I have been completing a research project for a Life Coaching certification program I am doing. I chose to look at arts based supports for the coaching process or if an arts/creative process could be a self coaching tool. I didn’t come away with a clear answer but the thing I know for myself that diving in without thinking but with clear intention causes images to appear. Understanding them can come later, sometimes much later.
The thing is what do you do with a vision board? Most people I have encountered over a number of years who advocate them tell you to put it in a prominent place and look at it frequently and ….. I can mostly understand the and but for many people it is a mystery around how the vision board becomes reality in their world. In the same way that many folk respond when they are asked to journal. So frequently the response I hear is: ‘I don’t know what to write.’ (that can be another blog, as you may have figured out I am prone to using lots of words)
My understanding of a vision board is that it is like a download of what it is the maker wants to see, feel and have in their life. A set of goals in their most rudimentary form. The thing is that goals, actions and values can get really mixed up on a board. Especially one like mine that was very responsive simply to what I found in the magazines that appealed to me and I randomly glued on. Well it would be easy to think that, it is visually cluttered with lots of colours, lines and layers.
Let me tell you what I see this week. The tree is my metaphor for living so I am the tree all adorned in flowers with the curious addition of the book. The rocks were pleasing to me to hold the tree up but a good foundation in life: family, caring relationships, work, resources…… are all those things. The earth holds and feeds the tree so they stand for the things which do that in my life that keep me upright. Some of my values will fall in there.
The moth on the thistle surprised me when I found it in a random magazine. It reminded me of the day I recount in my book, Towards (p106) when I tell of falling in the mud on a track outside Melrose in Scotland and looking up to the ground in front of me, I saw a tiny butterfly on an equally tiny thistle flower. It’s beauty existed whether I saw it or not. It didn’t exist for me, this moment in creation was just the natural order of things, but that day it touched me very deeply and the lesson of flourishing as self rose within. I included it as a reminder that lessons of the past are always present. I especially included it as anything I create within my life needs to include me, and is the natural for me. If it doesn’t feel like that I need to think carefully.
The thing is there are so many of those moments in this board. It’s nice as a blessing point but it can be the source of reasons to find the dream and write the story (in my journal). I was given at the afternoon I went to, a book that I could record my thinking in, so I decided this should be the place where I continued to create and write the story of the board and desires it contained.
In the journal I am writing about what comes up but I have reached the place about what comes next. What I wish and dream of. The heart’s desires that have not been lived yet. I can clinically make a list, which I might or I can write them as a story to myself about what it could look, feel and be like. That is what we do in a visualisation process it is just using all of the senses to do it.
So what will you do with your vision board? Would you like help to turn what you hope for and envision for your purpose of your board to get turned into real life. You have recorded intention and decide what you really are saying to yourself in the images you have chosen. Then ….. there is the option to turn that knowledge into goals with scaffolding around them so you can take action to turn your intention into something real.
Towards life is the only direction
Sandy