I like being crafty, creative, artsy…whatever you want to call it. For me, it’s taking time to let my thinking brain wander. To use it in a different way, exercise the other half. When I get into that space, I find myself losing track of time and feeling ‘filled up.’ It feeds something in me. So when I asked a couple girlfriends if they had interest in creating vision boards with me – because creating is more fun with friends – I was excited when they said yes.
I hadn’t created a vision board in a couple years and I led us through a warm up of sorts. Doodling – loosening up the creative mind – followed by pondering a few different areas. What do you want more of in your life? What are areas that bring you joy? What do you want to experience this year? Questions intended to get each of us thinking about the types of things we may want on our boards. What was interesting to me is that the ideas that came to me were nearly the same as what came up for me a couple years ago.
That, in and of itself, tells me something. Let’s take relationships. It’s been a focus 
and is still a focus even though they look dramatically different today than they did then. There’s been movement, but it’s still an important area for me. Another was body image, seems like that’s always a focus, but with a twist. Deep sigh.
And that’s the thing that happens in life. We sometimes think that if we just put energy into a certain area, or make changes that we can move on. But we don’t. Well…we do and we don’t. Maybe we move forward from that current dimension of the issue but like many are, it’s an onion. You have to heal, examine, or understand one layer before we can move to the next.
It’s like that with people. You can meet someone, maybe even spend a good amount of time with them, and still not fully know them. There are behaviors that you see, but that’s only the outside layer. Inside, there are beliefs, life experiences, family ‘leftovers,’ and the motivations that drive them. We can get a ‘vision’ of them from the outside, but that won’t necessarily let us ‘see’ them. It happened to me just the other night with my husband. I heard his words, saw behaviors, but didn’t understand his heart. When we finally got there, I felt like I really knew him in that moment. Behaviors and words can be a smoke screen, they don’t tell the whole story.
So, what if we had vision boards, so to speak, for the important relationships in our lives? We could focus on the layers of the onion we want to understand. Areas we want to focus on, and to learn more about. We could focus not only on that other person, but on what the relationship looks like for each of us, and what we want it to look like. We could also desire a vision of where we want to go in that relationship.
Sounds interesting? Wonder how to start? Think about what you know and what you want to know. What do you want to bring to the relationship, understand about it, learn from it? What experiences do you want in the relationship, what emotions, feelings? Here’s a big brave move…create a vision board for an important relationship and have the other person in the relationship do the same thing…and then compare them. What do you notice? Where are the differences? Similarities? Have an honest conversation about it. The vision you once had for the relationship may have changed, and that’s normal. It could change as you both change. But talk about it…that’s your brave move. I can’t wait to hear about it!