Description: This week Dr. Boogren reflects on an activity she personally completed recently. Could this be a successful strategy for the Squad, as well?
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Transcription: Hi, this is Self-Care for Educators, and I'm your host, Tina Boogren. This is our third season, and this is episode 32. This week's invitation is to create a vision board. I know it might seem like an odd time of year to do this, but there's never a wrong time to create a vision board. I know many people like to do this around that January 1st, turn of the calendar, new page, new year. But, I bring this up, because I just created a vision board. Last weekend I went to Iowa and spent the weekend with one of my best girlfriends, a friend from high school actually. And, we had an amazing, what I call a slow relaxed weekend where some of you are familiar when you have best friends that live in different states when you talk to each other, you say things like, Oh man, if we just lived in the same state, we could just go to Target together and just ... We could, I could come over and just hang out on your couch. And so, I flew to Iowa and did exactly that, and it was awesome. And, one of the projects that we had, that we've talked about forever, and we actually followed through with, was to create our own vision boards.
And, we both loved this. I know some of you do this already, and you are well versed in this, so this may not be a new invitation, but for some of you, this is probably something you've heard of, but maybe you've never done it before, and this is gonna be kind of your nudge to try it. There's no wrong way to do this. I'll just kind of go through the process that my friend and I did. So, since she lives there, she had a nice bulletin board that she was using. So, she actually put some of that decorative tape around the outside. She was gonna hang it up in her office. Now, I was getting my vision board back on an airplane to take it home. And so, what I did, which actually worked out so well, is I bought individual of square pieces from Target that you would go get for the, they're just, oh geez, like eight and a half by 11 size canvas boards, and there were six of them. So, I could kind of create them individually, pack them up, put them in my little shopping bag and carry them on the airplane home. But, when I got home, it ended up being perfect, because in my office, I've moved them around. I, I first hung them up all six together, so it looked like a full vision board, like a bulletin board. And then, I kind of played with them, and I've moved them around. And, what I did was on each of the canvases, I just had a different theme.
So, one of my themes was travel, and one was work, and one was family, and one was health. Just different, different kind of themes that I wanted to focus on. And, what we did is we'd been collecting magazines for a while, and we also, when we were out and about, we went to a few different places and got some more magazines. I'll tell you what, Barnes and Noble had an amazing selection, because we got to get some specific things that we were kind of interested in, like food and wine. And, there was a travel one. A lot of health ones like a cycling magazine that I was interested in and women over 40. There were just some nice kind of different resources that we could pull into. And, we went back to our house, and we'd sat on the floor, and we laid all the magazines out, and the first thing that we did is just started cutting out images and words and phrases that just seemed to speak to us. And, that was what we did the first night.
We just kind of had a big pile of images. Nothing went on. The actual boards themselves. Walked away from it next day, went and did our thing the next evening ... What we did is then we started to dig in a little bit more, and we kind of started putting them in piles. For me, that's when I discovered, Oh, I'm gonna have each board be a different theme. And, so I kind of ... I put the images and the pictures and the words with the corresponding board that I wanted to kind of focus on and, and my friend took her bulletin board, and she kind of had different sections that were for different themes, and we put some music on, and we got our scissors out and our glue sticks and our actual glue and made a project out of it. And, it was so fun. It was such a throwback for me of doing that when I was younger. I haven't made a vision board in a while. And, in fact my last few, and I think I did a podcast on this, I talked about making a digital vision board. And, that's actually something that I did right around January 1st of this year. And, that's great, but I'll tell you what. That is nothing compared to actually getting scissors out and glue out and creating something, gosh, with my hands. And then, it was so fun for my friend and I to just kind of share with each other what, what each of the pictures represented, why we selected the phrases that we did, what are kind of short-term goals or our long-term goals.
This is like, well pie in the sky. Can you imagine if this happened down to some real specific things that were like, This has to happen. We are making this happen. And again, no right or wrong way to do this. They can be wild dreams, or they can be absolute like goals of this is going to happen. We, both of us kind of ended up with a mixture of both, and I'll tell you just kind of a side story that was. Ended up being really special is we had a third girlfriend that was supposed to join us for the weekend, and because of a few things that was going on in her life, she was unable to join us. But, what we did, we couldn't help ourselves as we were cutting out pictures and images, things that felt connected to her. We cut those out and made a little pile for her, and it ended up being a really sweet gift. She was on our mind, and it was cool to share those with her. To say, These things made us think of you, and for her to receive that gift from us just felt really special, and we hadn't really thought that through. We just kind of did it. It just seemed like the natural thing to do, and it was awesome. So, that's what I want you to play around with.
Maybe you create your own vision board. Maybe you, maybe you do the whole thing or maybe you just start collecting your supplies so that. Over the weekend or on your summer break when you've got a little bit more time, you can dig in. Maybe you invite some friends over to do this or colleagues. What I love is my friend when I left, so she got her daughter back for the weekend. When her daughter saw her mom, my friend's vision board, she fell in love with it and wanted to create her own. She's in kindergarten, so she started just pulling images out, and so my friend started working on a vision board with her daughter, and I thought that was amazing. So, maybe if that's something that you do with your own children, maybe it's something you do on your own. Again, maybe you just start collecting images. Maybe it feels a little overwhelming to do a whole arts and crafts project. So, you wanna do the digital version. There's no right or wrong. I just ..
For me personally was like, Oh wow. Creating this felt totally different than just finding images and creating my digital vision board. I really loved doing this. It was quite a big project, but it felt so fun and creative and away from screens, and it just was the highlight of our weekend without a doubt. And, to see those hanging on the wall in my office right by my desk that I look at every single day just feels really special. So, maybe, maybe you're gonna play around with a vision board. I hope you do. And, if you create one goodness, I'd love to see it. Yay. Okay.
As always, a huge thank you to Brooke for making this happen. Thank you to Marzano Resources and Solution Tree for this job. I get to do. So many amazing images that I got to put on my work board. And, to you, my bad-ass Self-Care Squad. I, I thought of you a lot doing this project. I'm just, so grateful for you and for this community and being able to serve as a support. I hope that feels really good to all of you. I'm cheering so hard for you. Have an amazing week.
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