How often do you write out your goals? Daily? Monthly? Not at all? It may be time you assessed this practice and take it to the next level! Here’s how.
Write Out Your Goals
Setting goals for yourself is a great form of motivation, inspiration, and an overall reminder to keep you on track. Having your goals written down can help you assess your daily productivity and whether or not your time spent doing different activities will help lead you to that end goal or achievement.
Having different levels of goals can also be a great practice. Where do you see yourself in ten years, five years, a year from now, or even next month? If you are really proactive about setting goals and motivated enough to write out weekly or daily goals, do it!
What better time of the year to create your very own vision boards than during the time you are starting to implement your New Year’s resolutions (and hopefully not failing on any already!). Here’s how to started making your very own vision board today.
Dream Big!
Photo by David Marcu
Don’t hold yourself back when setting your life goals, whether it is in your relationships, job, or personal life. Negative thoughts and images of ourselves are the biggest obstacle on our road to success. Let the imagination you had in your childhood take over and you’ll be surprised at what barriers that you previously though impossible to cross now fade away.
Visualize the Possibilities
Photo by Todd Quackenbush
The brain is often stimulated best through visual cues. Even when something is not in our forebrain, visual cues can activate our subconscious to help lead us to make decisions that we aren’t actively thinking about.
Get to Work
Assuming that you’ve now taken the time to consider your goals and where you want to be in a set amount of time, take what you have written and transform it into a vision board. A vision board is a visual representation of your goals and achievements that you display somewhere where you can see it often enough to be a subconscious reminder of what you are working toward.
Author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books and big advocate for vision boards Jack Canfield suggests placing it next to your night stand. He states that this is most powerful because those thoughts and images we experience in the last forty-five minutes before bed are the ones perpetuated in our subconscious minds throughout the night.
Vision boards also a fun and creative project you can do with friends, family, or co-workers. If you find you really enjoy making vision boards, you could really go the extra mile and make one for each area of your life (Work, School, Family, Friends, etc.)
I personally like to make vision boards with my “One-year goals”. This way it is not too short of time that I get disappointed when I don’t make great strides to reach my goal and it is not too long of time that I cannot feel the wonderful feeling of accomplishment when I see that I’ve reached my objective.
I’ve made several vision boards and have hung them by my desk. After a substantial amount of time had passed it was crazy to see that I had actually achieved most of the goals on my vision board over time.
How to Make Vision Boards
1) Get a poster board, cardboard, cork board, piece of large paper or whatever you can find to stick a collage of photos on and are able to display.
2) Gather magazines, personal photos, or peruse Google images to find the perfect picture to represent your goal. I like to add inspirational quotes to mine as well. It’s YOUR vision board so get creative! Make sure to have scissors and glue handy and a printer if you are printing your photos from the Internet.
3) Create affirmations by typing or writing them out and place them with the corresponding pictures.
4) Glue, tape, or pin everything together in a neat manner; too much clutter could cause confusion or attract chaos into your life. Don’t try to recreate your collages from junior high that were a visual assault of “cool” “savvy” “chic,” all of the celebrity guys you wanted to date, and this season’s hottest nail polishes.
5) To really drive the point home and put your vision board to its best use, take a few minutes per day to look at it—focusing on the goals and affirmations you have identified on your board and what is depicted overall will help you to accomplish those goals in your life.
Writing photo credit: FLICKR | mezone via PhotoPin | Creative Commons
