A Gentle Vision Board Process For When You Feel Uninspired

Typically the week between Christmas and New Years is when I get reflective, set my goals and build my vision board for the year ahead. This year though, I wasn’t feeling inspired. I’ve been living a difficult season and if I am honest, the weight of daily life has left little room for dreaming big… or dreaming at all.

 
Gentle vision board process when feeling stuck - a simple intuitive way to create inspiration when you're unmotivated.
 

One evening earlier this year I stumbled on an episode of Queer Eye and felt inspired by the holistic nature of the transformations on the show. In the episodes the ‘fab five’ (Jonathan Van Ness, Karamo Brown, Tan France, Antoni Porowski and Jeremiah Brent) use their areas of expertise (grooming, mindset/culture, fashion, food & wine and interior design) to transform each of the heros’ lives. I grabbed my journal and made a list of the categories and began to consider how I could apply these principles to my own life. Being a visual thinker, I went onto Canva and created a template as a base to find and add photos to:

 
 

Keeping these categories in mind, I then started finding photos on Pinterest to fill in each of the areas. 

 
 

From there, inspiration started to flow and I found myself rearranging the photos in a way that felt good. An hour or so later I had a vision board!

 
 

While I am not in a place to set big reach-for-the-stars goals, looking at my board, I started to piece together a few small changes I could start implementing to live in better alignment with what I was feeling inspired by.

  • I noticed that my board had quirky details and pops of colour; the red on the trim of the jacket and the pieced-together lamp. This reminded me to bring more colour and quirkiness back into my life and shined a light on how much joy and personality was missing from how I carried myself and moved through my day-to-day life.

  • The vintage table on the patio reminded me of my love for curation and finding one-of-a-kind pieces. It had me thinking about ways to bring thrifting and antiquing back into my life, maybe planning a weekend trip to a market but also taking time to appreciate some of my favourite thrifted pieces that I already have in my home.

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  • In the area for grooming I expected to have photos of beauty products or routines but those types of images didn’t feel right. Instead I felt inspired to put a photo of a woman carrying her camera. This is because I feel most beautiful when I am noticing the beauty around me, be it items or moments, and capturing them. This has shown me that this year I want to find/create more opportunities to get my camera out.

photos from a mid-winter adventure

  • Another take away from my vision board was the area on mindset. I’ve had an internal battle over the past year about how to balance career with motherhood. I’ve felt blindsided by how all-demanding motherhood is on an energetic level and have struggled to find balance as a working creative. However my vision board shows me that having a career and financial independence is important to my mental health and that having good mental health enables me to be a happy mother to my children, so it is something a want to continue to work towards.

  • For food, I noticed how easy it was to fill that section of my vision board. This has inspired me to make ‘culinary experiences’ a central part of my life. To put this into action, I’m challenging myself to be even 1% more mindful when it comes to food prep, taking time to learn how to perfect the at-home iced coffee and adding new ingredients to my pantry that I’d usually shy away from. I also started to plan out my garden for the spring and summer:)

 
 

While the usual 'hustle and grind' approach to goal-setting felt completely out of reach this year, I've remembered a valuable lesson —vision boards (and life) don't have to be high-pressure. Change can happen in small, incremental steps, and these small shifts can gradually compound into something that feels more hopeful.

 
A handmade vision board held out, symbolizing a low-pressure way to find inspiration and alignment
 

When you’re in a difficult season, it can be difficult to even access dreams. This is where breaking ‘the future’ into compartments – grooming, home/environment, food, mindset  and fashion — really helped. While I can’t give you a clear picture of what I want 2025 to look like, I can tell you that I want to take more photos, and while I can’t say who I want to be a year from now, I can say that I want to bring more color and quirkiness back into my life and personality through clothing and decor.

There are times when dreaming big is helpful, but there are also times when being too ‘big picture’ can have a paralyzing effect. Sometimes, we just don’t know (or truthfully believe) anything big can happen for us, and that can keep us from dreaming at all. Stepping back and asking smaller questions somehow makes believing in a better future possible.

I’m excited for my vision board. I’m going to print it and tape it to my wall to remind me to keep focus on what feels good and aligned this year. In a way it’s a reminder to keep the idea of a better future close. To remind myself that there are things in my control. In small ways I can make change and believe that somehow things do get better.

 
 
Robin