The Vision Board Exercise: A Tool for Progress & Personal Growth

This is something that probably many of us heard of or did as kids but dropped due to the sad skepticism that comes with growing up, unintentional discouragement of imagination in school and society and/ or personal fear of being laughed at by friends or family. 

What is a Vision Board? As defined by Oxford Languages: 

“a collage of images and words representing a person's wishes or goals, intended to serve as inspiration or motivation.”

Famous startup investor Chris Sacca reportedly said that when he was young he wrote in his  journal about having a goal of living beside the beach and in the mountains. As he built his very successful investing career, he moved to Truckee near Tahoe in Northern California. After he retired from investing, he moved to the Greater LA area, living on Manhattan Beach. It works. 

Images & written language have power. Power that is used to craft our life and who we are. We use these subconsciously. When I look back on my life, these images have unintentionally driven a lot of my career and lifestyle decisions. Owning way too many books, lots of travel, a corporate career jet setting around the world. All the things I wanted, actually happened. 

I picked it up again from a personal development mastermind led by my entrepreneur friend David Henzel in 2020. This time around I am being very far more conscious of this. 

For the record, you can’t just have a vision board, sit around and hope stuff comes true. You use these images to motivate yourself, build habits and work toward these bit by bit every day. 

The Vision Board helps you build intentionality into your life. It helps you be deliberate and prioritize. And it is a daily reminder for you on what you are working so hard to get to. Stress on daily reminder. 

You program your brain and take action to realize this. This is the biggest part. Taking action every day to get yourself closer to these images. It takes time and it may not get you exactly where or what you have on your vision board. But you will get pretty close to it. 

Sounds so much better than living the often mentioned Alice in Wonderland quote: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." Basically, a road to Nowhere fast.