Creating a Vision Board
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Visualize success and manifesting your goals on paper! It’s possible to transform your goals into reality through the art of paper by creating a Vision Board. The Blueprint team shows you how.
Vision boards are loved and their use promoted by such self-help luminaries as Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra. With this caliber of fans behind them, it’s easy to see why vision boards are gaining in popularity.
But what are they for? How do they work? And how can you get started with creating your own vision board?
What is a vision board?
A vision board is usually a collection of images which represent a particular goal or dream which you wish to achieve. It should be firmly rooted in the expression of your goals – and more than a collection of pretty images.
Oprah Daily warns, “Don’t confuse it with a mood board. While similar, they are not the same. A mood board is more of a planning tool used for aesthetics – decorating a room or planning a party scheme. A vision board, on the other hand, relates to your life direction.”
Why create a vision board?
A vision board works a bit like a visual affirmation, helping you to articulate and reinforce your goal(s) and dream(s). This way, we are one step closer to achieving those goals.
How do vision boards work?
Psychology Today offers several explanations as to how creating a vision board can help you to achieve your goals:
- Vision boards help us to imagine what a positive future could look like.
- Imagining a positive future helps increase positive emotions and optimism.
- Positive emotions create opportunities and enhance the likelihood of success.
- We gain greater self-awareness and reflect more on what is important to us.
- The very fact of setting goals helps with positivity, mental health and the achievement of those goals.
How can you get started creating your own vision board?
The starting point when creating a vision board is, of course, to think about your goals.
Psychology Today suggests that these goals might relate to:
- Career
- Money
- Love
- Health
What is important to you? Why? What do you want to achieve in the near future? And the long term? What can you reasonably accomplish? These are the goals that you should reflect on your vision board.
Creating your vision board
Once you have decided on your goal(s), it’s time to start looking for inspirations images and words that relate to the achievement of your goal.
Note, that it’s important to use images and affirmations that relate to you working towards your goal as well as the end state. That’s because studies show that it’s more inspiring to focus on the steps to achieve your goal than it is the imagine the end state. In one study, students who were asked to imagine how great it would feel to perform well on an exam performed worse than those who were asked to visualize their study process!
To find appropriate images and words, hunt in magazines and online. Sites such as Pinterest and Instagram can be a great source of inspiring statements and affirmations as well as images. Once you’ve gathered a wide selection of images and affirmations, print them off and start sticking and taping them onto a large A2 or A1 sheet of cardstock.
Some vision board afficionados suggest that you should put your most important goal in the middle. Others suggest you should put a photo of yourself in the middle to encourage you to visualize yourself in the achievement of your goals. But there’s no right or wrong way to do this – create your vision board in a way that is meaningful and inspiring to you.
Use your vision board
When you have created your vision board, place it somewhere you will see it regularly every day. This could be above your desk if you work from home. Or perhaps next to your TV, on the wall in front of your favourite chair, or by your bedside.
View your board regularly. When you do, read the inspirational words and positive affirmations out loud to yourself to reinforce them further.
As you achieve your goals, you can update your vision board or create new ones.
What next?
You can find other ideas and inspiration about goal setting and visualization elsewhere on our blog:
