How Do I Create A Vision Board For My Life?

Vision Boards are something I have been doing for a few years now, in 2021 I  started creating one vision board for every aspect of my life (as opposed to a vision board focused on one or two specific areas).  This practice has provided to be an awesome way to motivate myself to take the hard steps towards the life I desire.   As the outcome was so good,  this has become a regular practice for me.  What it does is help me to uncover what is most important and what to focus on – yes, it’s about clarity.  This article was first written in 2021 because, after a little online research it became clear that many people are searching for answers to the question “how do I create a vision board for my life?”.

For that reason, I decided that it would be a good thing to share the process I follow with you. It’s much easier than you may expect, having said that, the detail you decide to go into will make it a simple or complex process. Simple is best, allow me to show you what I mean.

Analyze the Different Areas of Your Life With A Life Balance Scorecard

This is a process I learned when I was working with a life coach, it is so valuable. There are no right and wrong answers, only those which are your life at present and those you are aiming for. Let’s have a look at how it works.

Print off the PDF of this Life Balance Scorecard Template (or take a screenshot, whichever works best for you) and score your life as it is currently. 1 being a perfect score and 10 is where you need to do some work.

Place an x on the number that best reflects where you are in your life right now. As I said, this is not anything to be concerned about, you are merely putting a graphic in place to view your life as a whole.

Why Do A Life Balance Scorecard First?

My recommendation for a life balance scorecard to be done first is to help you gain clarity. Sometimes our lives feel like one crazy blur. There is just too much going on.  The Life Balance Scorecard process will give you perspective.

With the Life Balance Scorecard, you get a birds-eye view of what your life looks like in numbers. This will assist you in determining which areas of your life need more immediate action than others.

Once you have done your ratings in each area of your life and decided which aspects of your life you would like to work on, then start creating a plan for those areas.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What has contributed to the score?
2. What can I do to change this?
3. What do I want in my life in this area?
4. How will I feel once I have achieved what I want?

Notice the emphasis on want and feel?  I encourage you to dig deep and spend time tapping into your own desires and feelings, you find the energy and motivation to change anything.

Knowing your own feelings and desires helps you to dig deep when it is challenging to put in the effort.

Step-By-Step Process To Create A Vision Board For Your Life

There are two different ways you can create a vision board for your life. We are speaking about the step-by-step process of putting a vision board together now.

For the good old-fashioned way, which is my preference, you will need:

• a decent piece of board, say A0 in size, your favourite colour or one that suits the images and/or the place you are going to hang it., There are different ways you can use the board which I will share a little further down.
• poster or paper glue
• scissors
• magazines or access to the internet and a colour printer
• a photograph of yourself (preferably one you love)

When sourcing images and pics, I encourage you to find ones that really speak to you. Find the colours and settings that appeal to you. Find images that inspire you and get you excited about your life.

If you are artistic, you can create something uniquely your own by drawing and painting – go for it, collage, create and enjoy!

The second way, more technological, is to make use of a platform like Canva.

It really is an easy-to-use system, you can change up the images, colours, fonts, and layouts, add in text, remove text, and so on. Canva offers the facility where you can upload your own images too, just scan them in and upload them to the platform.

From there you can print it out and place your vision board in a prominent place and/or use it as your screen saver and carry it around on your phone as a constant reminder.

Canva offers a free plan or you can join with a paid-for plan. I would not recommend going for a paid plan if you are using it only to put your vision board together. If you are a content creator, then go for it, otherwise just sign up for free.

Below are examples of two different templates available in the Canva platform. I think they’re both beautiful, what about you?

 

Choosing A Layout For Your Vision Board

Keep in mind that you are the only one this vision board needs to work for. We cannot create vision boards for other people. It does not need to be perfect or understandable to anyone else. This is 100% for you alone.

Don’t even feel restricted to only focusing on the areas where your score can be improved. Should you decide to create a different vision board for each area of your life you can. Change up the colours, say a white board for spiritual, green board for hobbies, purple board for family and so on

Here is how I did mine:

Greeting Card Format

• I took a single sheet of A0 board and folded it in half, so it looks like an oversized greeting card and I have four different surfaces to work on. The front, inside left, inside right and the back. This is a way of demarcating each section of my life.
• The colour I selected is a light purple, because it’s a favourite colour.
• Then I pasted images and words for each area of my life, separating them out by my priorities. The front of the “card” is all around my spiritual life as it is the most important aspect of my life
• On the inside left, I have posted beautiful images of lavishly decorated dinner tables to remind me that I aspire to make more money and one of the reasons why: so that I can extend the size of the table and make a difference in the lives of others
• I have also included inspirational pics of gorgeous decor and a high-tech gas and electric stove (in South Africa we have power outages and load-shedding, need I say more?)
• On the inside right of the card, I have placed encouraging words about fitness, health, nutrition, and travel
• On the outside back, there are a range of underwater pics to remind me of the scuba diving I plan to do

Important: The images are pictures of what I aspire to, not practical pics that I think I can achieve right now in this moment. I encourage you to do the same so that you provide something to stretch and grow beyond where you have ever been before.

The images remind me that others are doing these things already and if they can, surely I can too.

Something else I recommend is that if you find something that appeals to you but doesn’t fit on your board, fold it up so that the headline and image show only, and paste it to your board in such a way that you can open it up and read everything it contains. I have done this with entire articles from magazines.

1 x A0 Flat Format Board

This is the conventional way of doing a vision board and it works very well too.

Paste everything on one sheet of board. Again, you can make it as elaborate or minimalistic, as you like. The way you create your board is as individual as you are.
Once you have everything glued in place, hang the board in a space that you will see every single day. I have clients who have hung theirs inside their bedroom cupboard, others on the fridge or the pantry, for example. Wherever suits you.

Multiple A0 Flat Format Boards

Should your Life Balance Scorecard reveal that you would be best placed to work in detail on multiple areas of your life, then you can create more than one board.

One for each aspect.

My only caution with this is to ensure that you avoid overwhelming yourself with too much to change at one time. Overwhelm can cause total inaction which would render your vision board ineffective.

Cube or Box Format

This is a format I have not made use of to date but it looks amazing. You can create a cube/box with your board and paste images on all the different sides.

Once it is done, you place the box somewhere that you will see it on a regular basis. It’s pretty cool too because you can move the cube and look at different aspects of your vision board each time you see it.

Here is a YouTube video showing how to create a cube, the sizes can be adjusted to whatever size suits you. I may do this to put on my desk, it looks awesome!

My Current Life Balance Scorecard

Below is my current status. There have been many shifts on this due to the different levels of Lockdown, our hard lockdown started in March 2020.

Allow me to walk you through my life balance scorecard:

Spiritual – 2,5 – 3

I am a Christ-follower and lockdown allowed me the time to slow down and really look at what is important to me. Spiritually speaking, the lockdown has been good for me. it allowed me to slow down, spend time reading the Bible, praying, attend online conferences etc. (I was gifted a ticket to the online Ladies Colour Conference 2021  from Hillsong in Sydney, Australia – wow, it was incredible!).

My church, like many all over the world, has been opening up physically and then closing again, depending on the incidence of Covid infections.  Since the lockdowns my church has developed an incredible online platform to log into, so all is not lost.  In fact, it’s pretty awesome to watch online from bed some Sundays.

Never keen to take anything for granted, I am happy to say that I currently score well on the spiritual front. And continue to keep my eyes fixed upwards to continue aiming for the top number 1.

Family – 3

Family at the start of lockdown was rocky for me, as it was for many people. Being locked up with family can be very challenging.

The lockdown also benefited my family relationships, it became a great time of just being in each other’s company and learning to enjoy and appreciate downtime together. Also, learning to respect one anthers’ space at times, lol!

Family is a nice 3 for me at this stage. Relationships always take work though so they do appear on my vision board, they’re just not in crisis mode. What a happy report.

Physical – 9

Again, as with many other people in lockdown, my physical shape became rounder and rounder. This is definitely an area I need to focus on.

A nice and overly curvaceous 9 requires some attention – exercise and nutrition need a serious revamp.

Financial – 6

Many of us have been impacted negatively as a result of reduced income since lockdowns began. My daughter and I are no different, we have a pet and house sitting business, that took a nosedive from March 2020 to December 2020 where it picked up somewhat, but nowhere close to what it was in 2019.

Another area for focus.

I have rated this a 6 though because I am employed half-day and my employer’s business has done exceptionally well. So, my employment is secure, but our pet and house-sitting business is in need of attention.

Not only that, the online business space has skyrocketed – what a blessing to many of us online entrepreneurs.  On that note, if you would like to see how I have created my own online businesses, have a look here.

Social – 10

A score of 10 is usually not good for anything. In the Covid lockdown circumstances, it did work for me.  These days though, my part of the world has moved from pandemic to endemic which means I have the freedom to spend out and about with family and friends.

Another area to focus on – I will probably combine this will exercise, Saturday mornings back at the Park Run sounds awesome!  Not to mention, learning to stand up board.

Hobbies – 4,5 – 5

Another area that benefited from lockdown is my hobbies. It has been great to paint, garden, read and write again. I plan to enjoy this for as long as I can, even post lockdown.

Future – 4

Whilst I cannot say that “my future is so bright I gotta wear shades”, having had the downtime, I am much clearer about what I want in my future and that clarity has moved it up to a healthy 4.

Vocation – 3

I love what I do and am very fortunate to be able to say that. A 3 is a good number because my employment is secure and I have more time to do what I love and plan to do for and in retirement. It will move to a 1 when we have freedom of movement again.

 

 

To map it out a little further, the two main areas I want to focus on are:

• Physical and
• Financial

because they are the lowest scoring, outside of Social which I can work on quite easily with the physical exercise plans.

So, physical and financial are the two primary areas I am focusing on for my vision board and here is how I am doing it:

 

 

1. Physical

Photo by Tower Paddle Boards on Unsplash

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

 

Now the restrictions have been lifted, we can get back to doing the things we enjoy. One is the Park Run and the second is swimming. Fortunately, I also love to cycle and have a stationary bike at home.

To keep me on track, I also decided to follow a book called “Lighten Up” by South African author Vivienne Heath, and is all about “40 days to a healthier body, soul and spirit”.

Here is access to a free preview of the book.  Enjoy!

As you will have gathered, this book speaks to creating a healthier lifestyle through nutrition, fitness, and spiritual health.

So, my vision board for physical contains images of cycling, stand-up paddling, and scuba diving.

 

 

Photo by Michael Bernander on Unsplash

 

My plans are to participate in a couple of big cycling races in 2023.  It’s a big birthday year for me – I’ll give you a clue, I last celebrated a big birthday when I turned 50 in 2013.

 

I am a novice cyclist so it is more about competing against myself than winning a race. For me, the delight will be in completing the 100kms or so. I will need to be fit and trim for those.

 

Stand-up paddling and scuba diving have both been on my mind for many years. I plan to make them both a reality by the end of 2022. Both require me to be fit and strong too.

In the meantime, I am watching YouTube videos about stand-up paddling and working on core strength. Here’s is a video from Blue Planet:

 

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Scuba is going to require water fitness so best I get back into the pool and train.

Again, I am watching YouTube videos to prepare myself … these videos also help me to keep focused on what I want in my life, no matter what the current situation is with lockdown etc. I hope you enjoy this beginner scuba video, I certainly did:

 

 

 

2. Financial

This one was a little more tricky because house and pet sitting has to be done in person and very few people were going away due to lockdown or post lockdown financial woes.  Thankfully business has picked up substantially since end 2021 – we had to expand our pet and house sitting business and employ siters!

But, during the lockdowns, we learned to become more resourceful. How?

• We increased our income whilst working from home. For me, this means more time spent on my online businesses (thank heavens I have them)
• And reduced outgo: one of the things I am still doing now is growing our own veggies in a  little container veggie patch.
• Being more home-bound also helped because less money was being spent on outings.

 

So, What Is On My Vision Board?

Once you have done the Life Balance Scorecard and given yourself ratings, it will be easy to see which areas require more focused attention than others. Being aware makes creating your vision board that much easier.

Here is an idea of what is on my vision board:

• Always prominent on my vision boards is something spiritual.  I love Biblical quotes and promises.  Those are on the front of my vision board card
• Beautiful images of a woman paddle boarding on a gorgeous azure sea on my vision board.
• Images of scuba divers and gorgeous pics of underwater scenes teeming with colorful fish and vibrant coral reef
• Images of things like a beautifully decorated very long dinner table, this speaks volumes to me. Yes, it is about having the money to entertain and enjoy lavish meals in great company, but more than that, it speaks to my social heart – there is a saying “when you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence”.

Money in itself does nothing to motivate me, but focusing on what I can do with money, well that is what really gears me up to a higher level! Seeing the table reminds me of the difference I can make in the lives of others.

Vision Board Workshops, just, by the way, are also a way of making a difference in the lives of others. When I give a workshop, my desire is to inspire hope and open the doorway to dreaming again.

 

===>  Breathe life into your dreams <===

Thank you for spending time with me here, I trust this article has given you insight and has assisted you in answering the question:  How Do I Create A Vision Board For My Life?

I will be writing follow-up articles to this.  As shared above, there are tactics and strategies you can make use of to ensure you stay focused on your heart’s desires and actively work toward them.

If you have any questions, please pop them in the comment section below and I will be happy to respond.

 

With love

Louise xxx