Build Your Vision Board To Plan 2021

The vision board is the simplest way to capture your vision and strategy at a glance. Some people use it for personal matters, others only for business strategy and product development. I would suggest you have your personal vision board, including all the aspects of your life that you want to prioritize next year.

The end of the year is the perfect timing to reflect on how your year turned out and how you plan to make it even better. 2020 particularly, is an odd year with all the Covid-19 crisis. You probably left many of your goals behind, but indeed you accomplished others that you had not considered. It is an excellent starting point to think of a long-term purpose that makes you happy, considering you as a whole person, not just a parent or an executive, and make it flexible enough to allow for change.

How to start?

Build your 2021 Vision Board! 50% off 2 Coaching sessions + Tarot card reading session (Value $300) for only $150. A Coaching session is a perfect gift for an entrepreneur or a leader who just need to be empowered to her dream life.

Gift certificates can be used for coaching sessions and online courses with 50% off until December 31, 2020.

Original article published @ Forbes.

Look for a giant board, white or black, whatever is more comfortable for you. You can also use a flipchart, or if you want to share it with someone else, you can also use online brainstorming tools, such as Mural.co. You can even use a wall or a window and post-its, you don’t need to spend any money upfront. I would not recommend using a Word document or an A4 sheet only. Take this time to expand your mind by using a format that doesn’t limit your thoughts, something big.

Some things to consider:

–       Handwrite your goals instead of typing them, it helps you embrace them. Computers may dominate our lives, but research suggests handwriting brings us significant cognitive benefits, such as improving learning and retention.

–       Keep the board handy. Visualization is a powerful mind exercise. According to the popular book The Secret, “The law of attraction is that you become what you think about.” It recommends holding images of what you want in your mind, helps you improve your focus and attention, therefore increasing the odds of achieving it. You can include pictures, colors or anything you want to make you feel blissful when you see it. Feel that you achieved it before you actually did. What you focus on expands. Olympic medalist Michael Phelps would picture in his mind “a tape” of him swimming every day and night.

–       Try to do this activity in an hour or so, nonstop. Let your mind guide you, and plan to prevent interruptions by blocking or silencing your phone or doing it at a time of the day when you are alone and feeling energetic. A Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon could work, to make you feel like you are not working, this is part of your life planning.

How to do your vision board

Your vision board should focus on the things that you want.

1)   Write down the scope of your vision board. Remember this should be a long term exercise, such as 2021-2025. So you are going to write down the things you want to work on and improve in the next five years.

2)  Write down your goal. Who you want to become or be known/recognized for. Example: I want to be a coach who empowers people to take action and cultivate their authentic selves.

3)  Think of the main categories you want to work on, which are how the goal statement will be achieved. Ideally, no more than five. Write them down across your board. The categories could be self-development, self-care, writing, leading a team, developing a business or business unit, or creating a new product. Think basically about how you want your week to be. Your week should be full of these five categories of activities. You can even assign them a priority number and a day of the week to achieve them.

4)  Then, continue writing down what you need to do to achieve that specific category. Examples are creating a weekly newsletter, journaling at night, taking a course or contacting new clients. There is no specific order or way to do this. It depends on how your creative mind works. I prefer using a tree diagram to break down each major headline into smaller boxes or tasks, similar to an org chart. You can also use mind mapping, a tool very much used in design thinking: write the title of the subject or project that you’re exploring in the center of a page and draw a circle around it. Then draw lines out from this circle to connect with the subheading or subcircles, and so on. Other ways to do it is by using post-it notes, stickers, drawings or images. But remember to connect them. It must look like a net. If the ideas are not connected to the main goal and each other, you will have a hard time making them work for you. It will be like multitasking, and you want to avoid that. Focusing on one goal is essential. Go down no further than three levels of details on your board, otherwise, it is going to too much information to visualize.

5)  You can include the impediments or potential block roads you may have to tackle on one side of the board.

6)  You can also do an exercise trying to remember what worked well last year, what did not work well, and what to continue, and review your vision board to make sure you don’t stumble with the same stone.

7)   Feel like you are done? Review it again, and make sure every activity that is included will make you happy. If not, try to see how you can eliminate it, reduce it or delegate it. Take a picture, and print it so that you can keep it safe. You can modify it later on, anytime.

Converting the vision board into actionable items

You have a vision board ready. Now what? Is that all? To make it work for you and avoid becoming just an adoration figure that seems more like a daydream, define actionable items and book calendar entries. That is, make it really part of your day-to-day. Define the tasks that you can achieve this week, next month and next year, and start assigning a specific date and time for each task. The recurrent ones, like writing, exercising or developing your employees, should have a weekly schedule. Block your calendar with those tasks.

Last but not least, be very specific about quantifying what you want to achieve. For example, how many clients you want to get per month? How much money do you want to make? How many stories do you want to write? Use these metrics to check your success.

Adjust the vision board, the tasks and the metrics as necessary; they are all yours. The vision board is a tool to empower yourself, not scare you, or paralyze you with fear. Get a coach or mentor to help you out, your future is worth it. The reason why you do it long-term is so that you think of the big picture, keep it present in your mind and take obstacles as opportunities to reconnect your activity net with new paths towards the same goal.