What is a Vision Board?

“What is a Vision Board? Why would I make one?”

For those unfamiliar with making a Vision Board, this article is for you. We all make New Year’s resolutions, or, if the year has sped by without them, we make promises to ourselves later in the year to be better…or to make more money…or to lose the weight…or to go to the gym. These promises soon fade as the actual challenge of changing our ways rears up in front of us like a mountain. Yes, changing our ways is hard, and the road is not particularly rewarding in the beginning. How many times have the promises faded? They can become rather punishing to remember, and so are soon forgotten.
Some 60-plus years ago, Napoleon Hill wrote about this problem in his forward-thinking book of the time, “Think and Grow Rich.” He understood that, without a vision of what you want, you cannot pull in the forces of your life to manifest that vision. He understood that the vision must be accepted from deep below the conscious mind, so that all aspects of the mind are in agreement with the vision. The vision becomes a promise to yourself that you will not break.
The Vision Board takes your promise to yourself beyond thought to a visual reality. With no judgment or memory, the Vision Board shines a light upon the way you want your future to be, and calls you to it. By making a Vision board, you inform your innermost mind of what you truly want, using your own photographs or pictures from magazines. To be effective, the Vision Board must be made by you, using colors and printed words that reflect what you truly want. Surrounding a picture of yourself with all that you desire opens your mind to the idea that you have already begun to live in that future. Hanging it on the wall in a place where you can see it daily reminds your innermost mind that the journey has already begun and that you welcome the arrival of all within the picture.
At what was perhaps my lowest point, some three years ago, my life looked like this: I was 62, just widowed, unemployed, had had to put down my sweet old dog, and had a cancer on my face removed leaving a long red scar. My only child married and moved away. I was a pretty sad sack! I determined, however, that this was NOT what the rest of my life was going to look like, and so made a Vision Board for myself and hung it in my bedroom.
When I looked at it carefully two years later, I realized that EVERY thing I’d put on it had come true, from “good health” and “no regrets” to “romantic music” and “stretch the imagination”. I was stopped suddenly by a few words from a magazine: “develop our projects”. I stared at those words: “Our” projects? I couldn’t remember putting them onto the Board. I was the most single woman I knew when I made that Board, and had had no way to think about being any other way. I was a “me”, not an “our.” By putting this little scrap of paper on my Vision Board, I had called the “our” into my life, and indeed am partnered now with a wonderful new man.
As the New Year begins, it’s time to create new ways for taking action to get what you truly want from life. The Vision Board can represent a time a year in the future; it can represent your hopes for a single event, or it can be for an indefinite time. Hanging it on the wall in a place where you can see it daily keeps your dreams alive and awake in your mind. You will automatically make decisions and take actions that lead you toward your desires. You create a vision for yourself and that vision will draw you to its promise.
Phone 425- 252-1591 at Vision Quest Books in Everett to sign up for the January 19th Vision Board experience! I am your facilitator for this! KB

Matted works are beautiful, ready to get on their home walls!