How To Make A KILLER Vision Board

As a leader, you'll have ideas. You'll have a goal you're working towards and ideas you need to brainstorm and a picture in your head of how your world would look when you're successful.

A wonderful technique that we really highly recommend for fleshing out exactly what this vision looks like is to create a vision board. It's commonly used in business, by entrepreneurs, and really when fleshing out any idea - be it a new product, innovation, team, or even creative project like a social media campaign.

So, what is a vision board?

A vision board is a tool that you use to figure out and define a focus on an end goal. It will flesh out your vision - which is to have a real clarity of detail about how the world you're affecting will look when achieving your end goal - and thus illustrate all those details that you see in your goal.

Your vision board will end up being unique to you, and it's essentially a brainstorming tool, which means that you can use images, text, drawings, or anything else that helps you visualise that vision.

The reason we do this is that sometimes your goals will get put on the backburner. But by creating and using a vision board, you’re ensuring you flesh out the most important details so that you don't forget them. Specific to you're business, you'll be:

• Identifying and giving clarity to a long-term vision for your business

• Fortifying your positive intentions to follow through with your goals

• Making a commitment to stay focused so that you don't get caught up in the day-to-day of your business and actually achieve your long-term goals with it.

The great thing about making your vision board is that you’re in control of it, so you can choose things that really speak to you and work for you. 

Once you’ve created your vision board, you will end up with a visual representation that you can keep in front of you every day. It can remind you of why you do what you do, which is especially helpful on those challenging days that inevitably make you feel like giving up. Your vision board is great because it stares you in the face and says don't. Don't give up.

So, how do we go about creating a vision board?

How To Create Your Vision Board

Step 1: Prepare

As this is a physical resource, you'll need to grab some materials. 

If you make a board, you could use a corkboard, a whiteboard, or even a flipchart. You could also make a digital version that you print out later. 

Personally, we recommend making something permanent if possible, which means using a corkboard and physical pictures.

And when it comes to those pictures and anything you put on there, use ones from magazines, pictures you've taken, a drawing you've made, anything you can find which feels right. If you're not so creative, don't stress - like we said, it's for you to do what works for you. You can just pin some pictures you've printed out on paper to the cork.

And of course, if this is starting to sound tedious, make sure you know that the most important thing here is to just get started and get it done. Making your vision board doesn’t have to be difficult or costly; make sure you're having fun with it and these decisions will flow naturally!

Step 2: Identify Your Goals

What do you want to focus on with this board? To decide how to narrow down the focus of the board, you need to know what you're applying it to. Is it a project, the whole business, a new campaign, or something else? It may be your personal goals with being an entrepreneur.

Think about what you want your business to achieve and why, and then ask yourself a few questions:

• What things in the past have influenced this?

• What should you be going at doing or who should you be good at serving?

• Why did you start the business, project campaign, or idea?

• How do you want your future to feel in your business?

So start by setting goals that are based on the values that are most important to you, and then expand on them. This is similar to understanding the concept of the "real problem". It essentially means deciding the real thing you want to achieve, then looking at what you need to do that will solve that problem.

So for example, if I'm building a business based on bringing public speakers to schools, that's what I do, but the "real problem" is that I want to empower young people. So maybe my vision board is about what the world looks like when more young people are empowered based on my work.

Extra Step: Believe Your Goals!

You should go one step beyond just identifying your goals before you start making your board. You need to really believe in yourself and claim your goals as being things that you WILL achieve. Your thoughts create your reality - so you need confidence to be able to make your vision a reality one day.

Get into the mindset of expecting success - this means that as you’re creating your vision board, you'll be inspired and can feel a sense of motivation to act on those feelings of inspiration moving forward.

Step 3: Organise Your Ideas

It can take some time to create a great board. If you want to make a really visual and long-lasting one, then you'll want to have your images and anything else that you like that represents the details you want to express all picked out before you start.

Your vision board should offer a representation of how you want your future self to feel, you don’t want to focus exclusively on pictures. You'll also want descriptive words, sayings, and quotes that describe feelings. Some examples could be:

• Powerful

• Loved

• Strong

• Healthy

• Proud

• Serene

• Confident

• Optimistic

• Happy

You can add words such as these to your board by simply writing them or finding them on the internet and attaching them to the board. And, just like most other things with your vision board, doing these things is completely optional.

And of course, your vision includes main milestones, so while you want your vision board to be mainly representative of the end result that you want to achieve, you can also include things that represent some of the main steps you will need to take in order to get there. So if you want to be a world-renowned business, perhaps being renowned in your country first is an obvious step. 

Step 4: Create The Board

Once you’re all set with your time and materials, your next step is to lay everything out in a way that’s visually pleasing to you. As you’re creating structure, it might be a good idea to separate spaces on the board (just draw a line or circle), a bit like a mind map. You can do this digitally too if that suits you.

Designate the amount of space for each of your goals if you’re putting multiple goals on one board and be strategic about their placements. So, you may want to give your more important goals more space and put them front and centre and move your relatively less important goals out to the side.

During this step, trim down your pictures and start layering your quotes and sayings over relevant images. Keep moving things around and trimming your images until it feels right.

And, you're done!

You can hang this anywhere - but keep this somewhere you'll definitely see it! You can also make lots of little boards that go over more specific goals, or even elements of your personal life.

These steps can serve to support you in a variety of areas and hold you accountable, but they'll only work if you're willing to commit to achieving your vision for yourself! 

Here’s a recap infographic I found that can also help summarise some of the points I’ve covered above. Hope this helps!

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About Seven

Hey friends! I’m Seven - I write about challenges and opportunities affecting leaders across business. I release a weekly newsletter and a podcast, helping folks understand the leadership journeys and challenges out there, so we can better understand our purpose, place, and potential. The goal: to learn about what it means to be a leader, to support leaders, to find leaders, and to discover the leader within.

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Lots of love, and here’s to your success!