Enjoying the journey is about consciously taking stock of your life and determining how it could be better. It’s about taking the time to look at your life and ask yourself if you feel fulfilled. So – do you have everything you want? Do you feel energised, alive and that you’re making the most out of your life?
If you’re not perfectly fulfilled, a vision book can help you to create a life that is more exciting, fun, loving, engaging, peaceful or whatever it is that you want. The journey of life is a process – it’s always changing. A vision book is also dynamic. It will enable you to:
- take stock about what’s working in your life and what isn’t
- envision and design a more compelling future
- acknowledge and celebrate your achievements
- ultimately create more of what you want
You may want more adventure, a sense of more space, or a way to earn money doing what you love. The adventure may come in the form of an exploration holiday. The sense of more space may come from a larger home. And earning money doing what you love could come from starting your own business. Or perhaps you want to feel better about yourself, get a sex life or find your spiritual side. This can come from losing weight, finding a new partner or going on a mediation retreat. But how does a vision book fit in?
What exactly is a vision book?
A vision book is one of many tools that can help you to attract a variety of positive things into your life. It is a collection of pages created by you that are filled with images, pictures and words that demonstrate what you want and why you want it.
The 5 steps to creating your vision book
Ultimately, you want to feel better than you do now and there are certain things that will help you to get those feelings. You don’t just want a car – you may want the feeling of freedom, speed, and luxury. You don’t just want a new partner – you want to share, to love and to feel loved, be admired and so forth. So…keeping in mind that it’s the feelings that we’re after, let’s get started:
1. Decide on a ‘theme’ for your first page and write it at the top of a piece of scrap paper. This is the pre-vision page draft. There are no rules, so you can decide to create a page that:
- outlines your life (ex. you in the centre with work, social life, family, material items, etc. depicted all around you)
- something very specific that you want (ex. your perfect home, to create your own business, a new partner, a child)
2. Under the theme write as many details as you can about it. For example, if it’s your perfect home, you might put: barn conversion, lots of land with enclosed garden, no houses overlooking, lots of trees, place for a veggie patch, solar panels, open-plan kitchen/living room, bedroom with walk-in closet, overlooking rolling countryside, and so forth.
3. Brainstorm a list of feelings you will get when you achieve what you want. For example, when you get your perfect home the feelings you’ll feel might be: warmth, space, freedom, cleanliness, cosiness, accomplishment, pride, love and so forth.
4. With your theme, details and feelings go to google images and type in both the details and feelings and find pictures/images that depict your vision. When you see something you like, print it out. You can also find images in magazines or photographs. Once you get in the habit of looking and updating your vision book, you’ll start to pick up pictures from a wide variety of places.
5. Get a piece of white or coloured card and arrange and glue all your images to a piece of paper. If you can’t find images that convey a certain feeling, type out the word and cut and paste it on the card or simply write the words with a pen. Once you’re done, go back to step one and decide on your next theme.
How do you use your vision book?
Your vision book will always be a work in progress. Spend time once a day or every week looking through your book. You can add or remove whole pages/images/words as time goes by. There’s no right or wrong to what you put in your book – you can only judge your pages on whether they make you feel good or bad. If they make you feel good you’re doing the right thing.
When you achieve an element of a page or a whole page simply put a tick mark over the area to signify your achievement. Congratulate yourself, show appreciation and keep achievements highlighted within your book – every time you see your achievements it reinforces the fact that you can attract what you want into your life.
How does a vision book work?
You get what you focus on. By looking over your vision book you not only focus your mind on what you want to achieve but you also focus on the feelings you’re looking to feel. The more your mind knows what you want, the more it will seek it out on your behalf.
Have you ever bought a car and then noticed that there are tonnes of them all over the place? Before you put your focus on that particular car, you never noticed the abundance of them. For me, when I became pregnant I suddenly noticed lots of pregnant woman that never seemed to exist before.
Your brain is super powerful – it’s doing all sorts of stuff behind the scenes. If you focus on negative stuff like the daily news or how sad your life is you’re going to attract more negative stuff. Conversely, if you focus on the positive side of life, you’re more likely to be more fulfilled. The vision book is a tool that will help you to keep your sites on what you want while feeling gratitude for what you’ve already achieved. It’s just a little devise that helps to remind us about what we want and why we want it. Give it a go and let me know how you get on!
Kim is the author of EnjoyingTheJourney.co.uk. For more information, please email her at Kim@EnjoyingTheJourney.co.uk
