Happy New Year, mamas! I hope everyone had a great New Year’s Eve. I was lucky enough to have my mom come to visit for the weekend, which the kids loved.
Now that the holidays are all over, the Christmas decorations are taken down and life is beginning to slow down some, I get to do one of my favorite new year activities — create a vision board for 2024.
I have been creating vision boards for myself since college and it is one of my favorite traditions to help me kick off the new year. A lot of people enjoy making new year’s resolutions and I guess this is my version of that.
I am a more visual person, so creating a digital vision board gives me the opportunity to set it as my computer screen, as a regular reminder of my goals. When I used to make them by hand, I would set the vision board up somewhere in my room so that I would see it every morning while getting ready for the day.
To begin, I sit down and think about what I want my life to look like in the next year. Once I have a handful of goals and ideas, I start looking for images to represent them. Then I create a collage using those images. It’s that simple!
I have learned through the years to not go overboard with too many goals or ideas, because then it seems less likely to achieve them all. So, I typically stick with about five.
This year, my goals are to be more affectionate to my loved ones, spend more one-on-one time with each kid of mine, be more outgoing at work, start cooking and baking again, and pick a hobby and stick with it.
The cool thing about this year’s vision board process is my 5-year-old daughter asked what I was doing and I got to talk to her about it and help her think of a few new year goals and dreams for herself. I loved this!
She told me that in the new year she wanted to visit family more, go horseback riding and learn to swim without floaties. Having my daughter be a part of a personal tradition I’ve practiced for years was really amazing and meaningful. I hope that each year moving forward we can create our vision boards together and make it a special time for us to look ahead to the new year together.
I love doing this every year and now I get to share it with my loved ones. Hopefully this inspires you to start this tradition in your household, too.
ANN BURNS is a Morgantown native, raising two young children with her husband, Drake. She writes weekly columns for The Dominion Post. Contact her at Columns@DominionPost.com.
