How To Create A New Year's Vision Board That Will Transform Your Life For The Better
It's time to get creative with your resolutions.
Dasha Petrenko/Shutterstock A New Year's vision board helps you dream and scheme, defines your intentions, and focuses your attention.
In a sense, the board is a declaration of commitment to your hopes and dreams.
Once they're declared or posted on your board, you can hone them into more specific targets and plans, take action, and, ultimately, fulfill them.
New Year's vision board and resolutions
Typically, people make a wish list and give it the jazzy — and often falsely empowered — title of "My New Year's resolutions." But, all too often, the exercise stops there.
People either give up or quickly forget about their resolutions. According to Forbes, 80% of resolutions fail by February.
More realistically, successful sustainable change and transformation require greater articulation than imagery, attunement to opportunities, action, progressive steps, and recognition of successes.
It requires serious perseverance.
Sure, sometimes you might find that what you want seems to simply serendipitously arise. But, you can't count on that.
So, don't sit idle in the meantime. Don't be a wallflower. Engage and stay open if you want your vision to dance with the energy of the universe.
What's the function of the New Year's vision board?
All vision boards have one thing in common. They use a visional representation of mental, emotional, and even spiritual inspirations and aspirations of the person who creates it.
Some are time-sensitive. Others are more open-ended.
It's my impression that all vision boards are, fundamentally, devices for dreaming and scheming. They can also serve as a reminder and reinforce commitment.
Real change and transformation come from what you do in your everyday life to bring it about.
The vision board depicts one person's vision for the coming year.
Each aspiration is represented by a photo, which is the main component of that particular goal. Some items are specific. Others are more general or qualitative.
For example:
Spend more time with good friends.
Emphasize quality over quantity.
Relax more.
Get more sleep.
Better work-life balance.
Seek out more beauty.
More self-care.
Finish my book.
Winter break in Barbados.
Visit my sister in Europe.
Buy a new car.
Have more compassion for myself and others.
Believe in me and my abilities.
3 Steps to creating a New Year's vision board
Take some time to think about and make a list of what you'd like to change or achieve in the coming year.
Search magazines, photo albums, or the internet for visual representations or metaphors.
Glue all the images to cardboard or some other preferred backing, organizing them in a way that's appealing to you.
Now, embody your New Year's resolution.
The dreaming and scheming stage is critical to the change process and can be wonderfully invigorating.
Furthermore, the process of constructing a vision board stimulates creativity and spiritual ritual. However, the transformation process doesn't stop there.
Craft specific intentions into your vision board.
Whenever possible and applicable, turn the visions represented on your board into clear, positive, and specific intentions.
This will provide more direction to your process and a clearer path to fulfillment. With this clarity, you'll be better able to orient yourself, take targeted actions, and monitor success.
Clear, positive, and specific intentions help you notice and respond to opportunities, even unexpected auspicious stepping stones.
Energetically, these types of intentions are more apt to entrain with the right energies (think co-create or "Law of Attraction").
Embody your transformation through your vision board.
If you continue to engage with your vision board, you'll keep the interest, focus, and energy alive. This might be through meditation, crystal grids, energy healing, or some other form of ritual.
If you can sense and embrace small changes and shifts, you'll be able to encourage your life-forward movement. In addition, you"ll be able to celebrate and embody your progress.
Patricia Bonnard, PhD, ACC is an integrated coach and energy healer offering a blend of conventional coaching, embodied practice, and energy healing to help clients go one level deeper and make important life decisions creatively and authentically.