What are your goals or dreams? Perhaps you want to lose weight and increase your energy. Maybe you dream of running a marathon even though your knees ache and you’ve never run a mile. You might long for healthier relationships, and a better career. Does the thought of achieving your goals make you feel fearful that you might not have what it takes to succeed? This vision board has three steps to help you know exactly what you need to do to make your ideal future a reality.
A vision board is a creative tool that will help you achieve your goals. You will illustrate the future you want to create using images cut from magazines or printed from the internet. For this particular board, consider using a tri-fold poster board used for school projects. A large piece of cardboard you have hanging around the house, or even three smaller pieces from cereal boxes will do. With this vision board, you will be illustrating your present, your future, and what needs to happen in between. These three steps, inspired by the method of visual goal setter, Patti Dobrowolski, will give you a more complete picture of how you can achieve your goals. Knowing where you are presently in regard to your goals, is key to understanding what you need to do now to achieve them.
Step One: Illustrate Yourself in the Present
On the left side of your board, use pictures to illustrate yourself within your present reality. Take an honest look at your life without being overly critical of yourself. Do you spend too much time on social media? Are you surrounded by unfinished projects. Are your cupboards and refrigerator filled with high calorie junk foods that only serve to keep you and your family overweight and unhealthy? Be sure to represent the good in your life too. Friends or family who care about you, a comfortable home, and a car that runs and gets you where you need to go, are all things that support your success.
Step Two: Illustrate Your Desired Outcome
The right side of your board will represent your ideal future, when you’ve achieved your goals. Leave space in the middle of the board for the last part of this project. A picture of yourself will help you better imagine yourself in your new and improved reality. If your goals are to lose eighty pounds and run a marathon, add pictures that represent family or other people in your life who could be cheering you on. This will help you connect with the emotions, and a larger purpose, that will drive you to succeed.
Step Three: Illustrate Your Action Steps
The third and middle section of your board is where you illustrate how you will get from your present reality to your dream life. You can use words on your vision board as well as pictures, but it’s important to use pictures as they help you visualize possibilities and understand your goals as reality. It may take a little more time to fill in this section. Look over your present reality and find what’s lacking. Let’s say you want to lose weight and find a better paying job. If you are spending more time than you need to on social media such as facebook, this could be time better spent doing short intervals of exercise and writing your resume. If you are busy with work all week and eating fast convenience foods, you could picture yourself spending a Saturday with your kids having fun cooking up healthy, delicious meals to freeze and have ready for each night of the week. If you want a better relationship with your spouse, relationship therapy could be a necessary step in moving from feeling sad and misunderstood in the present, to having a loving connection and lasting happiness in the future.
Are you ready to see your dreams come to fruition? You have all you need to begin. Collect your cardboard, magazines, and tape or glue sticks, and fire up the internet — just don’t open facebook or your mailbox, you don’t need these distractions. On a piece of paper, clearly write down the goals you want to achieve, and your present state of health, emotions, habits and assets. Brainstorm and write down on another piece of paper all of the action steps you can think of that will lead you to your success. Now that you’ve clarified all of this on paper, you can begin illustrating your board. Draw a divider between sections and label them at the top. For example, you can name each part, “my current self,” “action steps,” and “my new reality”. Once your board is complete, keep it someplace where you can view it daily. You are ready to begin. Happy journeying on your road to success.
