Marking the Destination
The first step in plating a full plan: Identify where you want to end up. Like those who spend their days in the kitchen or at sea, we too benefit by marking the destination before setting sail. Instead of a professionally printed menu hanging in the restaurant window or a tack on a nautical chart hanging behind the helm, identifying our own journey’s end may take the form of something more common. For millions of people around the world, a variant of inspirational iconography does get placed in a prominent spot as they start off. In fact, this is exactly what one of the most popular self-help books of recent times—selling more than thirty million copies in fifty languages—advised we do when attempting to check off the items on our bucket list. It said: Create vision boards.
I’m sure you’ve seen one. There’s a good chance you’ve made one. To craft a vision board, you compile a montage of visual icons, arranging the pictures like a page from a scrapbook. You choose images that depict how you want to look, what you want to achieve, or what success looks like to you—imagery that represents your loftiest dreams. And you hang it in a place where you see it every day.
Vision boards are incredibly popular, because people think they work. I recently surveyed nearly one thousand people from fifty-two different countries, ranging in age from sixteen to sixty-nine. Of these respondents, about half said they’d made a vision board themselves, and two-thirds said they knew a friend, colleague, family member, or acquaintance who had created one. Over 90 percent of survey respondents agreed that vision boards definitely, probably, or at least maybe help motivate and inspire people to figure out what goals are important to them in life. And over 90 percent said that they definitely, probably, or maybe help people complete a goal that’s important to them. And if I’m being honest, my own photos folder on my phone sort of looks like a vision board, what with all the photos of me sitting behind the kit with Mattie at my feet holding a drumstick of his own, banging on the bass drum while wearing his polka-dotted headphones as oversized earplugs.
Celebrities spread the popular perception of vision boards. Famously, Ellen DeGeneres made it clear for months that she wanted to be on the cover of Oprah Winfrey’s O, The Oprah Magazine. She created a vision board to remind herself and her audience of the goal. DeGeneres Photoshopped herself and Oprah into bikinis, with the two of them sitting on the beach and at the Playboy Mansion. She depicted herself and Oprah on Santa’s lap holding a screaming child for what she imagined could be the Christmas edition. She placed herself between Oprah and the only other woman to ever have appeared on the cover of O, First Lady Michelle Obama. The dream was real, and so was the visual montage DeGeneres made of it.
Oprah caught wind of DeGeneres’s fantasy and her mockups and said, “Ellen DeGeneres is a woman who can make things happen. When she decided she wanted to be on the cover of O, she pulled out all the stops. It worked—for only the second time in O history, this December, I’m sharing the cover with a woman I adore.”
In 2016, TD Bank conducted a survey of five hundred small business owners, asking whether they use vision boards. Over three-quarters said that they think vision boards give their workforce an accurate sense of where the business aspires to be in five years. Within the group of respondents, millennials were the most likely to say they use vision boards. They have grown up in an era when people use visuals to tell the stories of their lives, and avail themselves of the digital and social media platforms at their disposal to do so. Nearly 60 percent said they’d used a vision board to decide whether to start their business, and almost 90 percent reported using them to develop business plans.
But is there really anything behind it? Well, the TD Bank survey found that those who used visuals when defining their business goals were almost twice as confident in their own ability to meet their goals than individuals who didn’t use them.
Making vision boards can help us visualize where we want to be, and foster self-assurance that we can get there. Vision boards and other inspirational iconography strengthen our conviction in ourselves by formalizing our aspirations. They depict our hopes and dreams with concrete imagery. They are tools of materialization.
This process of materializing our goals applies to more than just financial decision-making, and can shed light on more than just the desired future growth of a company. It’s a tool that we use quite often to our own advantage in many facets of life. We materialize when we write down our grocery list rather than rely on our memory of the contents of our fridge and pantry as we walk the aisles of the market. We’re materializing when we create a list of chores our kids have to finish before they go out to play. We materialize when we leave a Post-it note affirmation on our mirror reminding us to be kind to ourselves, or to take out the garbage, metaphoric or literal. And the same goes for the checklist we create and cross off as we plan for a vacation or coordinate a team of coworkers at the office. Materializing can help us sidestep some of the common pitfalls that thwart our attempts to cross the finish line when racing toward our goals.
When I contemplated my musical journey from my place of total ineptitude to the one-hit wonder I hoped to become, my first thought was to cover the walls around the kit with pictures of legendary icons who had inspired generations. I hadn’t ever been into showcasing my fan-girl status at any point in my life by covering my drywall in band posters or ticket stubs. But why not give it a shot now, I thought. So that poster of the rock band Rush my parents got my husband for Christmas a few years back found its way into a frame and onto the wall. As did a dozen or so other photographs of musicians Pete and I both liked, and a hundred or so ticket stubs from some of the greatest shows we’d seen.
Removing the Ambiguity from Our Aspirations
Unless we are Ellen DeGeneres and are friends with Oprah, to reach success we need to take another big step beyond materializing what it looks like with a vision board. Indeed, while the confidence this gave the small business owners in the TD Bank survey is great to have, the question really is whether confidence increases the likelihood of seeing results. Do vision boards help us find an actual path forward to accomplishing our goals? I wondered, Would creating a wall of rock fame make a drummer out of me?
Unfortunately, simply envisioning future success won’t necessarily produce success, and creating images of ideal futures isn’t usually enough to make our dreams come true. A study led by a colleague of mine at the time, Heather Barry Kappes, found out why. She asked people to think about what success would look like when they had achieved an important health goal. She measured the physiological changes that occurred in their bodies as they daydreamed, and found that heart rate and blood pressure dropped over the course of their visualization. Their bodies showed signs of giving up before they even really got started. They were responding as they would just before nodding off to sleep. When we contemplate how great it will feel to overcome some of our toughest challenges, like losing weight or finally getting that promotion, we are, in a very real sense, mentally savoring and vicariously experiencing success—and resting on our laurels. We grow sluggish even before we get off the starting blocks.