How to create a vision board in time for National Vision Board Day

It’s not too late to set your goals for 2022! National Vision Board Day is Saturday, January 8 and you can easily create a vision board by cutting things out of a magazine or printing images online.

Melissa Jones of the Girls Positivity Club joined us today to share her tips for creating the perfect vision board for you!

1. How do vision boards help people reach what they want most in life in 2022? 

Vision boards are a great way for parents, kids, and families to reflect on what they want to bring into your life in the upcoming year.  It is a way to make visual something that defines your goals and your desires to life in a visual way that motivates you to take action toward reaching them.  They are supposed to be a visual cue to help you take steps toward bringing these feelings and goals to life. Your vision board is most effective to achieve what you desire to visualize the process and keep track of the steps it will take to reach your goals.  They are a great daily reminder and keep you motivated throughout the year.  

2. What kind of things should people include on vision boards and what kind can you create?

Vision boards can come in many forms- poster board, digital, an arrangement of pictures on a corkboard, really there are limitless possibilities for the design process.  You should have a variety of visuals- words of feelings you want to bring into your life, pictures of events, quotes you want to live by, printed or actual photographs, and categories that will represent your goals.  The most important part is that vision boards should not only focus on the end desired result, but on the process, it will take to get there.  

For example, if you’re wanting to run a marathon, you won’t only have a picture of the finish line of a marathon, but the steps you will take to get there.  You may have a picture of running shoes, an alarm clock that reads 6 am (or whenever you plan to run), 20 minutes run each day, and so on to break down the process from where you are in that vision. for yourself. If you want. to spend quality time with your family, you may want to put how that will look- will you have pictures of trees because you’re going to go on a nature walk together, a board game night, a family dinner?  You have to visualize and ask yourself on a daily basis what you will do to feel the way you want to feel- more connected and happy as a family.  

3. How can people make sure their vision board is aligning with their values throughout the year? 

I think you have to know your core values and actionable goals as a person and as a family (if you are doing a family vision board) along with finding visuals to represent them.  A family vision board brings you all together around your values and allows you to verbalize and communicate what you want to work toward connecting with your values and goals collectively.

Then both individually and as a family, you have to reassess as needed.  You have to look at vision boards as something that can be updated over the year.  Not so frequently that it is meaningless, but leaving room for additions as they arise.  For example, once you reach a goal, you can add to your vision board to build onto it or to add something new that you didn’t expect to arise.  Leaving blank space on your board will allow it to be a bit more of a work in progress instead of something you can only update once a year no matter what.  This is a big change for me as in the past I have filled every visible space possible.  It takes a bit of the pressure off of having everything permanently in place until the following year. I think updating it at least twice a year is a great strategy for keeping it up to date.  

4. How do you make sure a vision board actually helps you throughout the year?

The first step is to place it where you’ll actually see the vision board every single day, pause in front of it every morning and start planning at least one action step toward one goal that is made visual on your board.  Then actually take the steps.  If you slip up and miss the mark, keep consistently taking action toward them.  

Again, you have to take steps toward the process of the things you have on your vision board. Pick smaller steps each day that is going to help you reach those bigger goals is really crucial.  If I have a dream of writing a book and becoming a New York Times best-selling author and that is the only visual, it’s not going to help me break down the steps.  A more helpful visual may be having “write 1000 words a day” AND having the achievement of selling it on Amazon may be smaller steps toward reaching the bigger goal of selling millions of copies.