Vision boards: You can live your days with intention
Here’s the deal; I have done many vision boards. It’s kind of what was “in” when I was in graduate school. I’ve had my fair share of evenings sitting with my girlfriends sipping wine and pasting images with glue sticks while we discussed school, the woes of being a broke graduate student living off of $5 Hot-N-Ready pizzas (which I still thoroughly enjoy, much to my husbands chagrin), the most recent episode Parenthood, and contemplating what life could possibly look like in 5 years when we could hardly see past our next Friday night.
As an aside, please tell me about your pizza dreams.
What is a vision board? In short, it’s a tool to help you clarify and maintain focus on your goals. And they can look like anything you want them to look like. For me, in school, it was often an 8x11 piece of colored cardstock paper that I would cover with ripped out words from magazines like Glamour.
But I’ll tell you what; they didn’t really mean anything to me. They were fun to do, and it was an okay way to spend some time thinking about life in that way, but I never had them be all that useful.
I am someone who has a lot of really big dreams. And big dreams that are quite scattered around. I’ll pick one up for a bit, swish it around in my life to get a taste, and then put it down for the next dream. I actually don’t like that about myself, and it has led me to leaving jobs too quickly or making decisions too hastily. Recently I’ve found myself circling back to the same few dreams over and over again. I don’t want those dreams to sit in the abyss that is my brain.
So I decided to take some action.
I am not here to say that I have some ground-breaking news about how to create dreams and mold them into reality. Let’s be honest; I’m not that brilliant to have come up with something that millions of other bloggers have been writing about since the invention of blogging that haven’t already tapped into it. But one of my dreams is to get my blog going, so here I am. I really don’t even care if no one reads this. (But if you do read this, WHOA!) I just don’t want this dream to continue to be one that circles back around in my head, and then I feel ashamed because it sits here blank.
Here is Jade Erickson’s plan for creating a vision board that is intentional and a living document:
Map out your goals. And do it with mindful intention.
Give yourself 20 minutes of uninterrupted time to answer the following prompts:
What are your life goals in the following areas?
Career
Bucket List
Financial
Family/Social
Personal
Here’s a peek at some of mine!
What are your 5 year goals in the same areas?
What are your daily goals in the same areas?
Say those goals out-loud to someone.
Say them to a close friend, your spouse, a family member, or ask me to grab coffee with you. I know it’s a privilege to have a safe place to have someone sit with your goals and not pass judgment or add their advice. I will be that for you if you need it. It is crucial. When we say our goals out loud, it gives us space to flush them out a bit more. It also shifts them into the external, instead of them just living inside of our heads.
Google (or Pinterest) vision board ideas.
Find ones that speak to you. There are some really great ideas out there. Get a sense of what you need it to look like for YOU.
Spend time gathering items to put on your vision board.
I’ve found that if we just sit with magazines and try to find the things for our vision board that encompass our goals, we will just be left feeling unsatisfied. Vision boards can include magazine pieces, but they also can include cards, photos, YOUR OWN HANDWRITING! I love motivational quotes, so I put many of those on mine. This process could take some time. This process for me lasted an entire week because I slowly gathered items as I saw them. Make sure you gather things that speak to each one of your goals. EACH ONE OF THEM! Because they are all worthy. Even if you have one goal similar to mine that reads something like making sure my dogs get adequate pets each day.
Photo of doggo requiring pets during creation of this blog post.
Piece your vision board together, and spend that time manifesting those goals.
The law of attraction; put that intentionality out there! Woohoo! Giggle, sing, dance, smile, have fun. I’m not creative, but I had a blast with this part. Each time I put something down on the board, I thought about which one of my goals it was speaking to.
Put the vision board somewhere you can see it.
If you put all of this work together, and then put it in a room that you never visit, what good was this? It can to be a living document, which requires we spend time with it frequently, updating it when appropriate and reflecting on it often.
Here is mine! I love it, and I put it in my bedroom so I see it every morning. Ask me about what’s on it! I’m ready to live these goals out-loud!
“Do something today that your future self will thank you for.”
Happy visioning!