Why You Need a Vision Board and How to Create One that Motivates You

I have to say that creating a vision board hasn’t always been at the top of my priority list when I set up a new year or a new quarter. Instead, I would always push it to the side. Images didn’t necessarily motivate me. And to me, that meant that it wasn’t worth the time. But then I realized that you can make your vision board anything you want it to be. It is meant to motivate YOU! That is when the lightbulbs started going off.

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Why you Need a Vision Board

One of the biggest reasons is that it helps you visualize what you want for your life keeps you motivated with your goals. When you look at a vision board regularly, it keeps these desires at the forefront of your mind. It will constantly prompt you to make progress on what is most important to you. As you visualize these outcomes regularly, it motivates you to continue working towards the outcome that you see in the images and words in front of you.

It also allows you to get a bit creative, and that is part of the reason we are crafting our dream life. We want to tap into that creative energy, especially if it isn’t what is the norm for us. Taking time to visualize your goals, visualize your life, and where you want to go is a powerful way to craft your dream life.

Remember, a vision board is a personal item. It isn’t something that you need to share with the world, but if it helps keep you accountable, you certainly can share it.

When you take the time to think about what you want your life to be, the daily habits and rhythms, how you want to spend your time each day, it helps you to make progress. You start to see these images and words every day, and something happens in your brain to want to constantly strive for those ideas that you are looking at each day.

Of course, sometimes looking at the same thing day after day can get a bit stale, and that is when you update your vision board to make it fresh for your mind. You can do this yearly or quarterly, or honestly any time that you need a new little boost of energy.

How do you Create a Vision Board?

There are so many ways to create this visual representation of the life you want to live. When I say visual, I’m sure you think of images. That is certainly one way to go about this process. However, it isn’t the only way. You can also use words. It depends on what is going to motivate you the most.

For me, I have often used words as the primary way to see what I want my life to be. I do like images, but I didn’t find them as valuable as words for a very long time. So instead of images, I would doodle on my poster board, and then fill it with the words that would motivate me to continue moving forward and make progress on my goals.

Once I started including my kids in the process of creating this tool for the future, my ideas on how to visualize what I wanted, changed. Instead of just words, it was now, still a lot of, words, but also images. The images were mostly pictures of my family, my kids, and the fun we experience throughout the year. That gave me more motivation to craft my dream life than words alone, or images of people and places that I don’t know.

What tools do you need?

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There are a number of ways to create vision boards, all of them equally as good. It depends on what you are looking for as you are creating it. Do you want something small and portable that you can keep in your planner and look at daily or weekly as you plan your life? Maybe it is a large poster board? You put up on your wall in a space in your home that you are constantly in. Maybe you keep it in your goal planner so you see it every time you check in with your goals. It can also be something digital – either the background on your computer, or your phone wallpaper. There are a number of ways to create this visual representation of what you want your life to be.

Depending on the direction you want to go will determine which tools you need. The old school way is to take a piece of poster board, some glue sticks, and old magazines and go to town. That is actually my preferred way when doing this activity with my kids. However, the issue now is that magazines aren’t all that common to have in the house anymore.

That is where pinterest and the internet in general come in. You can go online and search for pretty much any image that you want to use. Then print it out, and glue it to your poster board. Or, if you are looking to do something digitally, you can drag and drop right into canva or pic monkey. This way is a bit more challenging because you have to have ideas before you go in to search. That is why the magazine option is a great one, especially for kids. Sometimes you don’t know exactly what you are looking for until it shows up in front of you.

Tips for Digital Options

If you are going the internet search route, sit down and make a list of ideas of what you want your life to be. Take out a notebook, or a brain dump journal and write. Make a list. Then you start to search. This is one of the easiest ways to figure out some images to use.

Oftentimes a vision board will come after you have set your goals for the quarter or year. If that is the case, take the goals you have written and search images that way. Use AI if you need some help getting started!

If you are starting with a long-range vision board, really think about what you want your life to be like in 10 years. This doesn’t have to be your only visual representation of your dream life. In fact, I recommend doing this at least yearly. But, you can change it up as often as you want. Having something super long-range, and then smaller, shorter range options is a great way to continue to make progress.

My Vision Board Plans

My plans for the coming year are to actually have four different vision boards. These will be smaller than a poster board. Instead, I want to put them into my planner for 2025. I want to separate them into four different categories. As of right now, those categories are:

• Home and Family
• Homeschool
• Personal
• Professional

I think this will give me a good representation of all areas of my life. In fact, a little spoiler for my goal planning in December, I think that I will be using these four categories for setting goals in 2025 as well. They are broad enough to cover all facets of my life, and the areas that are most important to me as well.

The Bottom Line

You only have this one life. I know, it may seem dire to say something like that, but it is true. Because you only have this one life, you want to live it in the way that makes you and your family the happiest. There may be one hundred reasons why crafting and living your dream life doesn’t work in your mind, but having a visual representation of what you want your life to be will help you make steps in the right direction.

And while we are at it, remember that when you constantly tell yourself you can’t do something for whatever reason, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.

~Henry Ford