What is a Vision Board and How to Make a Giant One

What the What is a Vision Board?

A vision board is:

1. A visual reminder of what you want to achieve or manifest in your life
2. Personal to you and what taps into your emotions
3. Created by you, usually from images you find in magazines or online
4. A daily reminder of where to place your focus and what to work toward
5. A really fun excuse to get all crafty and creative

Recently I started a mini vision board sketchbook in a blank Moleskine, and it feels like the lazy lady’s version of scrapbooking – you basically just pack it full of cool stuff you love, and you can take it out to gaze upon at your leisure.

You can use it as a daily vision book to keep in the forefront of your mind those things you want to achieve and acquire, and it gives you total Law of Attraction juju. Right? The things we choose to think about the most are the things we attract in our lives. Even if you aren’t into the Law of Attraction, you can see the benefits of focusing on what you want, right? Especially in a visual way?

Sometimes though, you need to have that stuff available at a glance. Sometimes it’s not even enough to be able to yank it out of your purse whenever you need it.

I decided to spend a delightful morning in my studio, with a ton of iced green tea, podcasts a-playin’, crafty materials spread out all over the floor, and make a giant vision board to hang up on my wall. This way I could cram a ton of visuals onto a single surface, happily intermingled together, and I can look at it all the time when I’m in there working.

If you don’t want to make a giant vision board, you can use a regular piece of card stock or cut a piece of poster board in half. Or go the Moleskine route, and add to it as you find visual inspiration.

How to Make a Vision Board

I like to grab a PILE of magazines, and flip through them, cutting out anything and everything that jumps out at me in a positive way: colors, shapes, people, words, textures, art, cool items, healthy, nourishing food, beautiful spaces. Don’t overthink. You can cull out the mediocre stuff later.

You can choose to focus on one specific area of your life right now, or go for an overall positive vibe.

I like to do everything at once. After I cut everything out, I usually separate the pieces into piles of similar themes.

Then I do a rough layout on my poster board to see how everything fits together. Usually the theme piles get split up, because I like to lay out the largest pieces first, and fill in blank spaces with smaller pictures. I’ll try to keep them generally together, but usually the composition of the whole board wins out, and I fit pictures in where they look good with other pictures.

Do whatever feels good to you – randomly glue pieces on, working all over the board at the same time, or you can be more calculated about it and keep the areas of your board themed.

More Vision Board Ideas

Feel free to draw or write on the board or pictures, too. Add stickers! Or labels! Or glue pieces of colored card stock onto the poster board first if you want more of a delineated background to work off of.

Alternatively, you can use a giant framed cork board as your vision board, so you can swap out and move around images more easily.

This would be SUCH a fun lady-get-together crafting night idea, right?

Ideas for areas of focus on a vision board:

• Organization
• Focus
• Healthy eating
• Creativity
• Home
• Exercise
• Writing
• Starting a business
• Social life
• Luv

Here’s my vision board close up. Can you find the Ellen Degeneres?

Using Your Vision Board

You can keep it up on your wall for as long as it speaks to you. Once you stop looking at it, or it doesn’t give you an emotional boost any longer, either take it down, cover over it with new pics, or move it to a new location.

The key for these vision boards to work, is that they need to fill you with strong positive emotions when you look at them. Whatever you have put on the board needs to resonate deeply with you. If you’ve cut out a pic of a woman doing the most amazing-looking yoga pose ever, and as you look at it you realize you don’t even want to do yoga, cover over her.

Make sure you take some time every day to look at your board. And not just a perfunctory glance. Sit your ass down and look at that thing for a good 5 minutes or so. Absorb yourself in it – really feel yourself in that mountain retreat, or spending your days writing a novel in your light-filled office, with your yellow lab asleep at your feet.

Say the words out loud if you want – turn them into affirmations and enjoy hearing yourself state what you want as if it is true now. (You will get past feeling like a weirdo talking to yourself.)

Want to add meditation to your self-improvement arsenal? Check out my tips for beginner meditators right here.

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