Why Everyone Needs a Vision Board
When I first heard about vision boards, I thought it was a collage activity, I didn’t give it the time of day. I wish I had done sooner. There’s heaps of psychology behind the principle but in this blog I’ll share why it worked for me.
Living with a disability can give you a certain sense of positivity; another day, another opportunity, and the determination to make every single day count so I’m naturally an optimist. In addition, I spent a lot of my childhood sitting down, always armed with my craft box and caddy of notebooks, I loved doing collages and I’ve always been visual. So, when I finally did listen in to what my reflexologist (Lynn Butler in Sheffield), was saying about vision boards, I took note. It was a challenging time at the start of 2019 (for everyone), I’d been recovering from an ankle fusion operation that had been weighing heavy for some time and things were starting to feel a bit unfulfilling. I’d be up at 5am and in the gym for 6, get ready there then dash to work for 8 and not get home until around 6pm leaving a few hours to shower, make some tea, order materials, or sort the current renovation challenge and be in bed by 9pm (I like and need my sleep). I questioned if this was what I really wanted. Many people have individual goals and ambitions on their vision board but I suggested to Lee that we did a vision board together and before I knew it, I was buying a pin board and getting my scissors out.
We focussed on how we wanted to feel and started by collecting photographs of things that made us happy, things that we would love to be part of our every day ‘new life’ when the vision would have come true. Mostly these were pictures from our camera roll, memories on holiday by the sea, walking the dog, baking, meals we’d enjoyed, bikes we’d seen online and taken a screen shot of. We had said previously that we’d like to live in Cornwall at some point in the future, we didn’t know when or how but that didn’t matter, we thought it could be our five-year plan perhaps, so houses from Rightmove went on the vision board. Once we’d got all our pictures together, we started to identify words they evoked: calm, rest, and time. Life had become so rushed and noisy, and we were craving a quieter, simple life. We assembled the pictures and words onto the pin board on the night of a new moon, (which I since googled and discovered was a good time for manifesting your ambitions), and then placed the vision board on the chest of drawers at the bottom of the bed. We’d chat most mornings when we woke up and nights before nodding off about what we would do WHEN we lived in Cornwall, when our vision would have come true. We’d play the alphabet game of things we’d do WHEN we lived in Cornwall, we even started watching programmes on Cornwall and got stuck into the Poldark series. Due to lockdown and shielding there was a lot of time for this, and it was a bit of a fantasy that took us away from what was really happening.
Nonetheless by the end of April things changed with our circumstances. The rug was pulled from beneath us and we were needing to find new jobs. With a renovation to complete and a mortgage to pay this was a hiccup to say the least. However, we recognised that this was an opportunity to change this noisy and busy life to the life we had been visualising and talking about and begin our Cornwall adventure. Of course, it’s all we’d been talking about and manifesting! Who said we couldn’t ride our bikes to fetch pasties? Who said we couldn’t walk on the beach before going to work? Sit and just do nothing. We did. We were telling ourselves a terrible lie. Well mostly me, Lee has always been quite good at doing nothing.
Two months later our vision was becoming our reality, we’d both secured new jobs and the house was almost complete and ready to go on the market. This wasn’t what we’d pictured when the renovation began, we hadn’t even been in the house for two years, but we embraced it. We trusted the universe; it was easier than trying to figure the logistics out ourselves! We took the next few weeks one step at a time; get the house on the market, accept an offer, secure somewhere temporary to live in Cornwall, find friends to stay in the house until the sale completed, see friends and family to say, “see you soon” and load up our cars with as much as we could so we could hit the road! It wasn’t a fine-tuned well organised plan, but it worked because we believed it would and by the middle of August, we were walking the dog on the beach and tasting the local pasties (rhubarb and custard from The Cornish Bakery in Fowey is my new favourite).
It sounds, in my mind, quite easy and it was. We had a vision, and it was perfectly achievable once we believed it could be our reality. Using a vision board to audit and recreate your life is a truly powerful way to take responsibility for your future; there are no dreams too big. Since our new life started we have updated our vision board, thankfully it doesn’t involve moving house again!
