Before I meet with a new client, I ask how their home would look and feel like, in a perfect world.
If you could have your home be anything you dream of, what would it look like? What would it smell like? How would it sound like? What would it feel like to live there?
Visualizing your ideal lifestyle is an important aspect of the KonMari Method®️.
Just like professional athletes, you want to have a vision that you work towards. It can be powerful, though not necessary*, to go beyond imagining and have your vision somewhere visible to remind you what you want for yourself.
If words are your medium, you can write your vision down somewhere where you repeatedly see it but I have personally found images to be more powerful.
A picture is worth a thousand words, as is often said. Words tend to be more precise where as one picture with no words can convey and remind you of your goals in life in more general terms.
How To Create A Vision Board
I do as Marie Kondo suggests and meditate on how I’d like my life to be like in the future. Whatever images and words come to me, I then go and find them online.
I print the images and words. I collect them together and put them where I can see them every day. In my case, this is currently the inside of my closet door.
If you still own print magazines, this is a good opportunity to go through them and save photos that speak to you.
I believe 5-10 photos is enough. More than that and you can’t really see the individual images, the effect becoming less focused.
You can make an actual vision board by attaching your photos to a board or just collect the images together wherever it makes sense to you.
Some people keep vision boards on their computers. I have one of my favorite quotes on my phone’s lock screen.
I believe in making small changes towards the life we want to live every day instead of just once a year. For this reason, my vision board might slightly change throughout the year as well. I might add a quote that speaks to me, or remove a photo that I realize no longer serves a purpose.
Whether you write your vision down, cut photos from magazines, or find them online, make sure the photos and words truly speak to you.
There is no point in keeping a photo of a fancy mansion on your vision board if deep down you know you’d actually feel lonely in a house that big and would stress about its upkeep.
Be true to yourself.
“Our minds aren’t passive observers simply perceiving reality as it is.
Our minds actually change reality.”
* When I first started my own KonMari journey, I had only a vague idea of what I wanted. I visualized my ideal lifestyle and it lived in my mind only. Some of my clients like to do vision boards while others just verbally describe their ideal lifestyles to me and I remind them of their vision along the way.