At work, where I never really mention what I do because I try to keep it separate from blogging stuff, we have an activity which centres around creating vision boards. It took ages for me to buy into this, mainly because the only clear examples we can find on YouTube to demonstrate the ethos behind it are from mad Americans who probably should be on infomercials selling milk carton openers or juicers.
If you've never come across vision boards before let me try and explain without looking like a mad American who should be on infomercials... You create a collage by cutting out pictures and words from magazines, newspapers, downloading/printing images from the internet, real photographs... anything which represents your thoughts or the theme behind your vision board.
We strip this back and use the vision boards as part of our discussion work. During our first session the students are given free rein. Everyone - and I mean everyone - turns their nose up at the idea in the beginning but let young people loose with a few magazines, some scissors and a pot of glue and, before you know it, they have opened up and are talking honestly without realising it. It helps to build confidence and motivation and we build the vision boards into a goal setting activity.
But there's a drawback. I've become slightly addicted to vision boards. I'm constantly ripping out pages from magazines because an image leaps out at me. I love tearing headlines from newspapers because I think the wording is so fitting for my mood right at that moment. My zip-lock pouch in my Filofax is where they get stuffed ready to sort out later; I suppose it's a form of scrapbooking on a personal level.
This is the board I constructed today. I was trying to focus on what is important to me in 2013 but what I have now thought about is taking this one step further. I've seen some really amazing notebooks-come-scrapbooks featured on my travels around the internet so I'm going to buy a new notebook and use one page per week for ideas, visions, moods and... well, anything.
And I'll probably blog about it, obviously, because of that red sticker, right in the middle of today's board.