A New Year’s resolution vision board helps you dream and scheme and put positive energy behind your intentions.
A Declaration of Your Intentions
In a sense, the board is a tangible declaration of commitment to your hopes and dreams. Once they’re declared or posted on your board, you can hone them into more specific goals, targets, and plans; take action; and, ultimately, fulfill them.
Vision Boards Help Define Your Intentions and Focus Your Attention
New Year’s Resolutions
As December wanes and the year draws to a close, people typically make a wish list and give it the jazzy, and often falsely empowered, title of my New Year’s resolutions.
The Lifespan of Most New Year’s Resolutions
But, all too often, the exercise stops there. Soon they’ll either give up or quickly forget about their resolutions. According to Forbes, 80 percent of resolutions fail by February.
This is not surprising given that change (fulfilling goals) is more than a wish or declaration.
Change Is a Process Not a Declaration
It’s a process. More realistically, successful sustainable change and transformation require deeper articulation. You have to be attuned to opportunities, take strategic actions and progressive steps, and recognize and embrace your partial or full successes.
In other words, it’s not a one-off decision. Instead, it most definitely requires perseverance.
Sure, sometimes you might find that what you want seems to simply serendipitously materialize. But, you can’t count on this. So, don’t sit idly by after you make your resolutions. Instead, engage and stay open if you want your vision to dance with the energy of the universe.
The Function of the Vision Board
All vision boards have one thing in common. They use a visional representation of mental, emotional, and even spiritual inspirations and aspirations of the person(s) who creates it.
Some are time-sensitive. Others are more open-ended.
It’s my impression that all vision boards are, fundamentally, devices for dreaming and scheming. They can also serve as a tangible reminder and reinforce commitment.
Real change and transformation, however, come from what you do in your everyday life to bring it about.
Example of a New Year’s Resolution Vision Board
The vision board illustrated above depicts one person’s vision for the coming year. Each aspiration is represented by a photo: a metaphor. Some items are specific or focused on something concrete like a new car. Others are more general or qualitative. Among them are some fairly common resolutions:
- Spend more time with good friends
- Emphasize quality over quantity
- Relax more
- Get more sleep
- Better work-life balance
- Seek out more beauty
- More self-care
- Finish my book
- Winter break in Barbados
- Visit my sister in Europe
- Buy a new car
- Have more compassion for myself and others
- Believe in me and my abilities
Steps to Making Your Board
In the simplest form, the process of creating your New Year’s resolution vision board can be reduced to just three steps.
- Take some time to think about and make a list of what you’d like to change or achieve in the coming year.
- Extract from magazines, photo albums, or the internet visual representations or metaphors.
- Glue all the images to cardboard or some other preferred backing, organizing them in a way that’s appealing to you.
Embody Your New Year’s Resolution
The dreaming and scheming stage is critical to the change process and can be wonderfully invigorating. Furthermore, the process of constructing a vision board stimulates creativity and spiritual ritual. The whole process can be enjoyable and centering. However, the transformation process doesn’t stop there.
Craft Specific Intentions
Whenever possible and applicable, turn the visions represented on your board into clear, positive, and specific intentions. This will provide more direction to your process and a clearer path to fulfillment. In other words, with this clarity, you’ll be better able to orient yourself, take targeted actions, and monitor success.
In addition, clear, positive, and specific intentions help you notice and respond to opportunities, even unexpected auspicious stepping stones. Energetically, these types of intentions are more apt to entrain with supportive energies (think co-create or “law of attraction”).
Embody Your Transformation
If you continue to engage with your vision board, you’ll keep the interest, focus, and energy alive. This might be through meditations, crystal grids, energy healing, or some other form of ritual. In the process, you’ll cultivate coherence and support as well as gain insights into the best approaches for you.
Furthermore, as you progress through the unfolding of your New Year’s resolutions, notice, sense, and embrace small changes and shifts. Your persistent attention will enable and encourage your life-forward momentum and the movement from your intentions and goal realization. In addition, you’ll be able to celebrate your successes, experience gratitude for yourself and others, and embody your progress. For more on moving your vision forward process, see my blog post entitled Going Beyond the Vision Board about what I call personal commemoration boards.
For more assistance with working with vision boards and self-transformation, see my:
- Mind-Body-Spirit Blog
- Personal Growth, Natural Healing, and Wellness workshops
- Spiritual Live Coaching and Energy Healing session
Updated December 1st, 2024
