Have you ever created a vision board? Vision boards are a visual representation of the dreams you want to come true, and often they are associated with manifestation and attracting what you want from the universe. But in today’s episode, I want to talk about how the dreams on your vision board come to life via the power of your brain, and why you should be creating a vision board to help craft the life of your dreams.

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My sister bought a car. She bought a Skoda. Now this was so interesting to my primary-school aged children because they had no idea what a Skoda was. And my sister came over and parked the Skoda out the front and the kids wanted to see it, and they were fascinated by the badge, the Skoda logo because they’d never seen it before. Yet, from then on every single time we left the house, the kids saw Skodas. Skoda! Skoda! There’s a Skoda! They could see them all over the place.

We have all had this experience. You learn about something for the first time and you think you’ve never experienced it before, and then suddenly it seems to appear everywhere. This is known as the frequency illusion, where you think something is occurring more frequently than it actually is. It’s caused by a combination of a couple of really fascinating cognitive processes, mainly the recency bias, which is where something that has occurred more recently is held in our memory and then affects the way we experience the world. So what do Skodas and the recency bias have to do with vision boards?

Well I want to show you why vision boards are so powerful. And whether you believe that the universe has special powers or not, why you should create one.

What is a Vision Board

A vision board can be created in any way that allows you to collect images of things you want in your future, AND can be kept somewhere that you will see it regularly. Vision boards are traditionally created by getting a bunch of magazines, a large board, and some scissors and glue, and then searching for images that you like, that represent things you want, or that you preference in some way. Sometimes we know explicitly what we want, and sometimes things just feel right to us. Through this process you’ll end up with a selection of images, and sometimes written words, that can be stuck on your board to represent a collage of your desired future.

If this physical task of getting the magazines and all the equipment feels like too much, I would encourage you to let it be really easy. You can start by just pulling out your phone, and looking up an image of something you want, and then taking a screenshot and saving it to a folder. You can just start a new Pinterest board, a secret board that no one else will see, and just start saving images. Let it be easy. You don’t have to even do it all in one sitting – over the next week you could just add images to your collection as you think of ideas. Let it be really easy, and you will have a collection of meaningful images in no time.

Finding Images

I see two parts to the vision board process that are really important. The first is the creation of the board, which I’ve just explained, and that serves a really important function of getting clear on your dreams. I mentioned that sometimes you know what you want, and you can search for these images directly, but sometimes the process of browsing things like magazines or Pinterest or just noticing what catches your eye on social media or on ads can really help to point you in the direction of something that you might be drawn to but not otherwise have actively sought out.

For example, maybe you have never travelled outside of the country, and you work a lot and you have very young kids and you just never thought about travelling, and you sometimes see images of tropical beaches when friends travel, but that’s just not your thing. And then maybe one day you see an image of a beautiful field of tulips with a windmill in the background, and that just really speaks to you. Seeing that might then start you thinking about going on a trip to Europe. You might have never actively searched for pictures of The Netherlands, yet seeing it aligned with your natural preferences and it became something that you began to desire.

So these processes of both actively searching for particular images, and saving pictures that you just naturally come across, are both important to help you gain clarity on what you want to bring into your life going forward.

Benefits of Creating the Vision Board

Creating vision boards is something that is sometimes done is certain types of counselling, and there is a paper by Burton and Lent in 2016 that outlines some of the benefits of creating a vision board, and these include identifying what you want in life, bringing awareness to your desires, clarifying goals, and inspiring and empowering people to create the life they imagine. So you can see how this process of simply creating the vision board can be a really illuminating experience in and of itself.

The Power of Seeing the Vision Board

Now, the second part of vision boards is a crucial one – you need to have it visible or very readily available. This is where the so-called magic comes in, but it’s not magic, it’s the power of your brain working away at matching your desires and preferences to your thoughts and your actions, and then to stimuli in the environment (and by stimuli I just mean things that our brain senses and perceives). Remember the story of the Skoda? Here is how we bring our vision to life.

Our brain has to processes millions upon millions of pieces of information in a day, and it just can’t do that consciously. Our brain has to be efficient, and it does this by processing most information subconsciously and only sending the upmost important things to conscious awareness. But how does the subconscious decide what is important enough to let through to consciousness?

Salience

Well the brain has many many rules that all work together to help it decide, and these are known as cognitive biases or heuristics. Often things that get let through to consciousness are things that are remarkable for some reason, for example very special or very personally relevant like having your name called out, or very dangerous so that the brain has to be on alert, or salient in some other way, like very bright or very uncomfortable or very emotionally charged or very important to your current task.

This idea of salience is important when we are talking about vision boards.

Salience is defined as the state of being prominent or projecting outward or of notable significance. And this is really how the brain processes information: it sends only the most salient information to conscious awareness for you to think about and act upon.

One way that something can become salient is that it is simply a recent piece of information. There is a study on decision making by Tsetsos and colleagues in 2012 who looked at how people’s preferences and values affected decision making in a numerical task, and they showed that when a piece of information is more recent, it affects decision making more heavily compared with information that was given earlier. This recency effect is a well-known cognitive bias and this paper is just one example of this.

There is another paper by Tiefenbeck and colleages in 2016 who found that making people’s household energy use more salient by giving real-time feedback influenced their decision making and reduced their energy consumption by 22%. So, the reason why my kids were seeing Skodas everywhere was because Skodas were really salient in their minds – it was the most recent car make that we had talked about, and it was also novel or new to them, and the brain finds novel information to be really salient too.

How it All Comes Together

The way that all this cognitive processing works together is like this: you create your vision board and the images of your goals are really clear to you. Then you keep it somewhere obvious so that you look at it frequently, and your brain keeps this information in recent memory. Then your subconscious gets to work applying rules to the information that it’s processing, and the recency bias applies and you start noticing things that you just looked at on your vision board, so that your attention is drawn to these things.

For example, you might overhear a particular word in a conversation that you weren’t really listening to, or you stop scrolling social media to read further into a post that you might have otherwise ignored. So, the recency bias causes the information to be more salient, and then this affects your decision making. By holding all this recent information in your mind, you are then biased to make decisions that are in line with what is on your vision board, and then your experiences match your desires. Importantly, it’s these later steps of making biased decisions and taking different actions that are also required when changing your life – simply making the vision board is not enough.

Magic or Brain Power?

So, is it magic? It can feel like that sometimes, but this is your incredibly powerful mind at work doing it’s thing. Bringing your dreams to the forefront of your mind means that they sit in the front seat as you make your way through your life. Creating a vision board is not a silly exercise, or one that is reserved only for people who are creative, it’s available to anyone and will make a powerful difference as you move towards living a life with more intention. Collect your images, arrange them, and then put them pride of place in your environment.

For an extra powerful kick, I want you to go back to this blog post about visualisation, which is a similarly powerful exercise, and the two combined will absolutely work together to move you quickly towards new and fulfilling dreams and goals.

I want you to let me know if you are going to make a vision board. Come and send me a message on Instagram, you can find me at live.an.intentional.life. I want to know if you’ve ever created one before, and if I’ve inspired you to make a new one or maybe to make your first one!

Now I’m going to end this post with my favourite quote from Mary Oliver, “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.” See you next time!

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If you are ready to implement the steps to get to those dreams on your vision board, then you are ready to join my online time management course TIMEWISE. Learn all about how to take back your time using the power of your brain.

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References Mentioned in the Post

Burton, L., & Lent, J. (2016). The use of vision boards as a therapeutic intervention. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 11(1), 52-65.

Tiefenbeck, V., Goette, L., Degen, K., Tasic, V., Fleisch, E., Lalive, R., & Staake, T. (2018). Overcoming salience bias: How real-time feedback fosters resource conservation. Management science, 64(3), 1458-1476.

Tsetsos, K., Chater, N., & Usher, M. (2012). Salience driven value integration explains decision biases and preference reversal. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 109(24), 9659-9664.