Host a Vision Board Night

TL;DR: Invite four to eight friends, ask everyone to bring old magazines and a snack, and give the evening a loose shape: eat, reflect, make, share. Good prompts beat fancy supplies. Before everyone goes home, have each person name one obstacle and one plan for getting past it, because that is the part with research behind it.

January is nearly over, and it is the perfect moment to check whether your resolutions are still alive. A vision board night lets you find out in company. You sit on the floor with your friends, cut up magazines, eat too much chin chin, and slowly reveal to one another that you want to move to Accra, run a half marathon and never attend another 7 a.m. meeting. It costs very little, it works in the smallest flat, and the conversation tends to be better than the art. Here is how to host one.

If you have already filled in your New Year bingo card, bring it along. A vision board is the picture version of the same kind idea: goals you would be happy to live with, instead of a list of ways to be a different person.

What do I need for a vision board night?

Very little. Paper, pictures and something to stick them on are the whole list. Ask each guest to bring something, and the cost gets divided nicely. Tick these off as you gather them:

How do I do this on a small budget?

Use what you can find. Ask around at the salon, the church office or your auntie who has been saving lifestyle magazines since 2009. A newspaper's weekend pull-out works beautifully, and so do old calendars, event programmes and the wrapping paper you could not bring yourself to throw away.

Cereal boxes make a sturdy backing, and a plain page in a notebook also counts, particularly if you would like to keep your board somewhere private. Anyone who has no paper to spare can make a digital board on her phone using a notes app or a free design app and her own camera roll.

For the food, make it potluck and keep it simple. Our girls' night in ideas have a small chops menu and a plan for the snacks, but one rule applies here that does not apply on other nights: anything that leaves oily fingers should be finished before the scissors come out.

A simple run of the evening

About three hours is enough. You can move things around, but keep the order roughly the same, because the talking at the start is what makes the boards interesting.

The first 45 minutes: eat and arrive. Let everyone settle in and catch up. No one should be asked to reflect on her life while she is still hungry.

The next 20 minutes: look back. Go round the circle and let each person share one thing from last year she is proud of and one thing she is happy to leave behind. Anyone can pass.

The next 20 minutes: think quietly. Put on some music, hand out paper and give everyone a few prompts from the list below. Writing first stops people from gluing on the first nice-looking house they find.

The next hour: make your boards. This is where the magazines get destroyed. Keep the playlist going and let the conversation drift. Someone will find a photo of a man she claims is her future husband. Allow it.

The final 30 minutes: share and plan. Everyone who wants to shows her board and says what it means. Then do the last step below.

What should I put on my vision board?

Start with how you want your life to feel, then look for pictures that match. A board filled with only cars and handbags tends to be less useful than one that shows what your days could look like. These prompts should help:

• What do I want a normal Tuesday to look like a year from now?
• Where do I want to spend more of my time, and with whom?
• What do I want to stop doing, carrying or apologising for?
• What do I want to learn just because it sounds fun?
• What would make my body feel looked after this year?
• What does enough money look like for me, in plain numbers?
• Who do I want to be closer to?
• What is a small thing I keep saying I will do?
• What am I already doing that I want to keep?

Health goals fit nicely here too. A picture can stand for booking the smear test, finding a doctor you trust or finally getting a straight answer about your periods.

Does making a vision board help you reach your goals?

It can be a lovely way to work out what you want, but we did not find good studies testing vision boards themselves. What does have evidence behind it is what you do next. A meta-analysis of a technique called mental contrasting with implementation intentions, also known as WOOP, found it a concise, low-cost and effective way of working towards goals. So enjoy your board, and then give it some support.

The last step: turn one picture into a plan

Before anyone leaves, ask each person to pick one picture from her board and write four short lines. WOOP stands for wish, outcome, obstacle and plan, and it goes like this:

1. Wish. What is the one thing you want? "Go for a walk three mornings a week."
2. Outcome. What is the best part of getting it? "I feel clear-headed and less snappy at work."
3. Obstacle. What in you or your life is most likely to get in the way? "I stay in bed when it rains."
4. Plan. Write it as if and then. "If it is raining, then I will do 15 minutes of stretching on the living room floor instead."

The obstacle is the part most of us skip, and it is the part that makes the board useful on an ordinary wet Wednesday in March. Read your plans to each other if you like, and pair up so that everyone has one person to check in with next month.

What to do with your board afterwards

Put it somewhere you will see it, like inside a wardrobe door or above your desk, and take a photo so you still have it if it gets moved. Plan a catch-up in the middle of the year and bring the boards back out. Some things will have happened, some will have quietly stopped mattering, and that is all useful to know.

If one of your goals is about your health, keeping a record can help you see it move. Asele's cycle tracking and symptom logging will show you what is changing from month to month. And on the days when the plan falls apart, remember that the board is on your side.

Send the invitation, start saving the magazines and buy more glue than you think you need.

Sources

1. Wang G, Wang Y, Gai X. A meta-analysis of the effects of mental contrasting with implementation intentions on goal attainment. Front Psychol, 2021. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov