Vision Boards, a How-to

Leave it to Oprah to generate a buzz that is heard around the world and sends Google searches a flyin’. Last week she invited a panel of teachers and visionaries from The Secret to talk about their lives and profound personal transformations, and to share their messages with her audience. Lisa Nichols, who appeared in the movie The Secret, was a guest life coach on the popular show “Starting Over”, and has dedicated her coaching skills to help thousands of teenagers, held up one of her tools-of-the-trade: you guessed it — her vision board. Created more than a year before last week’s show aired, she had composed the following statement into her vision board as something she wanted to bring forth in her life: “Be on the Oprah show”. At that time, she had no clue how that would come about. She just knew that this was what she wanted to do.

I made my first vision board a year ago and another in October. My new one for ’07 is now on the dining table, on its way to completion (that would be tonight!). Although my first board does not feature such a far-reaching declaration as “Be on the Oprah show”, it does include visual representations for: joy, gorgeous flowers, garden creation, increased revenue, domestic organization, beautiful home, happiness, dancing, dance performance, and art work. I have to say that repeated return to these visuals must have influenced life decisions during the course of the year, because I feel that that board does indeed reflect my personal experience during 2006.

As you know, my personal challenge is reining in too many things I want to grow, change, learn, do. However, I’m finding with this most recent board that I am better at fine-tuning and focusing the specifics. It would be way too easy to just make pretty, eye-pleasing collages to perk up a corner of my desk. I want this board to do its job: keep me attentive and focused on this year’s intentions. I’ll post a photo when it’s finished. Until then, here’s a step-by-step for those who are interested:

Supplies:

You’ll need paper glue and/or double-sided tape, a sheet of poster board, scissors. I vote against glue sticks because over time, the glue fails.

Gather together a bunch of magazines. As a lover of magazines and a rabid recycler, I have way too many of these hanging around anyway. Vision boards and collages are a great way to put them to extended use!

Let your inner wild child go crazy — tear out pictures, words, phrases. Keep in mind your focus for this particular board. I often end up with a pile of leftovers, which goes into an “Inspiration” file for later use.

Play with the words and images, arranging and rearranging to your heart’s content. There is no right or wrong. You may decided to not include any words at all, which is one way to approach it. Or, perhaps the words will dominate the images. Whatever works for you is the right way to go. Good luck and have fun!