At the beginning of every year, many people gather around with magazines, scissors, glue sticks, and dreams.
Sipping wine, laughing, and carefully curating vision boards—collages of aspirational images representing the life they want to live.
It’s become a cherished ritual, a way to bond and set intentions for the year ahead. It’s something that I’ve enjoyed throughout the years as well. But this January, I did something different. I didn’t make a new vision board. Instead, I stared at the ones from previous years and confronted an uncomfortable truth: Many of my biggest goals remained trapped in those pretty pictures.
The wellness industry has sold us the idea that visualization alone can manifest our dreams. Vision boards have become so popular that entire workshops are dedicated to them, with promises that cutting out images of dream homes, exotic vacations, and career milestones will somehow magnetize these realities into our lives.
And I’ll admit, there’s something genuinely powerful about the practice. The process of identifying what matters to you and clarifying your desires has real value. Vision boards can serve as daily reminders of where you want to go, keeping your goals visible when life gets busy.
But inspiration without implementation is just daydreaming with aesthetics.
I love my vision boards. I love making them, I love how they look, and I genuinely love the conversations they spark with my friends about our hopes and desires. What I’ve realized, though, is that I was treating them as destinations rather than starting points.
I’d carefully select an image representing career and financial freedom, glue it down, and somehow believe the hard part was done. The board went up on my wall, and I’d glance at it occasionally, feel momentarily inspired, and then return to my regular routines that had nothing to do with making those visions a reality.
Research on goal-setting supports this. Studies show that while visualization can be helpful, it’s most effective when paired with concrete planning. Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen’s work on “mental contrasting” suggests that fantasizing about positive outcomes without considering obstacles can actually reduce motivation and performance. We need both the dream and the roadmap.
This year, instead of creating new visions, I’m auditing my old ones. Which goals still matter to me? Which ones have I outgrown? And most importantly, what specific actions will move me toward them?
I’m not abandoning vision boards. The practice of dreaming together with my friends is too valuable, and having a visual representation of my goals genuinely helps me stay focused. But this year, I’m approaching them differently. My vision board will be accompanied by an action plan—a less aesthetic but far more practical list of quarterly milestones, weekly tasks, and accountability measures.
Vision boards work, but only if we’re willing to do the work. They’re the “what” and the “why,” but we still need to figure out the “how” and the “when.” So if you’re crafting your vision board this month, I encourage you to add one more step to the process. Before you hang that beautiful collage on your wall, sit down and write out the strategy that will turn those images into your lived reality. Because dreams don’t manifest from magazine pages—they materialize through deliberate, consistent action.
