Make your dreams concrete with Dream Boards

During or after the Christmas Holidays, lots of us start formulating our New Year’s Resolutions. Why don’t you jump start a super future by creating a Dream Board?

To get started with how to make a Dream Board, you’ll need these supplies:

-- Poster board. I always use giant flipchart paper.

-- A big stack of different magazines. Make sure you find lots of different types. Or use your old ones and throw the rest away (downsize your stuff, remember?!).

-- Glue. Not Elmers. (It makes the pages ripple.) Rubber cement is perfect. Glue sticks don’t last.

Ask yourself what you want next year, what you want to do, have and whom you want to be with. I love doing this with soft music in the background and a nice glass of wine.

You can also leaf through the magazines with this question in mind.

Step 1: Go through your magazines and tear the images from them. No gluing yet! Just let yourself have lots of fun looking through magazines and pulling out pictures or words or headlines that strike your fancy. Have fun with it. Make a big pile of images and phrases and words.

Step 2: Go through the images and begin to lay your favorites on the board. Eliminate any images that no longer feel right. This step is where your intuition comes in. As you lay the pictures on the board, you’ll get a sense how the board should be laid out. For instance, you might assign a theme to certain parts of the board. Health, Career, Finances, Relationships, Self-Improvement, for instance. Or it may just be that the images want to go all over the place. Or you might want to fold the board into a book that tells a story.  People come up with amazingly creative ways to stage a vision board. It only needs to mean something to you!

Step 3: Glue everything onto the board. Add writing if you want. You can paint on it, cut out text or write words with markers.

Step 4: I like to put an attractive photo of myself in the very center of the vision board. You also could paste yourself in the center of your board.

Step 5: Hang your vision board in a place where you will see it often. This is important and, of course, inspiring. You could ask yourself questions like “What could I do now that would get me closer to these dreams?” or “Which of the themes interest me the most today?”

How to make a vision board if you’re not quite sure what you want:

Go through each magazine. Tear out images that delight you. Don’t ask why. Just keep going through the magazines. If it’s a picture of a teddy bear that makes you smile, then pull it out. If it’s a cottage in a misty countryside, then rip it out. Just have fun and be open to whatever calls to you. Then, as you go through Step 2 above, hold that same openness, but ask yourself what this picture might mean. What is it telling you about you? Does it mean you need to take more naps? Does it mean you want to get a dog, or stop hanging out with a particular person who drains you? You’ll probably know the answer. If you don’t, but you still love the image, then put it on your vision board anyway. It will have an answer for you soon enough.

You’ll have fun doing this with others, too. I have done this with participants of my seminars. It can point you in the right direction, the direction of your dreams.