The Power Of The Pen: Writing Your Vision on Paper Will Propel You To Reach Your Goals
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the demands of everyday life. Work, family responsibilities, volunteer opportunities easily swallow up your time before you even realized what’s happened! Amid the chaos, it can be a challenge to immerse yourself into personal development, but you know you must for your own benefit of reaching your goals.
Vision boards have become very popular in today’s world of self-improvement. It began with the launch of the film, The Secret, and unmasking the reality of the law of attraction. By not only saying what you wish to achieve in your head, but writing down your vision, your goals, on paper and viewing them each and every, day has the power to unleash clarity to your dreams and desires by allowing you to see them. And seeing them propels you to act upon them, resulting in achievement.
A Step by Step how to create a vision board below
Telling yourself what your goals are is simple but accepting the fact that writing out your goals can be a challenge for some. Many people don’t see the value in the power of the pen. They think keeping their goals they wish to reach in their head is good enough. However, creating a vision board, or at least simply writing out what you’d like to achieve, accomplish, receive, in the form of a board, book, or app on your phone, will keep you in a constant state of progression.
In the year 1990 Jim Carey, famous actor who was struggling at that time, wrote himself a check for ten thousand dollars for Acting Services RenderedÂ. He gave himself five years to achieve this dream of being able to cash this check. In fact, the date written on the check was Thanksgiving 1995. He carried this check in his wallet and as you could imagine it deteriorated over time. Right before November 1995 is when he was scheduled to film Dumb and Dumber (his famous movie) and for Acting Services Rendered he got offered ten million dollars!
Step by step how to create a vision board below
It’s not the board, paper, app, or in Jim Carey’s example of his check that makes your dream magically happen; it’s the realization that you get when you continually see your vision and the clarity of the steps you can take to get there. When we continually see what we strive for, we develop an emotional connection to all we do to get there. When deciding what to invest our time into accomplishing, we can rely on the vision we set for ourselves to provide clarity on what is worth pursuing.
Creating weekly, actionable tasks to meet your monthly goals will ensure you stay on track. By the end of the year, you will be further towards creating the vision that was formerly just a dream. Now, it has become your reality.
Go ahead and take a minute to look at the trajectory of your life. Write down what you’d like to achieve in the next year, 5 years, 10 years. Consider what it will take to go from where you are now to where your vision is leading you.
Here is a step by step how to for building your own vision board taken from my recent live workshop
step 1
Today we are going to talk some more about what a vision board is… what’s so special about having one? Is this just glorified arts and crafts?!
No way! The process of creating your vision board requires you to focus on getting crystal clear about your dreams and envisioning the life you truly want!
How do you figure out what it is you want?!
It might seem easy to answer… but we want you to dig seriously deep here! A good exercise to find out what you want (and today’s assignment for you) is to take an empty sheet of paper and write down EVERYTHING that comes to mind when you think about your ideal life.
Don’t restrict yourself. Everything that comes to mind, write it down… even if it seems impossible. You can be a little bit selfish here – remember, this is your dream life.
As you sit and reflect on what it is you want, I really want you to also think about how you want to feel every day – happy, vibrant, positive, loving, grateful.
Assignment
Take a blank piece of paper and write out everything that comes to mind when you think about what your dream life looks like!
Step 2
Today, we are going to take your dream life writing exercise from yesterday and write 7 goals for 2021 that will help you get closer to living that dream!
It’s important to make these SMART goals! SMART is an acronym for goal-setting – you want your goals to be:
- Specific – “Get in shape” isn’t a great goal; get specific and write a goal like “I want to get a Beachbody on Demand subscription and workout 5 days a week.”
- Measurable – You need to have criteria for measuring progress (otherwise you won’t know if you’ve reached your goal)! So, we don’t say “I want to lose weight,” we say, “I want to lose 20 pounds.”
- Achievable – Ask yourself: Do I have the resources and capabilities to achieve the goal? If not, what am I missing?
- Relevant – This is why having your dream life exercise from yesterday is important. If your dream life involves sleeping in and having a leisurely morning, it would make no sense for you to set the goal “I wake up at 5am every day to workout.” Make sure your goals make sense for what YOU want!
- Time-Bound – You should have a deadline for yourself, to create a sense of urgency and motivation to achieve the goal!
Assignment
Reflecting on your dream life exercise from yesterday, write 7 goals (or more) for 2021 – at least 1 for each of these categories.
- Career/Business
- Relationships
- Finances
- Health
- Learning
- Spirituality
- Creativity
Step 3
It’s time to gather supplies!
To keep things simple, present your goals and wishes in the form of pictures or written words by sticking them to a blank canvas.
You’ll need the following things:
- An empty canvas
- Glue
- Markers
- Scissors
- Magazines with pictures or a printer
Once you have the materials, you’re going to collect your pictures for your board. Find images that symbolically represent your desired goal. The more specific the better!
Example: If you have written the goal, “I want to make $100,000 in 2021.” Think about the why behind this goal – you may notice, for example, that you want more money so that you can travel regularly and see the world. If that’s the case, what do you think will be a better picture for your vision board – a stack of cash or your dream vacation spot?
Assignment
- Collect the materials for your vision board
- Are your goals specific enough? – If not, break it down.
- Cut out (or print) a visual representation for each of your goals!
Step 5
Ok, you have the right pictures. It’s time to get crafty and stick them on your vision board! Your canvas should offer enough space to show off individual pictures – don’t make it look crowded or chaotic (after all, you don’t want to attract chaos into your life)!
Once you have your vision board, it’s time to figure out where to put it! After all, why go through all the work in defining your goals and creating this visualization tool if you’re not going to use it?! I recommend you choose a location where you walk by regularly or a location you sit near often. You should see your goals often so you can visualize them consciously (and subconsciously).
Assignment
Create your vision board and tag me on social or at least email or message me to let me know this was helpful. I would love to hear from you. If you put anything about health and or fitness on your board, you should join my free FB community Tips for Healthy Mind, Healthy Body, Healthy Food
https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthymindbodyfood/
