I’ve spoken to many people who are on a journey to achieving their dreams and aspirations and one of the common themes that runs amongst them is that they all have a clearly defined vision and many of them have created a vision board to support their vision.

What is a vision board?

A vision board is a visual representation of what you are striving for in your life, used to help clarify and maintain focus on your dreams and goals. Quite literally, it is a board placed somewhere that you can see every day where you display images and quotes that represent your ideal life and where you are trying to get to.

How do you create a vision board?

There are many different ways to create a vision board and how you do it can depend on whether you are a visual person or not and also how arty and crafty you are, it is down to personal preference. You can start off by asking yourself the following 5 questions:

• Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?
• What do you want to be doing?
• Who do you want to be with?
• Where do you want to be?
• What do you want to have achieved?

Try to answer these questions thinking what you would be doing if there were no barriers such as money and time and current commitments. Don’t be constrained by what you think is realistic, or held back by your current situation.

Once you have started thinking these things through, take a pen and paper and start writing down everything that comes into your mind. It is possible to type this up, but I often feel that you can be a bit more creative with a pen and paper. Keep on writing everything you think of down that describes your ideal life in 5 years time and where you see yourself.

You can focus on all aspects of your life, there is no set formula but the areas you can consider are:

• Health
• Family
• Friends
• Career
• Location
• Hobbies

Depending on your current circumstances you may be more focused on one area than the others or you may have a vision across many areas of your life, both are fine, there is no incorrect way of doing this.

You might find it helpful to take all the initial words you have written and go over them to fine tune them and come up with a final list. Once you have this list, you want to make it into an actual vision board, so you can better visualise the outcome. Just to highlight, if you are a highly visual person, you might want to skip the step of writing the words and go straight to the pictures. There are a number of different ways to create the actual board:

• A pin board and pin clippings from magazines to it
• A white board and magnets to stick clippings on
• Post it notes on a board
• A piece of card and stick clippings from magazines with clue to it
• Create something online from pictures from the web (I am aiming for Zero Waste, but I would advocate printing this out so you have it in front of you every day)

Handy Hints

– Allocate a good amount of time to work on it. You might need to go away and think and come back to finalise it after some further thought.

– Don’t put off starting it if you have not got a clear vision. Just start the exercise of writing everything that comes to your mind down and then you can fine tune it as you go. Its a starting point to set you in the right direction, it might evolve over time.

– Don’t just think about material possessions and what you want, to have, also consider how you want to feel and where you want to be.

– Don’t worry about getting this ‘right’ there are no rules, just add anything you find inspiring.

– You can make it as neat & tidy or as messy as you like, you can have it entirely made up of pictures or also include words and quotes.

Why vision boards work 

There is much scepticism about whether they are effective, but at the end of the day what do you have to lose by making one? Here are the reasons why I believe they are a powerful tool:

• The process of creating a vision board helps you identify what you are trying to achieve and gain more clarity on your vision
• Clarifying your goals makes them more specific and the more specific they are, the more likely you are to be able to achieve them
• Having your vision visible, where you can see it every day, helps to reinforce your goals, which in turn makes them more achievable
• Putting it ‘out there’ helps you to attract opportunities. The more you share your vision with people, the more opportunities you will find presenting themselves to you
• Having a vision board helps turn dreams into beliefs that you are working towards, rather than just fantasies you are daydreaming about. It helps brings your ideas to life.

I’d love to hear about any vision boards you have created and whether having one has helped make the vision a reality.