Have you ever heard the phrase, “You get what you see?” 

It means that your thoughts create your reality, so whatever you see in your mind’s eye – in terms of how you view yourself, other people, and the world around you, as well as the vision you have for your life – is what you will experience. 

This gives you incredible power! It means that you can change your reality simply by changing the thoughts and vision you hold in your head. 

And vision boards are a valuable tool for this.

Also known as “dream boards,” or “inspiration boards,” these simple visual tools make it easy for you to clarify your vision for the life you truly want to live – and keep it top of mind so you can make persistent progress toward it no matter what is happening in the world around you.  

I personally have used vision boards for decades to bring my biggest dreams to life. Back when I was first starting out as a success trainer, I set myself the ambitious goal of making $100,000 in a year. 

To keep my goal top of mind, I created a gigantic picture of a $100,000 bill and taped it to my bedroom ceiling so it would be the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes every morning. 

And you know what? By the end of the year, I had made $97,000. I was three thousand dollars shy of my goal but I didn’t feel like I had failed at all because that was so much more money than I had ever made before and it made me understand that my vision was absolutely within my reach. 

So now I want to teach you how to make a vision board that will allow you to make your most ambitious dreams come true! 

What is a Vision Board?

A vision board is simply a visual collage of images and words that represent your goals and dreams in life. 

By arranging collages on a poster or corkboard that represent your goals, it will come naturally for you to remember them and keep them top of mind every day. 

A vision board is also a powerful way to activate the Law of Attraction to attract the people, resources, and opportunities that will help you achieve your goals and make your dreams come true. 

Purpose of a Vision Board

Vision boards act as a compass or “guiding star” to keep you moving in the direction of your dreams, no matter how many unexpected distractions you have to deal with in your day-to-day life. 

When you create a “dream board” and display it where you can see it every day, it helps remind you of the bigger picture and what your ultimate purpose in life is. Your board will allow you to take action and bring you closer to your dreams, rather than pushing you further away.

Benefits of Using a Vision Board

You know the old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words?” 

Compared to words, images convey a huge amount of complex information to our brains in a single instant. A simple picture of a cabin on the beach conveys a sense of place, shelter, freedom, possibility, and accomplishment, and also engages our senses by evoking physical sensations one would experience in such an environment. 

Those are the benefits of using a vision board. By representing goals and dreams in an impactful, image-based way, we can create powerful “inspiration boards” that activate our subconscious mind to make decisions and identify the resources in our environment that will help us make real progress toward our dreams. 

Here are just a few of the powerful benefits associated with using a vision board: 

• Ensure your goals are one of the first things you think of every day
• Makes it easier for you to leverage the Law of Attraction in your life
• Creating your vision board can be a powerful, meditative process that brings clarity on what you really want your life to look and feel like
• Inspires you and boost your mood
• Expands your sense of what’s possible
• Helps you remember what’s most important and not sweat the small stuff
• They’re fun to make! A great bonding activity to do with family & friends
• You can share them with others to enlist their support in helping you achieve your vision

Now let’s explore the process of creating a powerful dream board for your life! 

How to Make a Vision Board

Your first step to making a goal-setting vision board is to allow time in your schedule to do it. 

Make sure you have a decent-sized poster board, corkboard, or even a metallic display board along with magazines or other images, scissors, glue, tacks, tape, or magnets – whatever you need to create a collage of words and images that portray your goals in life. 

What to Put on a Vision Board

As you start your “vision board journey,” I encourage you to look for pictures that represent or symbolize the experiences, feelings, and possessions you want to attract into your life. You can use pictures from magazines, photographs from your own personal collection, images from the Internet – whatever inspires you. 

Be creative! You can include not only photos but “power words,” inspiring quotes, illustrations, personal affirmations, purpose statements, or anything else that speaks to you.

You may want to include a picture of yourself on your inspiration board, so you can literally see yourself surrounded by all of the different things and experiences you’d like to attract into your life. If you do, be sure to choose a photo in which you are smiling and look happy.

As you gather your images and other vision-board “ingredients,” be sure to consider ALL areas of your life – not just your income and professional goals but also your relationships, your health and fitness, your free time, your spiritual life, and how you want to live in community with others. 

You can choose to make a vision board that encompasses all of these areas or you might want to create separate boards for each area of your life.

As you create your vision board, keep it neat and attractive. Be selective about what you place on your vision board and remember that less is often more. Use only the words and images that best represent your purpose, your ideal future, and words that inspire positive emotions in you. 

There is beauty in simplicity and clarity. Too many images and too much information will be distracting and harder to focus on. 

Vision Board Ideas to Consider

Exactly what you add to your goal-setting vision board depends on what you are trying to manifest in your life. For example: 

• Financial Goals: If you are hoping to attract more money into your life, you may want to include images of actual cash or the items you would like to buy with that money (such as your own home, a car, an e-bike etc.).
• Relationship Goals: If you are looking for romantic love, you may want to include images of happy couples doing romantic things, such as enjoying a fancy dinner, going for walks in nature, traveling, cooking together, snuggling up on the couch – whichever activities you most dream of enjoying with a significant other.
• Happiness Goals: If you are looking to experience more joy in life, add images that evoke that sense of joy in you. These could be images of nature, or happy people laughing, or cute animals – whatever causes you to feel the emotion you want to experience.
• Spiritual Goals: If you’re hoping to find greater spiritual understanding and contentment, include images that evoke the kind of spiritual enlightenment you seek. These could be images specific to your faith tradition, or they could be serene images from nature that awaken the sense of harmony you’re looking for.
• Travel Goals: If you want to experience more travel and adventure, include images of the exact places you would like to travel to and the types of experiences you would like to have when you go.

By featuring images and other elements that express the places, things, and experiences you want to manifest in your life, you will unlock the power of the Law of Attraction and find it easier to attract the resources and opportunities required to make your dreams come true. 

Just be sure to check in with yourself first and confirm that your vision board ideas are in full alignment with your goals in life – otherwise, you could find yourself manifesting situations that aren’t in harmony with your vision and purpose.  

My 6-Step Vision Board Creation Process

1. Create a list of goals you’d like to achieve in the next year

To create a vision board that embodies your goals, first, you must know what they are. 

Spend some time getting clear on exactly what you want your ideal life to look like, and what you need to accomplish in the next 12 months to launch you closer to your goals. This goal-setting article is a good place to start. 

2. Collect a bundle of old magazines with beautiful pictures

If you’re not a magazine reader or currently don’t have any magazines at home, ask your friends if they have any they don’t want. You should also be able to pick some up for just a dollar or two at your local thrift store. Or you could check out your local recycling depot. 

Ours has a “free stuff” corner where you can pick up all the magazines you could ever want at zero cost. Maybe yours does, too?

3. Find pictures that represent your goals and inspire you

Go through the magazines and cut out pictures that represent your goals and speak to your heart in some meaningful way.  Look for those that immediately make you say, “Yes! That is what I want in my life!” 

They don’t have to be physical objects or literal interpretations of what you want in your life. Instead, focus on how the images make you FEEL.

For example, if you’d like to move to a home with waterfront property, don’t worry if you can’t find a picture of your perfect “dream home.” Perhaps a picture of an idyllic ocean sunset will be enough to inspire you. 

Or if you’d like to attract a new romantic partner into your life, instead of hunting for a picture of a man or woman who meets your physical ideal, find a picture that represents love to you – an image of two people holding hands, or even a picture of a heart. 

Remember that you are in control of your destiny and can manifest any outcome you imagine! 

4. Make a collage out of your photos

Once you have collected enough photos, it’s time to make your vision board! 

Arrange your photos on your poster paper or corkboard into an attractive display. Then glue, tack, or tape your pictures to hold them in place. 

5. Add motivational “affirmation words” that represent how you want to FEEL

Your vision of your ideal life shouldn’t be focused on “stuff” so much as on how you want to FEEL. 

That’s why I like to add words to my vision board that describe how I want to feel, such as: “joyful,” “abundant,” “powerful,” “fearless,” “loved,” “strong,” “healthy,” “loving,” or “financially free.”

Take some time to create a list of words that describe how you want to feel. You can search for these words in your magazines or write them yourself. 

Add them to your vision board in a visually attractive way. This will help you keep your motivation high even when the world around you is in chaos. 

6. Take a few moments to contemplate your vision board every day

To get the full benefit from your vision board, it’s important for you to place it somewhere you can see it every day. I recommend taking a few minutes to look over your vision board at least once or twice a day. 

I like to review my vision board every morning when I wake up and every night before I go to sleep. This prompts my subconscious mind to come up with new ideas on how to achieve my goals so I can wake up in the morning bursting with motivation to succeed.

Tips on Using Your Dream Board

Vision Board Examples

If you’re interested in vision board examples, here’s what my personal vision board looked like a few years ago. As you can see, I have a picture of myself on the cover of Time Magazine, headlines of sold-out events with waitlists, a picture of the cover of a best-selling book I published that year, Chinese symbols, and more. 

You can use my vision board as an example and template to create your own inspiration board.

Create Your Vision Board & Reach Your Dreams

To maximize the impact of your vision board on your life, follow these tips:

• Look at your dream board often and feel the inspiration it provides.
• Read your daily affirmations and inspirational words aloud.
• Close yourself and clearly visualize yourself living the life represented by the images on your vision board. 
• Feel yourself in the future you have designed.
• Believe it is already yours.
• Be grateful for the good that is already present in your life.
• any goals you have already achieved.
• Recognize the changes you have seen and felt.
• Appreciate the presence of God in your life.
• Accept the Law of Attraction at work in your life.
• Look at it just before going to bed and first thing upon rising.

Finally, I encourage you to download my free Vision Board Checklist. 

Use it to amplify the power of your vision board and leverage it to stay on track toward your goals to make your wildest dreams come true!