Making Vision Boards – What Are They & How To Make Them!

Why hello, beautiful people!

One thing to know about me is that I like a little bit of motivation and direction in my life. Otherwise I tend to mill about like an obese slug, waiting for people to come along and squash me. Without the slightly suicidal overtone. Now, a great thing that I used to do was create vision boards to help me gain a bit of focus.

Vision boards are great for three reasons:

• They force you to actually think about what you want. Seriously – how many times do you feel like you’re not making progress in life, only to realise that you don’t actually have any clear-cut goals to make progress on? Taking the time to sit down and think about where you want to be and what you want to do is one of the main benefits of this process. After all – if you don’t know where you’re going, how are you going to know how to get there?
• You have documentation of what you want. Again, this ties in to the first point. You can think of all of these goals that you’d love to achieve; the house you’d love to have, the job that sounds fun and challenging, the dream trip you just can’t wait for... but after a week or two those goals will fade from your mind, to be replaced with to-do lists and spoilers from your favourite television show. Having documentation of your goals keeps them fresh in your mind and, even if it’s only subconsciously, means that you’ll actually be working towards something.
• Visualisation is, psychologically speaking, one of the most powerful things you can do to attain a goal. And this is the knockout punch! Visualisation (which is what creating a vision board is; you’re visualising all the things that you want) has been scientifically proven to work for decades now – Olympic athletes use the technique!

So...

Why Create A Vision Board?

In one word, manifestation.

I get that right now you’re probably raising an eyebrow and thinking “what kind of new-wave, hippie, occult weirdness is she talking about?” but hear me out – manifestation is powerful stuff.

The act of manifestation is essentially thinking what you want into existence. You take a dream or a goal, you want it, you think about it and envision it and make it almost real in your mind... and it will happen.

Okay, so it doesn’t happen exactly like that. But it sounded cool.

I think of manifestation as putting an idea in the universe’s suggestion box.

Personally, I’m a big believer in energy and that you attract what you are. Manifestation is essentially when you concentrate that energy and refine it; like I said, you’re putting in a little request.

Regardless of if you don’t believe in energy and the law of attraction and all of that jazz... you can agree with the concept of subconscious growth, right? Having something there that you can see everyday will stick in your mind. Maybe not consciously – but it will. And as you live your life, those images and ideas and goals will start to take root.

And you might start noticing opportunities that you didn’t before; you might start creating them. Think of it like this:

Life is a forest. You’re happy bumbling around and enjoying the scenery – until one day you get given a treasure map of the forest. You’re in the exact same forest, with the exact same surroundings... but now there’s a whole world of new possibility.

If you want a real detailed explanation about manifestation, read this.

With all these pros, you’re probably shocked that I haven’t created a vision board already! Then you realise that creating a vision board is a whole process that involves (admittedly mild) physical activity, concentration and actual effort, you immediately realise that 3/3 of those traits are things I’m not so great at and you’re not so surprised anymore.

Regardless, we’re here now.

I also realise that we haven’t got to the (arguably) most important part of this post.

What is a vision board?

Glad you asked.

A vision board is a board full of visual cues that represent or show goals and dreams of yours. It’s an image-based collection of your aspirations that you can see and work towards everyday. You can have whatever you want on there and how it looks is completely up to you. The great thing about vision boards is that they’re cute AF – so you can display them in your workspace, over your desk or wherever else that you’ll see them a lot!

Another great thing is that you can create vision boards for anything you need inspiration or motivation on – you could even create a blog vision board!

What To Put On A Vision Board

Now, admittedly this is where it gets a little bit trickier... what are you supposed to put on your vision board? Well, in many ways, it’s completely up to you – it’s a visual representation of your dreams, after all. However, here are my suggestions on things that you can use to fill up your vision board:

• Inspiration
• Goals
• Dreams
• Ideas
• Quotes
• Skills you want to learn
• Feelings and relationships; for example, on one of my old ones I wanted a better relationship with my mum, so I put an image of me and her together on it.
• Habits you want to stick to/improve

The whole point is to fill your vision board with imagery of your dream future and your goals – so take a while to sit down and think about what you want from life. Half of mine is aspirational and half is real-life plans; you can dream big, but I would really recommend including some like actual plans.

How To Create A Vision Board

Now, you could always have a virtual vision board and either keep it online or print it off, but that isn’t how I do mine. I like to have physical vision boards that I can actually display and look at, with things stuck to them because I’m over the top like that.

So here’s how I do/did it!

1. Get you a canvas. Solid back, easy to hang up and glue won’t make the paper bend. Win, win!
2. If you want to, split up sections of your vision board into different topics or areas of your life. Mine is only semi split because I want all of my life to interlock, if that makes sense. Having a fun social life and doing all the fun things I enjoy means more to write about on the blog, which means more money, which means having a nice house and being able to do more fun things and... you see where this is all going, right? However, for a lot of people, it will be easier to have your goals into sections like: hobbies, work, love, financial, etc.
3. Print images/collect images and whatever you want to stick down. You can be creative on this one! I took a few mementos of things I did this year (like my Download Trader bracelet) to stick down too.
   

   

4. Don’t forget your feelings! It might sound like the chorus of a cheesy song, but don’t forget how you want to feel and how all of these things make you feel.
5. Stick everything down in a way that makes sense to you and have fun with it! (I also like to add little annotations, but this is completely optional!)

Okay, so that’s how you go about making a vision board – but let’s look at what I came up with!

If you want to hear me talk about all the different parts of my vision board and what they mean to me, feel free to watch the video below.

Personally, I’d recommend this to anyone. It’s a cute room decoration, it’s a fun, easy and cheap DIY – and it’s helpful and relevant in “the real world”. Let me know your thoughts below – do you use vision boards? Would you?

Peace,