The Single Diaries Step-by-Step Guide to Vision Board Building
Growing up it was a tradition in my family to spend New Year’s Eve writing down our individual and family goals for the coming year. We’d meticulously tick through all of the important topics—health, travel, education, career… until we’d exhausted our lists. I kept my list in an old school notebook while my parents captured theirs on a loose piece of paper they’d pin up on their bedroom mirror. At the culmination of our list building we’d pull out our list from the year before and check off each of the goals we’d successfully completed.
As time went on our list-building exercise evolved into vision board building. Rather than simply tucking our goals away on paper that drew little attention throughout the year, we captured them with pictures glued to a poster board. My parents kept the board posted up so we could see our goals every day. The idea was that the more we saw our goals, the more likely we were to see them realized.
I always loved this annual ritual of ours especially revisiting the prior year’s goals and seeing how many things and seemingly, magically, come true. Books like, The Secret, and even Oprah Winfrey preach the practice of vision board building… attributing the “magic” that helps our goals come to fruition to a physical law of attraction that draws what we put out into the universe back to us. In this case, the act of putting our goals into a vision board is the act of letting the universe know what it is we want to attract.
Towards the end of college, I picked back up my family’s tradition and began building my own vision board at the beginning of each new year. Though it takes some planning ahead, the practice helps me start my year imagining all that is possible and getting focused on making it happen. And surely enough, every time I revisit previous boards I see that most of my visions have come true. Call it magic, the law of attraction, or whatever you will, I do believe there is power in articulating, capturing, and keeping your goals in front of you that allows them to actualize.
