London - I am at my kitchen table, surrounded by images of luxury and self-indulgence: piles of mouth-watering chocolates, bejewelled watches, brocade jackets and white sandy beaches.
That is because this year, instead of my usual list of unrealistic and puritanical resolutions, all doomed to be abandoned by February, I’m trying my hand at a vision board.
A tool that has long been popular with Hollywood stars, fashion designers and progressive business leaders, a vision board is a combination of collage and mind map, a display of images of how you would like your forthcoming year to be.
The key thing is that the board visually represents what you would like to attract to your life.
When Jim Carrey was at his lowest professional ebb, he reportedly used a vision board to jump-start his acting career, attaching to it a cheque made out to himself for $10-million for “acting services”.
Oprah Winfrey made a vision board showing a picture of Barack Obama as president, and while still a schoolgirl, Katy Perry created one to help her focus on her dream of becoming an award-winning singer.
According to Martha Beck, Oprah’s “life guru”, making a vision board can “catalyse something beyond your mind’s capacity to calculate.”
This is how I find myself flicking through my favourite journals, tearing out images of the tropical paradise where I’d like to holiday, the thoroughbred horse I’d love to own, and the model whose wardrobe (and waistline) I long for.
All the cutting and sticking is great fun, of course – it reminds me of being back at primary school. But there is a serious purpose behind what one might be tempted to dismiss as a silly celebrity fad.
Sports psychologists have found that mentally rehearsing winning a race, for instance, triggers electrical impulses in the muscles that can help fire them up for optimal performance which is why top sports stars such as Wayne Rooney and Jessica Ennis-Hill practise the technique.
It makes sense, therefore, that creating a visual reminder of your deepest dreams and ambitions can help not only to identify what matters to you, but focus your attention on achieving it, thus making it more likely to happen.
“I use vision boards with my clients to help them clarify their goals,” says productivity coach and neuroscientist Dr Magdalena Bak-Maier.
“If you do it properly, a vision board can reveal your subconscious beliefs and desires,” said Bak-Maier.
“If I pull out a clipping of a coat I like, I am more likely to find that coat somewhere or discount others that do not look like it, simply because this picture is now in my conscious mind. But of course, what made me pull out the coat in the first place is a deeper subconscious mind that mapped the coat to my desire for something: looking like the person in the coat, or that style and what it represents for me.”
“If you don’t know what you want, it’s much harder to achieve it,” points out interior designer and entrepreneur Kelly Hoppen.
“Pretty much everything I put on my vision board materialises because I make it happen.
“One year, I wrote a cheque for £1-million and said, “I want that in three months.” And I did it.
“A vision board is about what you want and how you’ll achieve it. If you think of your brain as a messy room, a vision board is like tidying it up,’ said Hoppen.
Hoppen is a great believer in the power of vision boards, and recommends them to the owners of businesses she has invested in.
She creates a new vision board for herself every January, in order to map out her hopes and dreams for the coming year.
“I don’t like the idea of starting with New Year’s resolutions about what I’m giving up,” she says.
“That seems very old-fashioned. A vision board is a much more positive thing; it’s about what you want and how you’ll achieve it.”
Her vision board for this year is a large piece of black card, covered with neatly arranged but apparently random photographs: a close-up of coral, some monochrome fashion images, the minimalist interior of a barn, a 1950s TV, an elegant model with grey hair, some cupcakes, a photograph of herself with a moustache.
Beside them she has written quotes that she finds inspiring: “no guts, no glory”, “say yes to new adventures”, “when nothing goes right, go left”.
“That one is just a reminder to me to be amusing about things; don’t always give yourself a hard time,” she said.
It’s important not to over think when you are selecting images, otherwise you can end up being too prescriptive, warns Bak-Maier, who plays music while her clients are choosing their images to distract them from conscious decisions.
So far, it’s too early to say whether next year will see me wandering on a beach, flaunting my newly size-ten figure in a bejewelled bikini, but I live in hope.
Daily Mail