Today I’ve spent the whole morning making a vision board for this year.
It feels that I’ve been procrastinating doing this for over 2 weeks now, and suddenly felt the urge this morning, which is the first full moon of the year, and a powerful one at that, a good time to set intentions.
I’ve been doing this for 4 years now.
I started doing this as an alternative, no actually, as a rebellion against the typical masculine-orientated process of making a list/bullet point/gannt charts and suchlike.
Once upon a time I was a control freak scientist who adored excel and Gannt charts. I was extremely process driven, I never forgot a thing, and was irritated beyond belief by people who didn’t prepare and plan things in advance or forgot stuff.
The birth of my first child rewired my brain, and led to my leaving my scientist career to become a doula. You can read about that here.
My creativity went through the roof and my organisation skills kind of decreased at the same time. I’m am so much happier for it!
The only problem was, I didn’t know how to organise things except in the way I had been taught.
The first couple of years of my self employed life I rode on the wave of excitement and novelty, so things were effortless and easy.
Then a couple of years later, I felt overworked and out of control.
What I didn’t realise at the time, was that the process I was using was a male one, a linear one, and that it didn’t suit who I was anymore.
So I started experimenting with more fluid, intuitive, creative, and feminine ways of working.
Making a vision board was such a process.
Here’s how I do it:
I gather a bunch of old magazines (I need quite a lot so I accumulate them over the years, many being free magazines I grab in local cafes etc).
I set my intention of what I want this vision board to be for (for me, it’s what I’d like more of in my life this year, but you could use it for something entirely different).
It’s nice to meditate before you start, especially about how you’d like to feel, rather than setting targets for now.
Then I sit at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee, and flick through the magazine and rip any page that has a picture that appeals to me. I am completely intuitive about this, I’m not analysing it.
After I’ve got enough pictures, I then cut them nicely using a rotary trimmer and scissors. As I do this I discard some pictures already.
I lay a large piece of flipchart paper on the table, then arrange all by themes. Some pictures don’t make the cut.
I visualise what each picture means for me as I set them in place. It’s quite vague at this stage but it feels important to do that. It doesn’t have to be logical or fully fledged either, usually at this stage it’s just an idea.
Finally I glue all the pictures in place, and set the finished vision board in a prominent place in my house.
Over the last 3 years I’ve been doing this, as I look at the board from time to time, it’s fascinating to see how what I visualised has manifested itself, often in different ways to what I had imagined, but manifested itself nevertheless.
I wrote this to encourage others to try it and I’d love to hear, or even better, see, what you come up with and what effects it has for you.
Here’s what the one I made today looks like.
