Vision boards are probably something you’ve heard of on social media, or on Pinterest, but didn’t quite understand their purpose. Gurus and social media influencers probably made them sound like another fruitless attempt at helping you with your motivation and seeking your purpose in life.
So now, here you are, thinking I’m spoon feeding you the same BS that you’ve come across before. I promise you that’s not it, and I’m going to tell you exactly how vision boards positively impacted my life. After explaining what a vision board is, I’m going to tell you why they’re important. But just like any other scientist out there, I’m going to back it up with evidence so maybe you’ll believe me.
Then, when we’re done with all the serious stuff, I’m going to give you some fun ways to create your own, so you can start visualizing how you want your life to look. So just bear with me, and I promise, you will leave here with some new information.
What exactly is a vision board?
Vision boards are exactly what they sound like; boards about your visions. Now this may sound crazy, like why would I waste my time with this arts and crafts project? You may have even seen a vision board before and thought they weren’t worth the trouble. They looked like huge collages of magazine cut outs and printed out pinterests pins thrown together on a posterboard.
And you’re right. There are some vision boards out there that look like that. but actually, vision boards can look like whatever you want them to. I’m more of a minimalist when it comes to my personal vision board. I like the simplicity of stating what I want in my life. No pictures or glue. Just a colorful poster board and some sticky notes. If you want to beef yours up, that’s completely fine. Do what works for you, because at the end of the day, these are your goals. So however you need to visualize them is up to you.
In a nutshell, a vision board is a physical representation of the things you want to manifest in life. Having dreams and goals in your head is one thing. Putting them down on a piece of paper, and hanging them up for all to see, is a different thing. It’s something that you can physically look at everyday, so you don’t lose sight of your goals. You don’t forget them, and you keep reminding yourself what it is you want to accomplish. It’s one large gathering spot for all of your goals to be written down.
Why are vision boards important?
When I was in college, I was a research assistant in a psychology lab on campus. The very first lab meeting of every semester, we would write our goals down on a notecard and pin them up for everyone to see. Scary right? “Oh no, everyone’s going to know my personal goals? What if I don’t meet them? Then everyone will know!”
Exactly, that’s the point. Ray Wu, cofounder of a social media platform for people to share their weight loss, did a study on sharing goals and outcomes. He found that those who shared their weight loss on a platform, like Twitter, lost on average 1.27 pounds/week, compared to the 0.27 pounds/week when they were silent about their goals and accomplishments.
CEO of Complete App, Xander Shultz, double downs on this idea with his app. He stated the reason that people were not completing goals and tasks was due to a lack of motivation. They just kept pushing them off to the next day. However, with this app, they add their goals and accomplishments to a public platform so that they are held accountable. This gives them a reason to push forward, while also giving them a place to receive praise once they did. Praise is as good an extrinsic motivator as any.
When we are silent about our goals, not only do we create an atmosphere of unaccountability, but there’s also no one there to cheer us on when we finally do it. Elizabeth Lombardo, author of Better Than Perfect: 7 Steps to Crush Your Inner Critic and Create a Life You Love, agrees that lack of accountability hurts motivation. When our goals are public, we look bad if someone asks us about them and we have done nothing to try and accomplish them. This pure desire to be congratulated and receive praise for not being stagnant is enough for more people to stop procrastinating and actually get things done.
This is why I share my goals on social media and here…
I want you guys to ask me, “Hey didn’t you say you wanted to do xyz? Have you done that yet? If not, what are you doing to reach that goal? What can you do to create time to reach that?” These are questions that help keep someone accountable without pressuring them.
I told everyone I was going to be a doctor, now I have to finish or I would have to explain to everyone why I didn’t finish. How embarrassing right? The pressure is on, but as long as I’m still pursuing something that makes me happy, and not quitting just because it’s hard, then that’s what I’ll use as my motivating force.
Vision boards accomplish this. When you hang it up where someone can see it, people ask you these questions. If you don’t want to feel some type of way by saying you’ve done nothing to accomplish it, then you will be busting your tail to get them done. As you accomplish certain goals, you move on to other goals and add them to the vision board. It’s a fluid, everchanging piece of your home.
What you need to make one
The supplies list is quite simple for my version of a vision board. If you want something more elaborate, then there is plenty of inspo on Pinterest. I am going to do my best to pin some to my Mental Toughness Board so you can see a variety of examples (if I don’t do this HOLD ME ACCOUNTABLE!). As most of my readers are balling on a budget, you can make a vision board for less than $10 and it will last you several rounds of goal making.
- Poster board, paper or cardboard (paper is probably easiest to hang on the wall)
- I chose one with a sparkly border because that’s my personality, but choose whatever color or design you want!
- notecards (plain or colorful)
- Sharpies, pens, or markers (your choice of color)
- tape
- thumb tacks or other hanging mechanisms
- (optional) sticky notes (colorful on plain)
How to make a vision board
Making your vision board is really simple, and also open to interpretation. I’m going to give you some very general guidelines to follow, and you put your own spin on it. Please, post them on Instagram and tag me, Twitter, Facebook, or leave a picture in the comments below. I would love to be able to share your vision boards with everyone and give them more inspiration. I also would like to share your personal testimony for how a vision board inspired you.
- Title your vision board. I kept mine very simple and titled it “Darian’s Vision Board” (original I know). Using a variety of marker colors, I wrote it in thick marker and fancied up with colors from a thinner pen. You can use cut outs, stencils, magazine letters, whatever. Just title it so it is clear what it is.
- Find a meaningful quote about dreams and goals, manifestation, or power of the tongue. Whatever helps you understand the importance of turning a dream into a reality. For me, the quote at the bottom of my vision board is “A dream with a DEADLINE becomes a goal”. Put it somewhere on your board, either physically, or by putting it on a note card and adding that.
- Write your goals on a separate piece of paper. This is where the notecards or sticky notes come in. You want to write your goals on them, instead of directly on your board for a couple of reasons. They are easy to take off so you can change them out or take them down when you’ve completed them. Also, you can change the background color so it’s more enticing to look at.
- After your goals are written on notecards or sticky notes, add them to your vision board. I put tape on the back of my notecards and added them. You can use glue, but it’s a lot more permanent and harder to remove than tape. You can also use tacks if your board is thick enough. The order you put them in is up to you as well as the colors you choose. Whatever catches your attention and fits in with your aesthetic. Maybe you want to use the notecards for career/education goals, and sticky notes for emotional goals. It’s completely up to you.
- After you have added everything and put your board together, hang it up somewhere. In the next section, we’ll talk about why it’s important where you hang it. Boom you’re done.
- Take a picture and share it with me!
Where you should hang your vision board
Put it somewhere visible where you have to look at it everyday. You don’t want to put it behind your bedroom door where you’ll never see it. The first time I made one, I hung it above my mirror because let’s be real, I’m looking in that all day.
The second time I made one, I hung it above my TV. This is effective for a couple of reasons. I watch TV before I go to bed, so naturally, my vision board is one of the last things I’m looking at before going to bed for the night. Second, I normally do my workouts on my TV, so while I am getting my day started, I am reading my vision board over and over. The repetition of reading your goals and saying them outloud not only reminds you to do them, but speaks them into existence.
I am the Queen believer of manifesting your dreams by speaking them into existence. The tongue has the power of life and death (Proverbs 18:21). So the more you speak on something and put it into the universe, the more it will come back to you. My post on You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero speaks a lot about this.
Think about it, you spend all day telling yourself that you can’t do something and that something is impossible. And look at you. Not doing it.
But just imagine what might happen if you tell yourself that you can do something and that it is possible. Give it a try and believe it with all your heart. Reading your goals everyday on your vision board will also help you believe it.
That’s a little thing us psychology majors like to call cognitive dissonance. When you believe something (i.e. that you can’t do something), but your actions and words (i.e. reading your vision board everyday) are the opposite, eventually, the two will meet. Hopefully on the side of the vision board, but it’s up to you.
How a vision board impacted my life
Now don’t think I’m going to get on my blog and encourage you all to do something that I haven’t done or wouldn’t do. I only advocate for things I really believe in on here. So I’m going to share my experiences with a vision board to help convince you to make one.
The first time I made a vision board was the summer of my first gap year. I was getting ready to take classes I needed to apply to medical school and take the MCAT. Let’s be honest, I was also 22 and Super Single, so looking for love was another goal of mine. Plus my senior year was so disheartening, I had a lot of growing and healing to do. Basically, ya girl had a lot of goals to reach and needed to organize them so I could visualize them.
So I went to Walmart, bought a $2 poster board, some sharpies, and sticky notes. Within 30 minutes, I had written down all the academic, social, and emotional goals I had for my hiatus and slapped them on the board. I hung it up above my mirror and just let it do its thing. Let me tell you what happened and what didn’t.
Goals that worked out:
- I got all As in all the courses I took, crucial for me to raise my GPA
- I got my clinical shadowing hours I needed and continued racking up volunteer hours through my sorority.
- During the second year of my hiatus, I moved. This one is kind of weird because I had these lofty dreams of quitting my job and getting a new one in NYC or Houston, somewhere exciting, then changed my mind and decided to stay in Tulsa, OK. However, I ended up having to move, but back in the suburbs of Kansas, living in my parents’ basement. So it still materialized, just in the most unexpected way.
- I fell in love. YEP YA GIRL IS HAPPILY CUFFED and working everyday on moving on from any residual hurt from the heartbreaks that are inevitable in college.
- I developed a closer relationship with God. I found a church home, became a member, and attended service every Sunday that I could. It was a really important move for me because it was the first time I had my own personal relationship and not one constructed from growing up going to church because that’s just what we did in my house.
- I got into medical school!!!
Goals that didn’t work out
Don’t get me wrong. My vision board wasn’t foolproof. I must have ran out of wishes or been unrealistic, but in the grand scheme of things, the things that didn’t materialize must have just not been meant to be.
- I did not get my dream MCAT score of 512. In fact, I fell quite lower than that as I shared in a previous post. But that just required me to beef up other parts of my application because I guess that score just wasn’t meant to be.
- I was not able to make enough money to buy a new car. Me and my OG “Pinkie” are still rocking together (if you know, you know)
- No scholarship money for school just magically landed in my inbox. Could I have (and should I still be) put more effort towards it. Absolutely. That just points to the integration of a vision board and actual work.
As I have transitioned to a new part of my life, my vision board has been updated. It will continue to be updated. Vision boards are by no means meant to be static objects. They should be dynamic, changing as you change and as your priorities change. I don’t mind sharing my goals with you because I want you to know the high expectations I have for myself.
The importance of having high expectations, is that I am always striving for the best. Even if I don’t reach them, putting in the effort to at least try is going to put my in a good position, no matter what.
For example, one of my goals is to rank #1 in my class. I’m not shy to admit that and I don’t mind if my classmates know. Does that mean I’m going to be a shark and take down everyone? No way. I’m very much a team player. For me, what that goal means is I’m going to put in the work that is required to reach that goal, and regardless the outcome, I know I will have put myself in a good position to reach my other goals.
Does this mean I will stress myself into crazy woman trying to reach them, and beat myself up if I don’t? No. It’s all about the process and putting forth the effort. If you just try your best, then after your initial reaction, you can’t be anything but happy about the outcome.
So, get started and please take the time to share with me your vision boards, and the changes you’ve seen with them!
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