New Year, New Vision Board

I like diving into the new year inspired and my favorite creative way to do that is to make a vision board to represent my aspirations for 2022.

We all know 2020 was a rough year for everyone. It seemed like we all were just trying to survive the Hunger Games with all the things being thrown our way. 2021 had a lot of promise and we all thought, "This is our year!". It seems now that we all reached the end of 2021 and now we all feel maimed by it in some way. So 2022, I have high hopes for you! I'm feeling 2022 (We got TS to hype us up). I feel like 2020 was the year where I was discovering myself and researching ways to honor my human existence, then I started creating habits to nurture myself in 2021. My word for 2022 is "flourish". I plan to take the research that I did in 2020 and the habits that I solidified in 2021 to reach my highest purpose in 2022. My vision board is a representation of everything I want to be this year and it encourages me to take the steps toward those goals.

How do I make a vision board you may ask? Or maybe you feel like it's a little too cheesy, but I truly believe in the power of manifestations and a vision board is a way I attain being a manifestation goddess. Being a visual learner, a vision board is my perfect inspiration for achieving my goals. There are many routes you can take to creating your vision board, but I wanted to share my process to maybe inspire you to make your own.

Getting Started

First step is to journal, journal, journal. I know, I am constantly promoting journaling, BUT GUYS! journaling is the most amazing outlet. Get all your thoughts out of what you want for the upcoming year. I break this down into categories:

• Health+Body

• Mindfulness

• Career+Finances

• Relationships

• Materialistic

• Personal Growth

Breaking your life into different categories helps your mind focus in on the specifics instead of shuffling to figure out that big question of "What do I want?". I know as a 25 year old, that question is daunting because I don't know... But when I break things down I feel less overwhelmed. One of my favorite journal prompts to do before I create my vision board is "In my perfect world, what would my day look like?" I want to do things to achieve that day and helps me get ideas.

Once you complete your journaling you need to decide what you want to use to bring your board into fruition. Do you want a digital vision board or a physical one? I personally have both. I make a digital one for my computer and phone background, but also like to have a physical one to put in my meditation corner. Last year I chose to use magazines to make a collage, but this year I stuck to making a digital one and printed it out. Think about what is going to inspire you the most and be present regularly in your life.

Digital Vision Board

After I had all my ideas written out on paper, I went to Pinterest. A totally underrated app in recent years, in my opinion. I created a new board and started adding pictures that I found inspirational and representative of my goals. For example, one of the visions I have for myself this year is to nourish my gal pal friendships so I made a goal to do at least one fun, creative friend date a month. I found images of things that I want my friendships to look like: a group of girls having a picnic on the beach or girls getting dressed up in their fanciest outfits to go to an art museum (relationships). Or I want to be more creative in 2022, so I have a goal of signing up for a pottery class, which I have been saying I want to do for years now. I found an aesthetic (obvs) picture of a girl doing pottery (personal growth). I added about 25 to 30 pictures to the board and made sure that I had a few pictures for each category. Add some inspirational quotes or whatever you feel will get you pumped. There is no wrong way of doing it. Get creative with it! This is meant to be fun.

After all my pictures were found, I opened up PowerPoint or Google Slides and I went to town adding and organizing the images. In the end I finished with a compilation of photos that I felt will encapsulate 2022. I save them as an image (can be done by putting it in presentation mode and taking a screenshot or if you're tech-savvy and know a more professional way of doing this, help a girl out and let me know ;)), then set it as my backgrounds to constantly see.

Physical Vision Board

For my 2021 vision board, I made a physical collage out of magazine cutouts. If you're overflowing with creative energy, this may be for you. I took a bunch of magazines and just started cutting out things that emulated the vision I had for 2021 with the goals I had journaled. My fiancé and I were planning a cross-country road trip, so any pictures of national parks and forests I ripped out to foster the drive and inspiration for the trip. There were a few times before our trip my anxiety came whispering. "Are you sure you want to go?", "Three weeks camping and driving is going to be rough", "It could be dangerous.", the list went on and on. Every time I looked at my vision board, though, I got invigorated with the excitement of the trip and squashed those worries.

Once I cut out tons of pictures I thought were the representations I needed I glued them on a poster board. I honestly enjoyed getting creative with the way I was cutting and gluing the items. I also felt since I was just relying on luck to find images rather than having the world at my fingertips through the internet, the images I found were meant to be. I put this board in my meditation corner and saw it every morning when journaling and meditating. It brought such positive feelings for the future to the space.

Make it a Party

Invite your friends and do it together. What a fun friend date it could be: being creative, drinking wine, and inspiring each other. The people closest to me are inspiring (God, I am using the word inspire so much, but to be honest it's the whole vibe of this post). Each one of my close friends are people I look at and think, "Wow! You're amazing and I want to be like you." This brought even more connectedness to my board. Forever be friends with people that you can't help but want to hype up all the time.

Start 2022 right with the creative inspiration of a vision board. I promise you it won't disappoint. Visualize the life you want and it's yours.