Thinking about the future out loud

Vision boarding AKA that time all my hopes and dreams stabbed me in the leg while waiting for a bus in the rain

On a damp midweek afternoon last June, I found myself sitting up to the big dining table in the house where I was helping to host a retreat, surrounded by magazines and drawing pins and ten laughing women, with a blank cork board in front of me.

We were in the middle of a vision boarding workshop. The idea is that you think about how you want the next few months of your life to look and then represent your aspirations through images. You put your vision board somewhere you’ll see it often and it acts as a reminder of what you’re working towards, something to feel excited about. It’s the sort of thing that I would, in the past, have felt highly sceptical about and thought was a bit ‘woo woo’. But if elite athletes are using visualisation to win gold medals, then maybe it’s something us mere mortals should be utilising more when tackling the simple (or not) task of crafting a life we actually enjoy living?

In the words of Captain Sensible, “If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a…