Processing Your Order (How I Created my Vision Board)

Leah's vision board going to print

I heard about vision boards from a few friends. One gal friend was telling me about her experience putting one together with her sisters and cousins, who (I'm sure) were also as equally talented, driven, beautiful as she is. And not only do they meet and encourage/challenge each other regularly on their vision boards, they do this kind of thing every year. What a gift to have a cadre like that. (I'd almost kill for one.) And while I crave deep conversations and partnership, I've always struggled with spending a little too much time inside my own head, and find it hard to find folks to do this kind of thing with. #introvertchallenges

Well, normally I resist things that feel gimmicky, but I also realize that when I say that, I'm trying to shut things out that sound non-native to me. And. Well. But isn't that contrary to the point? When you need fresh perspective, you need to do things differently. Right? I need to be open, and stop being dumb about this. Ok. So here's my little project I did this morning. I'm ridiculously proud of myself for doing this. 

• I started with a bit of googling and youtubing, because sadly I've never done a vision board before. That was helpful to get started. The guidelines were simple and thoughtful. Just my style.
• I decided that since I didn’t have time to gather a bunch of magazines and print and cut out images and break out my glitter glue, I’d use Canva. I love Canva. I use it a lot for work and decided it would work great for me today. And it turned out to be perfect for me!
• The how is kind of fun. Canva has layouts with grids. You can upload images, and then “click” the images into the grids, reposition, crop, and apply filters if you want, and boom. It’s GTG. (Being a marketer helps here, as I do stuff like this – image selection, messaging, calls to action – all the time.)
• I searched for images online, free good ones. And I superimposed some words on top of them, like captions. Batta boom, batta bing, presto chango = vision board.
• My vision board is all about things I want. Things I want to be, to have, to do. I recently wrote out a bucket list, so some of those went onto the board. Some images and words were things I wanted in the near future, and some were longer term goals, and others were perpetual wishes for myself. I spent some time switching some pictures out for bolder images and words. That was an interesting process to notice that a particular wish or goal wasn’t bold or honest enough. It felt really good to dig deeper and deeper, and I replaced several images and captions a few times. I had to redo my layout a couple of times because of this, but that was a part of the process for me.
• I had one final issue – I need some physical version of my vision board to look at home or at work or whatever. (Vision boards supposedly work best if you look at them regularly, to inspire and challenge and focus you.) So this was one of the coolest parts: Canva has a print function where you can create flyers and posters with a few clicks. For a couple hours of work online, and for less than $10, I will have a few copies of professionally printed vision board coming my way in a few days.

How cool is that?

I’m not sure if I would have gotten through this process without these tools available to me. I’m a professional and a mom and a wife and all that other stuff, too. My evenings are crunched, my mornings harried, and most weekends spent chasing some elusive sense of rest and well-being. Finding the time to get a bunch of old print magazines and art supplies together is NOT my idea of a good time or one that even feels practical. I’m going to say God bless image searches and free online graphics tools and my professional skill set that made doing all this super easy.

And it’s funny. This image in this blog is showing the final step, which is submitting my flyer-sized vision board to print. And it’s also rather indicative of what a vision board is all about at its core – you’re supposed put an order into Life, essentially, about what you want. You tell LIFE what YOU want. And you’re to focus on realizing that order for yourself. Being present and reflective in the process, is important too. Processing your order, indeed!