I’ve just completed a vision board for 2026.
One that isn’t organised around goals, timelines, or resolutions. There are no tick boxes or milestones, no 5 year plan waiting to be met. Instead, it holds images of travel, learning, cosmology, culture (including my own). It feels less like a map and more like an orientation. A way of noticing what I’m being drawn towards, rather than what I’m expected to chase.
Using the Vision Board to Suit You
Vision boards are often misunderstood as unrealistic or idealistic, but I’ve come to see them as something far quieter and more intentional. They don’t ask what should I do next? They ask what do I want to move closer to? Not in a practical sense, but in a human one. They help the mind focus on desires that exist beyond productivity, the things the soul and spirit recognise before language catches up.
OPEN VISION BOARD ADVICE: When creating an open vision board, it can help to let go of outcomes and focus instead on atmosphere. Rather than collecting images that represent specific achievements or timelines, pay attention to what you’re drawn to instinctively. Think colours, textures, places, gestures, moods. Notice what keeps reappearing without forcing it to make sense.
An open vision board is less about predicting the future and more about creating a visual language for how you want to live, think, and feel. There’s no need to be practical or realistic here; clarity often comes later.
By allowing curiosity to lead rather than expectation, the board becomes a space of possibility
The History of the Vision Board
Historically, this practice has deeper roots than it’s often given credit for. In her article From Hieroglyphics to Personal Empowerment, Eliza Fury traces the origins of vision boards back to ancient Egypt. Where hieroglyphics etched onto papyrus scrolls were used to visually express hopes, intentions, and desires.
Later, in the 1960s, the idea of creative visualisation gained wider attention. Centering the belief that what we repeatedly imagine shapes what we notice, and eventually, how we live. Not as fantasy, but as focus.
Vision boards, in this sense, become tools of attention gentle reminders of what we want to hold in view.
Honouring the Pace of Becoming
This feels particularly important now. I’ve just graduated from university, a moment that often arrives wrapped in urgency. The outside world quickly asks what next? as though certainty should be immediate, as though movement is always preferable to pause. But graduation doesn’t only mark an ending; it creates space. And I’m learning that there is value in not rushing to fill it.
My vision board reflects this refusal to hurry. Looking at it, what stands out is not a single destination but a way of living. There are gestures of movement, but also moments of grounding. Images of cosmology sit beside symbols of ancestry and craft, suggesting that learning is not only outward-facing but deeply rooted. It feels communal rather than individual, cyclical rather than linear. A reminder that knowledge can be felt as much as it is studied.
“Everything you can imagine is Real” – Picasso
This is not the time to be “realistic”. Realism has often been shaped by limitations that were never neutral to begin with. This feels like a moment to imagine more openly and believe beyond what has been engineered as possible. Not in pursuit of excess or ambition, but alignment. To consider how I want to think, move, and be in the world, rather than simply what I want to achieve.
I’ve made a note to return to this vision board at the end of 2026. Not to measure whether everything came true, but to reflect on how it shaped my year. Did it influence the choices I made? Did it help me recognise opportunities I might have overlooked? Did it offer reassurance during moments of uncertainty?
Perhaps the real value of a vision board is not manifestation, but permission. Permission to imagine differently. Permission to sit with questions rather than rush answers. Permission to trust that a life shaped from within is worth taking time over.
As 2026 approaches, I’m choosing to begin not with a plan, but with an opening.
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