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Dream It. Do It. - Vision Board
What The Heck's A Vision Board—and How Can It Change Your Life?
By Martha Beck
O, The Oprah Magazine | May 17, 2010
Step One: Cut out pictures of things you love. Step Two: Paste them onto paper. Step Three: Realize your life's ambition? Well...sort of. Martha Beck on the right way to use a vision board.
Since childhood, I've had a vivid recurring dream in which I can move objects without touching them. When I awaken from the dream, I can't believe it isn't true. For hours I'll glare at objects—starting with cars or furniture, gradually lowering my sights to scraps of Kleenex—incredulous that I can't move stuff with my mind.
Except that now I can.
A friend just gave me a gizmo called Mindflex, a game that includes a magnificently dorky-looking headset, a console, and a little foam ball. The headset transmits your brain's electrical activity to a fan in the console that blows the ball into the air. By thinking different thoughts, you control the fan, and thus the altitude of the ball.
The fact that this works delights but doesn't surprise me. The discoveries of physicist Werner Heisenberg, not to mention my recurring dream, long ago convinced me that the mind influences physical matter. If Heisenberg's work is unfamiliar, let me translate the theory into Californian: "Consciousness can shape reality."
This oversimplification makes my brain wince...which moves the Mindflex ball, confirming for me that the New Age ideal of mental magic—the notion that thoughts can create reality—is kinda, sorta supported by evidence. My goal is to teach you how to use one aspect of that magic, something indubitably cheesy but surprisingly effective. I'm talking about a vision board.
All the Pretty Pictures
Next to the Mindflex on my desk is a photo box containing many images I've torn from magazines. I plan to glue them all to one large piece of butcher paper. The resulting collage will be a vision board; its purpose, to depict (and lead me to) my desired future. This whole process makes me roll my eyes—as I was trained to do over the course of my very rationalist education—but damn if it doesn't work.
Sometimes.
I've made several vision boards that bombed out, and some that were so successful that the hairs on the nape of my neck prickled for months. Years ago I glued up a headline that said MAKING AFRICA WELL. I thought it was a joke—oh, sure, like I could do that—never expecting that a few years later I'd be invited to speak in Africa and while there meet folks who are healing African ecosystems. Suddenly, I found myself volunteering to work with them.
The Trick to Making a Vision Board
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.
Anyway, one illustration I did finish depicted a startled elephant. I wanted to paint it from a child's perspective, with the pachyderm rearing back, lifting one front leg, raising its trunk, and opening its eyes and mouth in surprise. I had no photographs that showed this scenario, and it wasn't the easiest thing to imagine. So I went to a circus, found an elephant who seemed to be parked in neutral, crouched down in front of him, and squinted, imagining what he'd look like with his leg lifted and his trunk raised. The elephant looked back at me...and adopted precisely the pose I was picturing. He remained in this awkward position for several minutes as I scribbled a sketch.
Just days later, I was working on another illustration involving parrots (this children's book was set in post-genocide Cambodia—what fun for kids!). In the midst of my research, I learned to my surprise that there was a species of parrot indigenous to my own turf in Arizona. I stared at these parrots in my bird book, wishing that one day I could see a living specimen. At that moment, I swear to God, I heard a scratchy thump, and three rare parrots landed on the window screen less than a yard from my face.
That's when I began believing that animals respond to intense visual images held in the human imagination. So does my Mindflex, and perhaps even complex phenomena like one's love life or career. I also noticed that the mental state that produced the elephant and parrot miracles was very different from the hankering I directed at my usual goals. And I've come to realize that you need to get into that mind-space if you want your vision board to work for you like a short-order cook hopped up on Red Bull. Here's how to do it....
Step 1: Please Your Animal
Create Your Own Vision Board Using this Simple Tool
What do you want in your life? What images represent your dreams? What words inspire you to move forward? Capture them with O Dream Board. Get clear about your goals, your hopes and your vision for your life. Make the connection to turn your dreams into reality every day.
The new O Dream Board is a free web-based application available to all Oprah.com members and easy to share with your friends. So dream it. See it. Share it. Achieve it. And repeat. Start living you best life now!
Need more inspiration? Still not sure what you want? Take the Passion Test and set your life on fire
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