I know, I’m one of very few people who isn’t really into the whole vision board thing this year.  I posted a little bit about my goals for 2018 on my Instastory and decided to expand the conversation with a blog post so that I could talk a little more about why I’m not into vision boards anymore.  I did make a vision board last year and put a whole bunch of time and effort into it.  With the way my personality is set up, it took me a very long time to find pictures that I liked and that (somewhat) accurately portrayed my vision.  I took my sweet time thinking about what I wanted to put on my board and I typed up the stuff I couldn’t find pictures for.  I even took the time to split the board up into three themes: body, self-care/mindset, and finances.  This year, I’ve decided to do things a little differently for a whole host of reasons.

If you google “vision board”, a million and one articles pop up, each one detailing what a vision board is and how you can use it to your advantage.  Vision boards have become increasingly popular, apparently since the release of a book called The Secret where the author talks about the benefits of using vision boards in some way.  I didn’t read that book, but I did love the idea of creating a super pretty set of images to put up somewhere in my house.  So before I made my vision board last year, I did a little research to make sure I understood exactly what I was supposed to be doing.  According to a HuffPost article, the purpose of a vision board is to bring your “vision” to life but putting it in the form of a tangible image, and your vision board is supposed to focus on how you want to feel, not just on things that you want.  But another article I read said that there’s no right or wrong way to make a vision board, so why not do a little bit of both?  Last year’s vision board was a mostly on how I wanted to feel and a little bit of what I wanted.

Long story short, of course, many of the goals or visions I put on my vision board for 2017 did not come to fruition in 2017.  Go figure.  As I sat on my bed a few weeks ago, looking at my 3-piece board that lives above my closet, I realized that more often than not when I looked at that thing before going to bed it made me feel pretty unhappy, I’d even venture to say stressed.  While the logical and rational part of me realized that my vision was way too ambitious for 365 days’ worth of time, the overly perfectionist side of me realized that there were so many things that did not get accomplished.  That realization made me sad.  Then things clicked: most of my vision board was based on my feelings and wishes, and quite frankly, my feelings don’t always help me reach my goals and in many cases, they’re counter-productive.  This made me re-think the whole vision board thing.  I thought to myself, “is this helping me or hurting me long term?”

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According to Psychology Today, Vision boards are based on the Law of Attraction and the idea that your mode of thinking directly affects what the universe gives you. If you put positive mental energy into the universe, you’ll be the recipient of positive outcomes.  While I do agree with this to a certain extent, the Law of Attraction fails to take how the real world works into account.  The Law of Attraction is universal, meaning that it always works if it’s done correctly.  So for any goals that you put on your vision board that don’t come to fruition by December 31st, let’s call them unrealized goals, you are to blame.  According to the Law of Attraction, the reason why goals X, Y, and Z didn’t happen is because you mis-stepped somewhere along the way.  You’re to blame for your lack of success, and I just don’t believe that to be universally true.  We have control over our own thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions and absolutely no control over the actions of others and the hard truth is that sometimes the actions of others can affect how and if we reach our personal goals.

Aside from the Law of Attraction issue I have, several research studies show that when you have idealized positive fantasies, your motivation and energy to achieve goals dramatically decreases (Kappes & Oettingen: J Exp Soc Psych, 47: 2011).  Sometimes the fantasy of having something distracts us from doing the work to get that thing.  Here are a few other personal observations that I made that may help you figure out which option is best for you.

I felt excessive guilt

My vision board made me feel very guilty for not achieving certain things that I couldn’t control; vision board from last year was built on the idea that if you want something you have to go get it and it’s not always quite that simple.  The difference for me is that a goals list helps me map out the steps needed to reach that “vision”.  For example, let’s say one of my goals for 2018 is to buy my dream fun car: a Jeep Wrangler.  If I were making a vision board, I’d obviously put a picture of a Jeep Wrangler on the board.  If I were making a goals list, I would write down things like “save $2,700 for a down payment on Jeep Wrangler” or “determine financing for Jeep Wrangler”.

I’m more motivated by words

This one is just purely personal.  I have to do what motivates me and sometimes cute visuals just don’t cut it.  But words, they will always do the trick.

Constantly visualizing the future took me away from the present

Being present is something that I have been working on for over a year now, and it’s a daily thing.  Every day, I make small changes so that I can be more focused on the present and I found that my vision board always made me focus on the future.  I think it’s important to have a nice balance of both, and I found that very hard to do when I looked at pictures of things that I wanted to do and hadn’t done yet, or wanted to have and didn’t have yet.  I found myself focusing more on how I would feel in the future after I got those things as opposed to focusing on how I felt at the moment with the things that I did have.

Misplaced Focus

This is a proven fact!  The more you focus on something, to more consuming it becomes (which can be good and bad).  I put a picture of Teyana Taylor’s glorious self on my vision board last year to represent “body goals” so to speak (and here we are at the top of 2018 and I still look nothing like her, btw).  Every time I got in bed and looked at that picture, my focus on the fact that I didn’t look like her expanded as opposed to my drive to look like her expanding, or my focus on the steps I needed to take to look like her expanding.  Basically, my vision board was causing me to focus on the wrong things.

The prioritization struggle

I’m very all or nothing.  I’m fully committed to everything or I’m committed to nothing at all.  So after looking at my vision board on a regular basis, I’d find myself trying to do everything exceptionally well, all at once.  Sounds great on paper.  The problem?  One word: burnout.  I’d be going hard in the gym every day, being super strict with my meals every day, self-caring it up every day, writing blog posts and doing blog research every day, all while working every day and trying to do fifty million other things.  Sure, I wanted to accomplish all of these things by the end of the year but I also wanted to finish the year with my sanity.  Looking at images that were broad representations of my goals made things very difficult to prioritize at a glance.

Vision-centered does not always equal value centered (according to Dr. Neil Farber, M.D.)

Why are value-centered as opposed to vision-centered goals important?  While goals may change, the values are more often than not consistent.  Our values connect us to a greater purpose in life, they differentiate the important from the unimportant, and they are an inexhaustible source of motivation.  It’s much easier for me to keep things value-centered when I actually write down words related to my values.

So now that I’ve said all that, let me throw my disclaimer in: I am NOT vision board bashing!  As with anything that I post on my blog, my goal is to educate so that you can make the best informed decision for YOU.  This vision board/goals list thing is no different.  If you want to create a vision board and vision boards work for you, go for it!  But if you find them to be little counter-productive for you personally like I did, now you know of another option.

Regardless of whether you’re making a vision board or a goals list, make it a fun self-care thing. So, set the atmosphere:

-       Gather your supplies (a board or paper, colorful pens, pencils, markers, your brainstormed list of goals, magazines)

-       Make it a party if you like company, or do it alone if you prefer a little solitude

-       Remove outside distractions (in order for your ideas to be as clear as possible, you should remove background distractions; TV, music, other people, whatever it is, remove it)

-       Quick tip: If you’re going the goals list route, your goals will only be accomplished if they are fully understood by you, in line with what motivates you, and if you know what the accomplishment of those goals look like to you (source).  If you’re going the vision board route, your vision will only be accomplished if you know how map your mental vision onto images.

If you’re like me, fantasizing about your ideal world and life may make you feel better in the short term, but it might limit your ability to transform your dreams into reality.  So take your time figuring out what works best for you.  Regardless of what you do to document your goals and vision for this new year, dream about it, envision what you have to realistically do to do it or get it, and do it.  Let’s make 2018 our best year yet!  What are your thoughts on this?  Are you team vision board or team goals list?