I have a degree in psychology, and one of the things I’ve always found fascinating is how much our thoughts influence our behavior.
What we pay attention to matters. What we believe is possible matters. More importantly, what we actually do with that information matters.
That’s why I like the concept of vision boards.
I don’t think putting a picture of a beautiful house on a board means the universe is going to hand you the keys. That would be convenient as hell, but unfortunately, there’s a little more involved.
What I do believe is that when you identify something you want, keep it in your awareness, and start making decisions that support it, you’re giving yourself a much better chance of achieving it.
There’s psychology behind that process, and it starts with something most people probably never heard of: the reticular activating system (RAS).
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Your Brain Pays Attention to What Matters to You
The reticular activating system, or RAS, is involved in regulating alertness and attention.
Your brain receives an enormous amount of information throughout the day, but you don’t consciously process all of it. Different systems help determine what gets your attention.
Think about the last time you considered buying a particular car.
Suddenly, you started seeing that car everywhere.
Those cars didn’t magically appear overnight. They were already there. You just started noticing them because that particular model had become relevant to you.
Your goals can influence your attention in a similar way.
Once you decide you want to travel more, you may start noticing flight promotions, destinations you’ve never considered, or opportunities to make travel fit your budget.
If you’re interested in starting a business, you may begin paying more attention to conversations, resources, and opportunities related to entrepreneurship.
The RAS isn’t solely responsible for this process. Selective attention involves several areas of the brain, and vision boards haven’t been shown to directly program the RAS.
However, the underlying principle is useful: what you deliberately focus on can influence what you notice.
A vision board gives you a way to keep your priorities visible instead of allowing them to disappear beneath everything else competing for your attention.
Why Visualization Can Help You Reach Your Goals
Visualization gives your goals a clearer shape.
There’s a difference between saying you’d like to travel more and having a photograph of a destination you’ve wanted to visit for years sitting where you’ll see it regularly.
The photograph makes the goal more concrete.
It reminds you what you’re working toward and why it matters.
Research on mental imagery suggests that visualization can support motivation and goal-directed behavior, particularly when people imagine the actions needed to achieve an outcome.
That’s an important distinction.
Visualizing yourself standing in Paris might make you excited about going. Visualizing the process of saving money, planning the trip, and making arrangements can help you think about what needs to happen first.
I think both have value.
The destination gives you something to look forward to. The process gives you something to work on.
A vision board helps you remember where you want to go. Your actions determine whether you get there.
Start With Something You Actually Want
Before making a vision board, spend some time thinking about what you want your life to look like.
Not what your friends are doing. Not what someone on Instagram says you should want.
What do you want?
Maybe you want to travel more, improve your finances, learn something new, build a business, spend more time with people you care about, or finally prioritize your health.
There’s no requirement that your goals be impressive to anyone else.
You also don’t need to completely reinvent your life every January.
Sometimes the goal is simply to make more time for something you already enjoy.
I like thinking about goals in terms of what I want more of, what I want less of, and what I’d like to experience.
Once you’ve identified those things, you can start finding images that represent them.
Your board doesn’t need to be elaborate. It needs to mean something to you.
Turn Your Vision Into a SMART Goal
This is where I think vision boards become considerably more useful.
You’ve identified what you want. Now you need to figure out how to make it happen.
One practical approach is the SMART goal-setting framework.
SMART stands for:
- Specific: Clearly define what you want to accomplish.
- Measurable: Decide how you’ll track your progress.
- Achievable: Make sure the goal is realistic given your circumstances.
- Relevant: Choose something that actually matters to you.
- Time-bound: Give yourself a reasonable deadline.
Let’s use travel as an example.
You might have a beautiful picture of Italy on your vision board because you’ve always wanted to visit.
That’s your vision.
Now let’s turn it into a SMART goal.
Measurable: I’ll research the total cost and save the amount I need.
Achievable: I’ll create a monthly savings target that works with my budget.
Relevant: Traveling and experiencing different cultures are important to me.
Time-bound: I want to take the trip by October of next year.</text>
Now you have something you can actually work toward.
You know what you want, when you’d like to accomplish it, and what needs to happen along the way.
Of course, your budget and circumstances might change. That’s fine.
The point isn’t to create a rigid plan that falls apart the moment something unexpected happens.
It’s to give yourself a direction.
SMART gives you a clear destination and a way to measure progress. Later, I’ll show you another psychology-based method called WOOP that can help you prepare for the obstacles along the way.
Break Big Goals Into Smaller Steps
One reason people abandon their goals is that they focus on the entire outcome instead of what they can do right now.
A big goal can feel overwhelming when you’re looking at everything involved.
Planning an international trip might require saving money, researching destinations, requesting time off, arranging transportation, and making reservations.
Starting a business might involve learning new skills, understanding the market, developing a product, and finding customers.
Looking at all of those things at once can make it difficult to know where to begin.
So don’t start with everything.
Start with one step.
If your goal is to travel to Italy, your first step might be researching the average cost of the trip.
That’s it.
You don’t need to book anything today.
Once you know approximately how much you’ll need, you can figure out how much to save.
Once you have a savings plan, you can begin putting money aside.
Each action gives you more information and makes the next decision easier.
You don’t have to know exactly how you’re going to accomplish every part of a goal before you begin.
You just need to know what you can do next.
Use Your Vision Board to Make Everyday Decisions
This is one of the most practical reasons to keep your goals visible.
Your daily decisions influence whether you move closer to what you want.
If saving for a vacation is important to you, you might reconsider purchases that don’t matter as much as the trip.
If your goal is to improve your health, you might start protecting time in your schedule for physical activity.
If you’re trying to grow a business, you might spend an hour learning a useful skill instead of scrolling through social media.
None of those decisions is particularly dramatic.
That’s the point.
Most meaningful progress comes from relatively ordinary actions repeated over time.
A vision board can serve as a reminder to ask yourself whether the choices you’re making support what you say you want.
You won’t get every decision right, and you don’t need to.
The goal is to become more intentional, not to turn your entire life into a productivity competition.
What Happens When Your Plans Change?
Something I think people overlook when setting goals is that you’re allowed to change them.
You might discover that something costs more than you expected, takes longer than anticipated, or simply isn’t as important to you anymore.
That doesn’t mean the vision board failed.
It means you’ve learned something.
I think goals should give you direction without making you feel trapped by decisions you made months earlier.
Review your vision board periodically.
Look at what you’ve accomplished, what you’re still working toward, and whether your priorities have changed.
You might find that a goal you once considered impossible is now within reach.
You might also realize that something you wanted six months ago no longer interests you.
Both are useful discoveries.
How I’m Thinking About Setting Intentions for the New Year
I like the idea of entering a new year with some direction instead of waking up on January 1 and suddenly deciding I’m going to become an entirely different person.
Personally, I think it’s more useful to spend some time beforehand considering what you want from the coming year.
You can start by looking at what worked this year, what didn’t, and what you’d like to do differently.
Then identify a few priorities.
You don’t need 25 goals. You don’t need to overhaul every aspect of your life.
Choose a handful of things that genuinely matter.
Create your vision board around those priorities, turn them into SMART goals, and identify the first action you can take for each one.
If you enjoy using a paper planner, keep those actions there so you can revisit them throughout the year.
Your vision board reminds you of the bigger picture. Your planner helps you handle the practical details.
I think that’s a much more useful combination than making a list of resolutions and hoping you remember them in March.
One More Goal-Setting Strategy Worth Knowing: WOOP
SMART goals are great for figuring out what you want to accomplish, but there’s another strategy I think is worth understanding: WOOP.
WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan. It was developed by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and is based on research into motivation and goal achievement.
What I like about this method is that it doesn’t stop at imagining how wonderful life will be once you’ve accomplished something. It makes you consider what’s likely to get in your way.
Unfortunately, wanting something badly enough doesn’t automatically make you do the work.
Here’s how WOOP works:
- Wish: Choose something meaningful you want to accomplish. It should be challenging but realistic.
- Outcome: Imagine the best result of achieving that wish. Think about why it matters to you and how accomplishing it would improve your life.
- Obstacle: Identify the biggest internal obstacle standing in your way. This is an important distinction. WOOP focuses on something within you, such as procrastination, self-doubt, or a habit that interferes with your progress.
- Plan: Decide how you’ll respond when that obstacle appears. Create a specific if–then statement so you already know what action to take.
Let’s Use a Travel Goal as an Example
Suppose you want to save $2,000 for a vacation.
Your wish is to save enough money to take the trip.
Your outcome is being able to enjoy your vacation without worrying about paying it off afterward.
Your obstacle is that you tend to spend money you’ve intended to save.
Your plan could be: When I receive my paycheck, then I’ll immediately transfer the amount I’ve budgeted into my travel savings account.
Now you’ve identified what you want, why you want it, what might interfere, and what you’re going to do about it.
That’s considerably more useful than staring at a picture of Italy and hoping your savings account figures itself out.
How WOOP and SMART Goals Work Together
SMART and WOOP aren’t competing strategies. They address different parts of goal setting.
SMART helps you define the goal. WOOP helps you follow through.
For example, your SMART goal might be to save $2,000 for a vacation within ten months by setting aside $200 each month.
WOOP helps you identify the habits or behaviors that might interfere with that plan and decide how you’ll handle them.
Research on mental contrasting and implementation intentions, the psychological principles behind WOOP, suggests that combining a desired outcome with realistic obstacles and specific action plans can improve goal achievement.
If you’re creating a vision board, I think using both approaches makes sense. Your board represents what you’re working toward, SMART gives you a measurable goal, and WOOP helps you prepare for the moments when motivation isn’t enough.
A Book Recommendation for Turning Goals Into Action
If you’re interested in learning more about this approach, Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen explores the psychology behind positive thinking, mental contrasting, and goal achievement.
Her research challenges the idea that imagining success is enough. Instead, it examines how acknowledging obstacles and creating realistic plans can help people pursue meaningful goals.
You can also explore the method and find free exercises on the official WOOP website.
It All Starts With One Step
I think one of the biggest mistakes we make when setting goals is assuming we need to have everything figured out before we begin.
We want to know exactly how we’re going to get from where we are to where we want to be.
Sometimes that’s simply not possible.
You learn things along the way. You discover opportunities you didn’t know existed. You adjust your plans as you gain experience.
A vision board can help you stay focused on what matters, but you still have to participate in making those things happen.
Choose something you want. Make it specific. Figure out one action you can take toward it, then take that step.
Until next time,
