My First Real Vision Board

Years ago, at a work event, we were given an hour to make a vision board. My colleagues dove for magazines and began cutting out pictures and passing around torn pages of aspirational vacation spots, icons of a favorite sport, or adorable animal pictures. 

I sat at my table and began folding my vision poster board into a book. 

Despite being a very visual person, I couldn’t get my head around the vision board. The problem not being unsure of what pictures appeal to me (things around running or baking or traveling). The problem being the second I open the magazine I want to read the words. I end up cutting out inspirational sayings or words that make me think.

I left that workshop with a small notebook with a few specific words pasted into it, the idea being I would use it for journaling on different topics. 

All this is to say—when a few days before New Year’s Eve, I posted in my neighborhood buy nothing group to see if anyone had old magazines they were giving away—I wasn’t sure what my end game was. 

With friends visiting from out of town, we sat around the family room, mindlessly cutting out pictures of dogs and running shoes and gorgeously decorated cakes. And then for a week after they left, I stared at a pile of torn up magazines and repeatedly knocked over the two accompanying glue sticks. 

Finally, last night, with the low rumble of the Steelers Ravens game on behind me, I laid out my construction paper and committed to finishing the thing. First, I had to get selective. I kept turning to my partner, “why did I cut this out? Did you cut this out? What does this mean?” to which he patiently reminded me again and again that he hadn’t cut up any of the magazines.

Just as I wanted to give up, just as literally any project on my list seemed more exciting than this, I reminded myself how important it is to push through things that feel outside your comfort zone. Perhaps this would be my first big learning and takeaway from my vision board. By all records, a vision board should be right up my alley. But I’d never truly made one and I was sitting with the nervous self consciousness of “am I doing it right?”

As I began to lay out my images and text, another thought came to mind and that is that perhaps there is no one way to do this. And perhaps the only real way to do it is to do it in a way that feels like you. In a way that feels authentic and unapologetic. 

When I finally finished the last cutout and had cleaned up the very messy coffee table, I stood back to look at my work. Then, like a little kid who’s just completed a complex school project, I ran to get my partner to show off my work. At a glance, it looks like me. It’s a little chaotic, the mix of animals and baked goods and half sentences. At the same time, lines of unrelated text come together to tell stories about my writing goals, my health goals, my lifestyle goals. 

It’s not yet been 12 hours since I tacked the completed board to the blank wall space above my desk but already, I feel a little enamored. When I’m working or writing or scheming in my space, I will be able to look up and see a line of runners from a race or a picture of water that’s meant to represent an upcoming family trip. I hope these images will give me perspective. I hope they will keep me focused on the things my January energy believes in. 

And even if it doesn’t. Imagining, as things go, that within a few weeks, it will become more a fading part of the background of the space, I’ll still hold onto the memory of pushing through the discomfort of “doing it wrong” and committing, in that sleepy Saturday night moment, to “doing it done.”