I’ve remade my vision board. I had to; I was inadvertently manifesting all the wrong things. Let me explain…
For the past three years I’ve made a vision board, but I only got serious about it last year. The first one I made had pictures of things that yes, I wanted to see in my life, but I wasn’t particularly intentional when I was making it and unsurprisingly, the two pictures on there that I really connected with, were the only two things that came to fruition that year. Then, last year I set about choosing pictures that I really connected with. I knew what I wanted to call into my life and I chose pictures that represented those things for me. I set it as my desktop and phone background so that I would see it every day and it worked. I was spooked by how well it worked. The only things that didn’t come true on that vision board were doing regular yoga and eating a more plant-based diet but everything else, all the big things, came true.
So this year, I was excited to make a new one and start manifesting some magic in my life but after Christmas and New Year I found myself craving one thing above all else – space. I felt overwhelmed by life and work and as much as I love creating vision boards, I had no clarity around what I wanted to achieve this year. I put off choosing pictures and when we had our vision board making session in the Business Bread & Butter Club, I half-arsed my board. There was very little on there and the focus was very much on the space around the pictures.
You see, your vision board isn’t just about the pictures you choose, it’s also about the way in which you arrange them. How big are they? Do they overlap or is there space around them? I had planned on creating two vision boards, one for my personal life and one for the business but instead I included both worlds on the one board, with a clear division between the two. And here’s where I think I went wrong with that first board; there was too much space. It was too empty. The pictures I had chosen for the business side included a clear calendar and an empty diary. I had chosen these images to represent having a lighter schedule than the overwhelming one that I was currently battling with, but what I actually got in the weeks that followed were cancellation after cancellation after cancellation. The likes of which I haven’t seen before! As the weeks passed and my mood lifted and my motivation returned, I became less and less pleased with the vision board and found that whilst it was working in the one area that I had put the most focus on (biggest, favourite picture), that was the only area my subconscious was being drawn to and I knew that I wanted to remake it.
*** Cut to a montage of me sitting cross legged on my bed, picture clippings flying through the air as I tear through magazine after magazine, Edward Scissorhands style – except, I don’t use magazines to create my vision boards, I make them digitally. ***
How you make your vision board is a very personal process and everyone will have a different style and a preferred way of doing it. There are no rules, you do you. For me, it looks like deciding on the things that I want to manifest (examples from this year include the financial freedom to have a monthly massage, go for brunch regularly and increase how much I’m paying into my pension) and then finding beautiful pictures online that capture how those desires make me feel. Sometimes I will find the right picture almost instantly, other times I have an idea in my head of what I’m looking for but can’t find it. I use images from Instagram, Canva and Wix and will occasionally go hunting for something more specific and end up down a rabbit hole of online retailers. But the creative process is a joy and I relish in selecting my pictures before collating them into a beautiful and meaningful collage.
I use PowerPoint to create my vision board. I usually have a rough idea of where I want my pictures to go before I start, but then I am led by which pictures I want to feature most prominently. Sometimes I will go back and find a new picture to represent a theme if the one I’ve chosen doesn’t look right with the others. There’s a sense of cohesion in my board and that in itself is part of the magic. Like I said before, how I place my pictures is as important to me as the pictures themselves. The remade board is very deliberate. It’s split into two parts, business on one side and personal on the other but those sections are not the same size. The personal life section is larger than the business side, not quite two thirds of the page but almost, and this represents a better work-life balance for me. The things that I want most are at the top of the page and those pictures are larger. On the personal side these are fairly obvious but on the business side, the pictures might not make sense to an outsider. This is because there is more of a focus on how I want the business to make me feel this year. No, I don’t want to have two dogs pulling me along on roller-skates, but I do want to feel as though I’m gliding along effortlessly.
I create a landscape version for my desktop background and a portrait version for my phone so that I see my pictures every day. I have explained briefly in a previous post that vision boards work by serving as a daily reminder to your subconscious that these are the things you want to work towards in life. The science behind it is that seeing these reminders every day primes your brain to notice opportunities to bring you closer to achieving those goals. Vision boards and manifestation don’t work by magic – you don’t create the board and then sit back and let the Universe send those things to you, you still have to put in the work, but they do work by subliminally encouraging you to do the work more often.
For example, when I manifested my van for work, I saw the picture of a van on my vision board every day and started to mull it over more often than when it had been a pipe dream. In my downtime, instead of scrolling the Instagram, I started scrolling through Autotrader instead, just to look. That developed into specifically searching for what type of van what suit my needs best and slowly, the snowball began to roll down the hill until one day when I had a five minute gap before a client, I rang a dealership to find out if I needed an appointment to be shown around some vans. All these little steps grew into me taking out a loan and buying Blaze and they stemmed from seeing a picture of a van on my vision board every day. It was still me that put the legwork in but if I hadn’t had that daily reminder, I wouldn’t have had the thought to start browsing in my downtime. And that’s how vision boards work.
The original vision board I made in January and my new one are very different. For starters, the new one is pretty full. Where space took precedence on the first board, the feeling of having a full life dominates the new board. But that fullness is not overwhelming. By making the personal side bigger than the business side and filling it with pictures that excite me, it sparks my motivation whenever I look at it. I’m hopeful that this years board will be just as magical as last years, but I know that it is ultimately down to me. Challenge accepted.
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