What is a Vision Board?

A vision board is an inspirational canvas, filled with reminders of your dreams, goals and aspirations to help keep you on the right track. You might ask yourself, why do I need something to remind me of my dreams when they’re already in my head? This question leads back to the law of attraction, the belief that the energy we put out into the world is what will be returned to us. By channeling our energies and focusing them on what truly matters in our hearts, we’re more likely to achieve these goals or at least head in the right direction.

Click here to jump straight to “How to Create a Vision Board”.

Stepping away from the spiritual beliefs behind the law of attraction, having a vision board also makes sense in a more practical way. By spending time creating a vision board we’re making ourselves acknowledge and understand what it is that we actually want to aspire to and achieve. Often we go through our day to day lives in “auto-pilot” mode, and don’t take the time to sit still and think: “Why am I actually doing this?” or ” What is it for?”.

Creating a vision board for your preferred timeframe, can help you set goals in a creative and fun way. Which helps reduce the stress from the heavy cloud that is “the future” and turns it into something to get excited about.

There are countless methods to create a vision board, and every person is different in their preference. For this reason, I’d like to run you by a couple of options. However, I will be deep diving most into the method I’ve used for my own vision board. Feel free to tweak, adjust, or even completely disregard the methods if they don’t feel suited to you. This process is supposed to be personal, an intimate moment you’re taking with yourself to help “the current you” become “the future you” that you desire.

Types of Vision Boards

Digital

This works exactly as it sounds, digitally. If you decide to create your vision board digitally this can be done in a couple of ways.

With online vision board generators (Milanote or Canva are very user friendly) you can create a beautiful board with self-uploaded images and even liven it up with cool add-ons within the platform. Once you’ve created this board, you can add it somewhere that you’re guaranteed to see it on a daily basis in your computer. Add it as your desktop screensaver or as the homepage on your internet browser if hosting it online. Another idea would be to treat it like a canvas where you create it digitally and print it out.

Canvas

The canvas method, refers to creating your vision board on a live canvas or something similar (an A3-A2 paper will also do). Using a canvas doesn’t mean you have to start bringing out your childhood paintbrushes and start drawing your goals from scratch (unless you want to, then this is great!). But being mindful of not everyone having a talent for the arts, the idea of the canvas method is that you collect images and glue them to your board. These images, can be drawn, printed, painted, or cut out directly from old magazines/newspapers.

What’s nice about the canvas method, is that you really see your board come to life before your eyes. From one image on the canvas to a collection of images and words that mean something to you, and have been put there with intent.

How to Create a Canvas Vision Board

1. Find Your Intent

The first, and maybe the most important step in creating a vision board is to brainstorm about what you want to put on it. Do you have a certain aspect of your life in mind, or do you want the board to touch on multiple aspects. A popular category for vision boarding is obviously ones career, but don’t feel limited to creating one for this area alone. You can combine your career vision with the direction of your family life, or personal developments you want to focus on as well. How best to go about this?

Sit down in a quiet place, where you can concentrate without disturbance and think about what it is that you want in life. At this stage don’t restrict yourself to what you think is possible within a short timeframe, but let yourself dream about where you want your life to be in 5 years time. And write down the words that are coming to mind without trying to organize them just yet.

Now look at the words you have written down, and decide which aspects of your life you want to focus on to create the future you just dreamed of. If you dreamt of getting promoted, you may want to consider what steps/courses you need to make this possible. If you dreamt of having time to focus on your personal interests like art or fitness, how can you schedule time to make this feasible. If you dreamt of being great at something you’ve never tried but have always been interested in, this is the time to consider what you can do to learn more about it. If you dreamt of owning a house, how much money do you need to save each month to make this possible. The list is endless, and differs completely depending on the person dreaming.

From all of this brainstorming you create a top 3 of your most important goals. This step is important because you don’t want to focus your energy on too much at the same time. You may have noticed many times in life when you spread yourself too thin, nothing receives the energy it deserves or gets done to the standards you hold for yourself. The same goes for goals, by being mindful to not spread your energies too thin, you’re increasing the chances of success.

For these 3 goals, you now write down in simple bullet points what steps you need to take to get you from where you are right now to where you want to be. For example:

1. What is my goal? To become a lifestyle blogger
2. Where am I now? I don’t have a blog or experience
3. What do I need to get from step 2 to step 1? I need to create a blog, research other blogs, think of a blog concept, etc…

You repeat this exercise for each of your three goals, and you’ll have the intent of what you want to put into your vision board.

2. Find Your Canvas

Click here to see vision board types for inspiration…

This step is very much a personal preference, but there are a couple of important factors to consider before deciding. One factor is to be sure that whatever the canvas type you choose, it’s possible to place it somewhere you can see it on a near daily basis. Preferably in a natural way, so you don’t have to go out of your way to take it out and look at it. For example, I have my vision board on my nightstand and everyday when I wake up and turn my head to the right I see it. When I see it, I take a moment to observe all of the elements mindfully and get up to start the rest of my day. I believe that observing your vision board often and if possible even daily, is the most important part. There is no point in creating your vision, if you’re not reminding yourself of what it is.

Then consider what format you feel most comfortable with and excited about making. If you feel that seeing it on your computer daily will bring you that mindful moment of joy, create it on your computer and save it as your desktop screensaver or homepage. And if you get excited thinking about creating this by hand and on a canvas or A3/A2 paper, this is the stage where you go out find/buy the canvas materials you think you’ll need.

3. Find Your Images

Similar to the previous step, where you source your images from is a very personal preference with no wrong answer. The most important part of this step is just making sure you prepare. If you want to cut into old magazines/newspapers to find your images, if you don’t already have them laying around you need to collect them (asking friends and family is often a good start here). Another option is to source them from the internet and print them out. This is what I did for my board because I wanted to find the images with the intent of the goals I had written out, and Google is an endless source of images.

However, a pitfall with the internet version is that once you’re creating your board you feel disconnected from the images, or that they don’t suit the board as well as you thought. This is why it is very important to print more images than you may actually need, and multiple variations within the same topics. For example, if you want to integrate more yoga into your life. Google “yoga” images, and don’t just select the first one but browse through them and pick a 3 that speak to you. Then consider looking at topics that are close to yoga, such as “meditation” or “ohm symbol” and see whether these images speak to you as well. If they do also select a couple here, if not move on to the next topic/goal. Trust me when I say, it’s better to have more than less images available when you’re ready to create.

Of course, you can also combine the above methods of internet and magazines, to initially print out images that speak to you and try to fill any gaps with magazine images. And if you’re creating a digital canvas use the Image search method to place images onto this digital format.

Again I want to stipulate, there is no right or wrong here…don’t overthink, do enjoy.

4. Find Your Words

Now that you’ve managed to collect images, prepared the canvas you want to attach these to and know which goals you’d like to focus on. It’s time to find the words that complement these images. Similarly to finding your images, these can be sourced however you’d prefer.

My advise here would be to lay out your images on the canvas (without glueing) to get a visual idea of how you like it, and also help envision which words you think are missing to describe your vision clearly. When you look down at an image and feel like you need too much context to understand the meaning, this is a good place to add words to help clarify the goal.

What you want to avoid in you vision board is that you look at it and don’t understand what the goals are without thinking hard. You want to make it as easy as possible to process your vision in a quick and effective way, using words to trigger this understanding of the goal and what you need to do will save you in the time you need to observe the board each day.

5. Find Your Vision

In this step we bring everything together. This is the part where you actually start glueing (arranging them if digital) the images and words on the canvas and creating a vision that you can connect with. When you look at your creation you should feel proud for having taken this journey, and excited for the future that is to come. Don’t forget the most important part, which is to look at the vision you created regularly so the labor you put into today will translate into the fruits of tomorrow.

My Experience

For my personal board I decided to envision most aspects in my life, including long and short term improvements. I created areas for my career, home and spirituality. And kept the words to a minimum because images speak to me a lot more.

The first row represents career and home, because for me the two are interlinked and I always want to find a healthy balance between them. I want to grow in my career and find success by reading books and expanding my knowledge, but at the same time I don’t want this success to take away from enjoying my home life and surroundings with the person I love. I’ve put them on the same level because they are of equal importance.

The second row represents home and spirituality, I want my space to feel soothing and be a place where I can retreat peacefully and recharge. To me, the colour blue represents peacefulness and calm and the left image reminds me of that. Another important factor for me to reach inner peace is my spirituality, this is represented by practicing yoga and mindfulness techniques such as meditation on a near daily basis. I’ve chosen the yin yang symbol, because I relate to the meaning a lot. The need of two opposite forces to create a balance has always spoken to me, because it feels logical. What does happiness mean if not compared to a moment of sadness. This row represents me trying to find my inner balance, in life and home.

The third row is a mixture of spirituality and career, and here I say spirituality because I’d like to use my passion for natural ingredients and mindful living as a foundation for my career path. The first steps I’m making to fulfil this dream is by creating this blog and filling it with content I’m passionate about and hopefully sharing that experience with other likeminded people, looking to improve themselves.

I hope that sharing my experience has helped you feel inspired to get started on your own vision board journey, and I would love to hear about your experiences or tips in the comments below.