Call them dream boards, action boards or treasure maps, creating a clear vision for our lives can work wonders. But vision boards can go wrong - remember that phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ - and it starts with the images you choose…
About twenty years’ ago I made a vision board. Central to that vision was my wedding. I was already engaged, but I dreamed of getting married in a blue dress a la Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, in the South of France.
Fast forward a few years and there I was in my blue dress, on the Amalfi Coast (France proved complicated) getting married. Problem was, I felt awful.
The bright Sorrento sunlight had thrown something into stark relief: I’d duped myself into believing that becoming Mrs Somebody would mean the end of Little Miss Nobody. But it was obvious, that feeling I was seeking to avoid wasn’t going anywhere.
I remembered the vision board. Yes, it had worked. My wedding looked the part. But it didn’t feel the way I’d hoped. Where had manifesting my desires gone wrong, I wondered.
And, so began my adventures into the ins and outs of vision boards. Here are three things I’ve learned about choosing the images which depict our dreams and desires.
Images are magic - here’s why
We use images to help make sense of an often overwhelming world.
Carl Jung, the famed psychoanalyst (he behind the collective subconscious and all that) made a case for this in the renowned book Man & His Symbols. Jung even explored his personal relationship with images through The Red Book, a kind of elaborate art journal.
But now neuroscience can go some way to explain this mysterious power. Tara Swart, author of The Source: open your mind change your life - and a big advocate of vision boards or action boards, as she calls them - writes:
“Pictures resonate more deeply than words alone, because they bypass the cerebral cortex, where language is processed, and register directly with the intuitive (limbic) and visual (occipital) parts of the brain.”
So, choose your images with care...
Images - all style no substance?
Remember Charlotte York from Sex & the City? Well, she had a vision for herself when it came to husbands (I’m not obsessed with husbands honest!).
Enter the dashing Trey MacDougal who looks the part, but turns out to be a relationship washout. One divorce later and Charlotte meets bald, brash, divorce lawyer with a heart of gold, Harry Goldenblatt. Et voila!
It took releasing the way she thought her life should look for Charlotte to discover what she was really yearning for - a loving relationship, not an image in House & Garden magazine, as per aptly titled episode All That Glitters.
The key is to think less literally and more in metaphors when choosing images for your vision board. For example, if your ideal relationship was a colour, place or song what would it be?
Feel into your images
My-blue-dress-blue-me experience caused me to doubt my ability to know what I wanted, or what I needed. Yes, I continued to make vision boards, featuring the usual suspects, but these things alluded me.
Then I discovered Danielle Laporte’s Desire Map:
“So many of us have the procedures of achievement upside down. We go after things that are outside of ourselves, but what we’re really reaching for is a feeling. When we combine our freewill with our Core Desired Feelings, we become intentional creators. Inner attunement = wiser attainment.”
So, when you choose your images aim to feel, not think, your way through the exercise. Otherwise your rational mind is likely to get all diva-esque. The aim is to select images that deeply resonate and get your creative juices flowing.
Summary
Creating a dream board is a powerful way to hone your vision and inspire you to action. But when it comes to choosing the images to represent our vision we can often get distracted by all that glitters, forgetting the gold lies in how we want to feel.
So when choosing images for your vision board:
Consider why images are powerful
Think more in metaphors - that’s how our dreams work, after all…
Ask yourself how you want to feel
