended and I hadn’t reached my goal. I decided to accept that I was not willing to take the effort it takes to have flowers around. And I excluded that image from my following Vision Boards.
Sometimes you simply decide to let a few things go. And this is also a good reason to create and revisit a Vision Board.
Creating your first vision board
If you decide to have an annual Vision Board as I do, start thinking about what you want to achieve next year.
Be specific. If you want to lose weight, how many kilos? If you want to get a higher salary, what is the salary you want? If you want to travel, what is the place that you want to go to? If you want to spend more time with the people you love, who exactly are they?
Be ambitious. It is ok if you don’t get it all in the first year. If the Vision Board helps you to go in the right direction, it is already filling its purpose.
Be nice to yourself. If you hate to wake up early, don’t set yourself the goal to wake up at 5 am every day. Go with “waking up one hour earlier than I did in the previous year”. Test the water. See if you can do it. See if you like the way it feels. Maybe you don’t. And it is also ok.
Going bold
In 2017, for the first time, I decided to build a “long-term Vision Board”. I visualized what I wanted for 2027. I spent hours, over a few weeks, until I considered it ready.
In there, I answered a few big questions:
- where do I want to be living 10 years from now?
- how do I want to be making a living 10 years from now?
- how do I want my marriage to look like 10 years from now?
- how do I want to spend my free time 10 years from now?
- how do I want my spiritual life to be 10 years from now?
- which kind of social life do I want to have 10 years from now?
- who are the people I want to keep in my life for the next 10 years?
I need to confess that doing this long-term Vision Board felt like a huge step (much harder than creating the yearly ones).
What is amazing is that, 5 years later, when I look at my long-term Vision Board, I see that I have been going in the right direction.
So, once you get familiar with creating and using Vision Boards (give yourself 2 or 3 rounds at least), try also the long-term one. It takes longer to know if it is working, but it is a really interesting exercise.
