What The Heck's A Vision Board—and How Can It Change Your Life?

What The Heck's A Vision Board—and How Can It Change Your Life?
By Martha Beck
O, The Oprah Magazine | From the June 2010 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine
Comments (43)
| Print
I've discovered there's a trick to making a vision board that brings forth such improbable coincidences. It starts with avoiding common pitfalls that result in faulty, inoperative models. Many people hear the basic instructions—"Find pictures of things you want in your life and stick 'em where you can see 'em"—and create virtually identical collages: a wad of cash, a handsome husband, a gorgeous body, a luxury car, a tropical beach.

Snore. These images constitute our culture's idea of the good life. Even a rich, happily married beauty queen with a Porsche in the driveway and a house on the ocean will crank out this same damn vision board. This has no juice at all. To really work, a vision board has to come not from your culture but from your primordial, nonsocial self—the genetically unique animal/angel that contains your innate preferences.

When you start assembling pictures that appeal to this deep self, you unleash one of the most powerful forces on our planet: human imagination. Virtually everything humans use, do, or make exists because someone thought it up. Sparking your incredibly powerful creative faculty is the reason you make a vision board. The board itself doesn't impact reality; what changes your life is the process of creating the images—combinations of objects and events that will stick in your subconscious mind and steer your choices toward making the vision real.

Vision Board 101

I've known for some time that staring at objects while holding pictures in my head makes reality oddly responsive. I was persuaded of this by two events so striking and improbable that I'll describe them to you in some detail. Both occurred while I was illustrating a children's book, which was never published because: (1) My animal/angel didn't really want to create it; (2) I got tired after doing about 25 percent of the illustrations; and (3) the book basically sucked.

Read more