How to Create a Vision Board for 2022

Early into the new year is the perfect time to reflect and define your goals for the future! The new year is the ultimate season of reflection, but it’s important to create a vision for every period of change in your life – and that, my friend, is timeless! So whatever you want to focus on: love, your career, becoming more spiritual, or getting that pet snail, let’s explore how to create a vision board to help define and manifest your goals!

Table of Contents:

• What is a Vision Board?
• How do Vision Boards Work?
• What should go on a Vision Board?
• How to Create a Vision Board
• Example of a Vision Board
• What Should you Do with a Vision Board?

What is a Vision Board?

Vision boards (also known as dream boards and goal boards) come in all shapes and sizes! Some people create physical boards using pin boards or poster boards to display a collage of photographs, magazine cuttings, words and quotes that inspire them. Others create digital boards using online tools available to help them create a visually appealing montage that showcases their goals.

Whether physical or digital, vision boards are made up of a collection of inspiring images and text that helps encourage the creator to work towards manifesting their dreams. We all need consistency if we’re going to nurture and achieve our goals, but it’s so easy to get caught up in life’s daily distractions (not to mention, frequent stress!) and put our dreams aside for tomorrow. Before you know it, 5 years have passed, and you’re not one step closer to achieving what you set out to do. How many times have you started a new project with complete focus and devotion, only to forget about it a week later and never see it through? Goals allowed to drift in and out of your mind are rarely achieved, as we need consistency to build habits.

Having your vision board in a prominent place will serve as the perfect daily reminder of your dreams and goals.

How do Vision Boards Work?

Visions boards have been linked to the law of attraction: a philosophy which insists you are always in a state of creation. What you think about, you bring about. Both consciously and subconsciously, you are constantly attracting and creating pathways towards your point of focus.

Have you ever had one of those days where literally everything went wrong? It felt like the entire universe was conspiring against you, throwing you a consistent stream of awful luck until you wanted the ground to swallow you whole. When you focus on the negative, you attract more of it into your life. You’ll miss opportunities because you’re unable to recognise them for what they are. You’re too busy looking at Pandora’s box of negativity. This can last for a day, a week, months, sometimes even years.

Focus on the positive, and you’ll create and attract pathways towards positive things. Like attracts like. This holds true for every single area of your life. With positive thoughts, you put out positive energy and attract people and experiences that are in line with your energy and focus.

Vision boards are one of the most effective tools for defining your intentions and keeping your mind in check.

So, how do they work? It’s simple 🙂
Consistent reminders of your dreams and goals allows you to keep your point of focus, align your energy and feel inspired to take the necessary steps towards achieving them. You create your own reality: whatever you choose to focus your energy and attention to will come back to you tenfold.

Visualisation is a powerful tool used by many successful athletes, CEO’s and entrepreneurs. Just like meditation can change your life, so can visualisation. Both these mindfulness techniques allow you to tap into your subconscious, align your energy and program your brain. Ultimately this will help you to recognise, attract and pursue the right opportunities to achieve your goals and manifest your dreams.

What should go on a Vision Board?

Before we get onto how to create a vision board, firstly, you’ll need to decide what you want your vision board to focus on! Think about areas of your life where you’d like to see change. Perhaps you want to focus on well-being, a change in career, or improving your relationships with family, friends or a love interest.

Be open and honest – these are YOUR goals and it’s YOUR life, not anyone else’s. It can be easy for us to get caught up in society’s ideals and not realise we’ve been chasing after someone else’s dream. There are masses of people out there who have achieved what others (often their parents and peers) wanted them to achieve. They have respectable jobs with a very good income and they’re completely miserable for it. Why? Because they followed the ego’s desire for recognition and approval rather than their own desires at a soul level. Is that success? Of course not! Success is happiness, and what makes one person happy does not make someone else happy. So always listen to your heart when you’re mapping out your dreams and desires for the future.

But how do we know where the desires are coming from? Always ask yourself WHY you want something. If your answer is along the lines of ‘to make money’ or if you start visualising people praising you and looking up to you, this is definitely the ego stepping in! If this happens, meditating is HANDS DOWN the best way to strip away the ego and allow your subconscious thoughts to come to the surface and suss out what’s really going on! If you haven’t tried meditation yet, definitely give it a go! Check out how to meditate in 12 easy steps.

How to Create a Vision Board

Step 1: Define your Goals

To define your focus, the best place to start is by asking yourself some questions. So ground yourself, grab a notepad and a pen and get ready to really listen to yourself!

Which areas of your life are important to you right now?

Lead with your heart here, not your head. Think about what areas of your life are really meaningful to you. Think about your biggest wins of the past year: how did they make you feel? Which experiences really resonated with your inner self? This could be anything from time spent with a partner, family or friends, playing an instrument, journaling, being outdoors, volunteering, or hanging out with your favourite furry friend. Which experiences connected with you on an emotional level and made you feel whole (or as whole as was humanly possible? Hey, it was a tough year!)?

If you can’t think of any wins from the past year, that’s OK! The whole point of a vision board is to empower us to bring about positive changes. Get lost in memories of previous years and think about the experiences that made you feel good.

What changes do you want to see over the next year?

What would you like to see more of in your life? Maybe you want to see more growth on a path you’ve already created, or you might be focusing on an area where you sometimes feel lack. Whichever the case, learn from the past, but always look to the future.

Have a look over your notes from the previous question and think again about the areas of life that are most important to you. Maybe it’s relationships, career, well-being, your home, or personal growth? Think about the specifics: what would you like to see happen? What would you like to achieve? How do you want to feel? It’s important to think about how you want to feel, not just on the things that you want. The more your board connects with your emotions, the more it will come to life!

Your board can be about anything. There are no rights or wrongs when it comes to the focus of a vision board. You can have one central board with different key sections, or you can create multiple boards if you like! Just do whatever feels right for you.

Once you’ve got your key theme, ideas and goals, think about what specific changes you need to make to see these things come into fruition! For example, let’s say your main focus is to increase happiness in your life. If you made a board with sunshine, ice cream and lots of smiley faces – it screams the key theme at you, but it’s not getting into the details of what you actually need to do! In fact, it might just make you eat more ice cream, and while we all need ice cream in our lives, it’s definitely not a sustainable road to success! Confession: there were probably times I would have disputed this.

For your vision board to work, you would instead need to think about what happiness means for you. What would make you happy? Learning to become a yoga teacher? Spending more time in nature? Having a pet cat or dog? Learning an instrument?

Visualise some achievable, realistic steps that you can take to work towards your goals.

Step 2: Find your Tools

First of all, you’ll need to decide if you would like your vision board to be physical or digital. Physical boards generally take longer to create, but it’s a fun task that allows for some hands-on creativity!

For a physical board, you’ll need:

• Pin board or poster board (these Foam Boards are ideal)
• Pictures and words from old magazines or newspapers (if you don’t have these to hand, you can do a google search and print some images!)
• Miscellaneous objects that are symbolic for you and your vision
• Scissors
• Something sticky! Glue, pins or tape are ideal. I like to use craft glue dots as you can readjust things easily, unlike with glue sticks! Washi Tapes are also great for adding some colour!

For a digital board, all you’ll need is:

• Access to a computer
• An account with a visual design platform (and if you’re not techy, don’t panic! Some are really easy to use)

There are a number of visual design platforms you can choose from, but I can personally recommend Canva! This is where I create all my graphics, and they have a free version as well as a paid version (Canva pro). The best part? It’s so easy to use! They even have templates which you can use and then edit to make your own. Do a search for ‘mood board’ or ‘collage’ and guaranteed you’ll find something you can use for your vision board!

Step 3: Get Creative!

Now, this is where the fun part comes in! Visualise your goals and let your creativity flow. Here you’ll get to put together all of your ideas and really bring them to life!

Inspiration for your Vision Board:

• Words, phrases or affirmations that speak to you about your dreams and goals.
• Inspirational quotes from people you admire (you can also write your own!)
• Colours that are symbolic of how you want to feel (check out this post for an insightful breakdown of colour meaning and psychology)
• Photographs or Images that represent your vision and goals
• Shapes, symbols, patterns and textiles
• For physical boards: objects that mean something to you and are in line with your vision (this could be anything from feathers, leaves, photographs or souvenirs that represent something meaningful for you – the possibilities are endless!)

Don’t just settle for anything here. You might find words or images that link to your goal, but you need to find those that REALLY resonate with you! Find powerful inspiration that stirs your emotions. If you have to think about what a word or image symbolises, then it has no place on your board! You need to feel it and instantly connect with it.

Once you’ve set aside everything you’d like on your board, you can then start laying them out. Take your time with this part – you want your board to look good! My mind can’t handle clutter, so I avoid over-crowding and make everything neat, clear and presentable. But if you like the feeling of closeness, then you might like to overlap. Play around and see what works for you! For your vision board to do its job, you need to look at it often. It needs to be visually appealing to you or it’ll end up in your wardrobe draped in clothes, never to see the light of day again!

Presentation is pretty easy with digital boards, as you can drag and drop as you go along. For physical boards, it’s best to have everything in place before you bring out the glue stick! You might prefer to use washi tapes or craft glue dots so you can make any final adjustments more easily.

Example of a Vision Board

What Should you Do with a Vision Board?

Once you’ve finished creating your vision board, you need to find a special place for it! Somewhere that you will see it and reflect on it often. I have mine on the wall by my bed, so I can look at it every morning and night. Some other popular places are in your office or studio, and/or set as your screensaver.

Wherever you decide to keep your board, make sure you spend some time looking at it every day and visualising your goals (even a few minutes is enough!). You might like to read your quotes or affirmations out loud, or just spend some time reflecting on your goals. According to the law of attraction, the best means of manifestation is to visualise your goals as if they’ve already happened. Some like to call it ‘fake it till you make it”. By imitating a confident, successful and optimistic mindset, you start to manifest this into your reality.

Manifesting is about aligning your energy with where you want to be. Don’t focus on feelings of lack and don’t obsess over how far away your future goals seem to be. Visualise your dreams, live as if they are a reality and you’ll begin to recognise opportunities, create pathways and seek the possibilities that life has to offer.