The imagination series (3): Two (2) things you should know before

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There are quite a lot of resources online on vision boards so my focus in this post will be to share two (2) important lessons I learnt from building my first vision board. I’ll start off with a brief description on how to build a vision board.

• If you have written out your goals (To understand how to do that, please read my earlier post here), grab the following materials
  • A couple of magazines. Lifestyle, inspirational, business review magazines or even newspapers
  • Cardboard
  • Scissors
  • Glue
  • Markers (optional)

• Get some music playing, review the goals you wrote down in detail one more time and then begin to flip through the pages of the magazines
• Cut out pictures or words that strike a chord with you e.g. you see an article title ‘talent in emerging markets’, you can cut it out if it resonates with your vision
• Draw out sections on your cardboard for your goal/vision categories/focus areas. (to understand vision categories, read my earlier post here)
• Then begin to paste the pictures/word on the cardboard in the different sections in order of the categories. e. you should paste the article title ‘talent in emerging markets’ in the career section
• Leave it out to dry and hang it up somewhere that is in your line of sight every day. I have mine on my wardrobe so It’s in my line of sight when I get ready for work/outings etc. everyday

So let’s move on to what i learnt from my first attempt at putting together a vision board. It’s very important you have clarity. I can’t stress this enough. Seek clarity and with all your seeking, seek some more. I’ll give you an illustration to show why it’s so important. Funmi wants a career in management consulting, she writes it down as her vision in the career category, gets a picture of a high performing management consultant and pastes it on her vision board. Eventually, she gets a job in a consulting firm and finds out it’s not what she really wants to do, she doesn’t enjoy it and it’s not the line of consulting she wants to practice. What happened here? Funmi didn’t drill down to know what exactly she really wanted. Now, drilling down should have included reading up everything about that career path, talking to people working in those roles, finding out about the typical lifestyle in that career etc. You get my drift? Seek clarity. If you did all of that, decide you want it, yet find out when you get the role that it's not what you want. Then it’s ok. Move on and evolve. The dots will come together eventually. Second thing i learnt is the first vision board is not the final draft. After I put my first vision board together, I started to notice gaps when I looked at it every morning i.e. areas I had not thought about. For instance, I didn’t add anything about my current 9-5 job. I realized that couldn’t work especially since I’m at the office, Mondays to Fridays from 8am to 6pm. It’s either I  put something on my vision board about my 8-6 or I realize I’m wasting my time because my sub conscious doesn’t acknowledge it as my part of the vision i have for my life. I also noticed it's not enough to have a picture on a vision board. I needed to have goals and a plan. The discipline of execution and being consistent is what sets successful people apart from unsuccessful people. I'll be writing more about that in my next post. I’m sure you’ll learn a lot when you build your vision board. It’s just important to start. It’s also a great idea to have a vision board party with friends. I had one with a couple of friends and it was fun. [caption id="attachment_128" align="aligncenter" width="392"] Here we are cutting out pictures for our vision boards[/caption] You can plan to have a vision board party with some friends as well. Stay remarkable Tomie.