Vision boards have a bit of a reputation! To some they seem a little airy-fairy, yet we have all heard the stories of the billionaires who pinned up a picture of their dream house, only to find themselves moving into that exact house five years later! So let’s delve a little deeper into this mystery and find out whether vision boards really can help you succeed.
What is a vision board?
Essentially a vision board is a collection of pictures, photos, words and quotes used to inspire you, encourage you to stay on track and give you focus. When it is described like this, it should be easier to see how a vision board ties in to achieving your life goals. But is it something you should use in your goal setting process and if so, how do you use them most effectively?
Vision boards can either be digital or old-school analogue. There are many online versions, the most popular being ‘Pinterest’ but lots of other apps serve the same purpose. Or there are the old-style – cork boards or A2 cardboard, filled with a pleasing collage of magazine clippings, photos, quotes and motivational titbits that get your heart-rate buzzing when you look at it.
How to make a vision board?
Collect pictures of your dream house or car, print out alluring photos of places you would love to visit. Basically, collect all the things you want to have, want to be and want to do and assemble them in a pleasing format which brings you pleasure. Proponents of the vision board use postcards of dream holidays, write fake cheques to themselves or mock up bank statements with their future balance written out.
Then, either digitally or on paper, they stick or pin these items to their board. Then they place it somewhere prominent – somewhere they will see on a regular basis – at least every day and the more often the better!
Tips and Tricks to a good vision board.
- Choose pictures that make your heart melt. The more emotive an image is, the more it will affect you.
- Try to cover the board with pictures spanning the 5 core areas of your life – money, relationships, health, time and self-care. Concentrating on just one aspect can leave your life a little unbalanced – as if you are focusing on money for example, at the expense of your health or relationships. Extrinsic goals are often out of your control (ie. the state of the economy, cultural pressure etc).
- Pick intrinsic goals to illustrate more often than extrinsic goals. Try to capture your ideal self and focus on your emotions, your personal growth and your spirituality; your feelings that your new life brings you.
- Find positive images rather than negative ones. Adding a picture of something you don’t want (or already have) will be counter-productive.
- Write down or print out your goals in beautiful calligraphy. A goal written down is more likely to come to pass than one simply kept in the mind.
- Rearrange the pictures several times to find an attractive layout that speaks to you. Remember you will be using this many times a day.
- When you have the layout nailed, put it somewhere conspicuous. You need to be looking at it several times a day – and especially first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
- When you spend a few moments studying your vision board, imagine yourself in those pictures, visualise yourself actually walking bare-footed across the clean white sands of your tropical paradise. Imagine driving to work every morning in that supercar or tending your beautiful front garden of your dream home, laughing fondly with your amazing neighbours.
- Try to believe that your dream is already yours. Be grateful that you are already living your best life and be grateful. List the things in the present tense you love having around you – caring friends, a loving family, beautiful pets, a stunning home etc.
Do vision boards really work?
There are a number of different reasons for the benefits you can get from using the vision board technique.
- Repeatedly seeing your goals, especially in a pictorial format, can be like an affirmation that some people swear by. This consistent thinking about your journey towards your goals keeps them alive and present in your mind. It gives you the reasons why you are working so hard or sacrificing so much for an end result. They provide us with the ‘why’ to our ‘what’.
- It clarifies your life vision, giving your actions purpose and direction. If you spend an hour every night after work every single day, to write your blog posts, it will remind you that giving up is not an option. So often, people get discouraged too soon in ventures such as these. Give yourself a fighting chance to remember the purpose of your striving.
- Designing your environment to help you achieve your goals is crucial to success. Habits and systems done consistently bring you closer to your goals and having a vision board in constant view is an excellent way to interrupt the bad habitual choices we make unconsciously and trigger new and healthier habits. Check out our article on How to use habit loops to reach your goals
- Vision boards help us track progress – if we use them as a marker of how far we have already come and that we are consistently edging nearer to the final outcome we so desire, motivates us to keep on keeping on!
- Sports psychologists train top-level athletes to visualise their performance in minute detail – seeing them effortlessly take each jump, step or pass well before the starting gun goes or kick-off. If Usain Bolt and Steve Redgrave use this process of visualising their journey, we can surely use some of this in our lives. Having a visual reminder of where we are heading and some actions that we need to take to get there, all planned out mentally, helps us to take the right actions in real life.
- We can easily get distracted by a plethora of different aspects of our lives. Netflix, social media, bad habits, they can all derail our efforts. Having a reminder of where we need to focus our energy and efforts stops us from taking tangents that do not bring us closer to our goals.
- Vision boards reinforce our positive self-image. Having a reminder of who we want to be and how we should act to get there, helps ingrain these aspects into our lives. A writer writes. The healthy person exercises. Few productive people sit in front of the T.V. for hours every night.
- Vision boards make us take ownership of our personal performances. They can apply a little bit of guilty leverage if we fail to take appropriate action because we know we will never reach our goals if we accept the lies and excuses we sometimes tell ourselves.
- By allowing us time to think and dream about our goals, we often unconsciously develop Plan Bs to circumnavigate the obstacles that could block our journey. We develop ‘If This Then That’ (ITTT) thinking which can aid us when we encounter stormier waters.
- Vision boards can simply inspire us to make the changes from our old self towards our new self: our version 2.0.
- They prove that your dreams can be a reality. After all, there must be someone who made the leap and permanently moved to the sun-kissed shores of Bali. Someone is living in your dream house at the moment – so why shouldn’t you? By bringing the ideas into some sort of tangible form, you are accepting that your goal is realistic!
Yes, but do they really work?
There is not a huge amount of scientific evidence to empirically state that having a vision board increases your chances of successfully reaching a goal. Dr Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and author of the bestselling book ‘The Source’ (see Tara Swart’s website here) says that we use images to prime the brain to look for new opportunities that we might otherwise miss. This is because “the brain has a process called ‘value-tagging’ which imprints important things onto your subconscious and filters out unnecessary information. It assigns higher value to images than words on a to-do list” and these pictures correspondingly move up in importance.
Could goal-centred thinking (such as vision boards) be detrimental to your success?
Although some say that vision boards inspire them to achieve great things, there are some scientists that say that they could actually have a negative impact.
The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology study in 2011 found that participants who visualised their goals in great detail, actually stops you from taking action, as the brain interprets the picture of a dream house as already yours. Therefore, there is little need to work hard to be able to afford one and so, reduces the motivation to take action.
To effectively counteract this, you should try focusing, not on the final goal, but on the Next Few Steps you need to take consistently to reach your goal. This shift in focus is vital as overweight people who visualised themselves as a healthy weight, relaxed their diets as the brain interpreted these thoughts as if they had already reached their weight goals.
In contrast, people with anorexia found that their restricted eating habits reduced when they visualised themselves being a healthy weight.
Conclusion: So should you use a vision board?
It is definitely worth a try. There are plenty of reasons for having a regular reminder of our goals that make psychological sense and as long as we understand the pitfalls of goal centred thinking, we can focus on our small habits and systems that will get us closer to those life goals we set for ourselves.