This week you’re going to create your vision board in Part Two of the four part series, “Are You Ready to Make 2018 Your Best Year?”

If you missed Part One, go back and read it here.

I hope you celebrated your amazing accomplishments and let your awesomeness in!

Letting go of everything that landed on your “Lessons Learned” list, is as important as celebrating your successes.

Did you let that shit go?

If not, go back to last week’s post and complete those important steps. If you carry limiting thoughts, beliefs, or behaviors that you’re not conscious of into 2018, you’re operating on autopilot.

You can learn to feel your feelings.

Feelings are only vibrations in your body.  When you lean into them, be IN them, and breathe into them, they dissipate.

Just like that…poof! They’re gone.

We tell ourselves we only want to feel the good feelings so we create ways of numbing the ones we label as bad.

Do you want to live year-after-year rinsing and repeating? Since you’re still reading this I’m sure you don’t.

Like I said last week, to be the best version of YOU, you must check your course from time to time.

The point of last week’s exercise was to check our course. That way we can make adjustments, if we need to do so, to aim in the direction of our best selves.

Onward we go to my favorite part of this three-part journey!

Are you ready to dream big?

This week you’re going to do a visioning process. Then, you’ll create your vision board to put your dreams and intentions into images. 

The vision board is a visualization tool that activates the universal Law of Attraction. As I said last week, the Law of Attraction says that “energy follows focus”. Another way of saying it is “where thoughts go, energy flows”.

So, if your thoughts are positive you attract positive outcomes. Likewise, if your thoughts are negative you manifest negativity in your life.

Not only does your vision board activate the Law of Attraction, but it also programs the reticular activating system in your brain (RAS).

The RAS is a bundle of nerves at the base of your brain that acts like a master ‘delete’ key.

The RAS’ job is to filter and delete the incessant “noise” that your subconscious mind is always taking in. It communicates the information you’re interested in to your conscious mind and deletes the rest. It’s a miraculous system that helps our conscious mind from going into major overstimulation. 

To best explain this, look around and notice everything you see that is yellow. Now close your eyes and name everything you saw that was green. You can’t do it because your RAS was looking for yellow things and it hit the ‘delete’ key on everything else.

To look at another example, let’s say you go shopping for a new dress to wear to a cocktail party. You know most women will be wearing little black dresses and you want to be different. So you decide on a stunning royal blue dress that accentuates all the right places. When you get to the party you’re surprised to see several others wearing royal blue.

That’s your RAS doing it’s job because you told your brain you’re interested in royal blue.

The Law of Attraction and the RAS work together to support you in manifesting your heart’s desire.

That’s a lot of power!

Now that you understand the power of vision boards, let’s get busy dreaming!

Step 1:

Take out your last sheet of paper that you wrote the following seven categories:

Personal/Emotional Growth

Family/Relationships

Spiritual

Career

Financial

Health & Wellness

Home/Physical Environment

Next, close your eyes and imagine, ” What would you love to create for yourself in 2018 in regards to your personal/emotional growth?”

Write down everything that sets your spirit soaring high.

Don’t worry about HOW you’re going to do it. That’s not important in this step. What’s important is that you let yourself dream without fear or judgement.

After you finish with your first category, move on and do the same for the remaining six categories of your life.

Reach high!

Step 2:

Gather your images.

Back in the “olden days”, I went through magazines and found images that represented my visions. I cut out pictures and phrases that aligned with my intentions. Once I had my images together, I glued them onto poster or foam core board.

If that strikes your fancy, feel free to use the same method to create your vision board. 

After creating a LOT of vision boards glued onto poster board over the years, I discovered they didn’t hold up over time. Between many moves and the passage of time, most of them fell apart because the glue didn’t hold, they got bent, or both.

So, for our 2016 vision board (my husband and I created that one together), I painted a canvas and then glued our images onto the canvas with Mod Podge. I love how that one turned out, and because it’s on a canvas, we hung it on the wall with a picture hook. We hung it in our bathroom so we could see it several time a day.

That worked great and I recommend this method if you’re going to use images you cut from magazines. You can buy an inexpensive canvas at any craft store and pick up some Mod Podge there, as well.

I created my 2017 vision board using a collage app, called Moldiv, on my iPhone. I am going to create my 2018 board on my laptop using on Canva.

Both options have collage templates that you can drag and drop your photos into.

I LOVE technology.

It’s made creating vision boards easy and mess free. (No sticky fingers from the adhesive you use.)

If you want to create your vision board electronically, I suggest that you create a board in Pinterest to gather your images.

Canva also has a ton of free images you can use. 

To find the images I pin to my Pinterest board, I search for words or phrases that I wrote down for each category in Step 1. For example, one of things I wrote down under the “Financial” category was “prosperous”. So, I did a search in Pinterest for “prosperous” and it brought up a gazillion images.

When I found one that struck my fancy, I saved it to my “2018 Vision Board” board.

WARNING: If you don’t already know, Pinterest can be addicting. You can lose hours of your life searching for images that you love. Proceed with caution. 

Once you’ve gathered your images, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Step 3:

Affix your images to your canvas or foam core board, or drag and drop them into your collage template.

Step 4:

If you created your vision board via an electronic program, I recommend that you send it to Shutterfly or Snapfish to have it printed as a photograph. (I had the one I shared above printed as an 11 x 17 photograph.)

Once you receive it in the printed format, hang it somewhere you will see it every day, several times a day. You may want to frame it first for easy hanging and to protect the image.

If you affixed your images onto a canvas or foam core board, you’re ready to hang it.

Be sure you hang your vision board someplace that you’ll see it often.

Don’t stick it in a closet where you’ll forget about it. The point is to look at it a LOT so that you are focusing your thoughts on manifesting your dreams. THAT is the secret to activating the Law of Attraction and your reticular activating system to manifest the awesome outcome that you desire.

I know you’re going to love creating your vision board!

Be sure to read next week’s post for the next step in Creating Your Best 2018.

Sending you so much love,