Two bouts of the flu landed me in an unplanned and protracted period of time in bed. Not the way to ring in a new decade.
After a few days piled beneath the covers watching Nancy Meyers movies (trust me, they are good for what ails you), I decided to live again and walk into the living room. There I saw a pile of magazines, some colored ink markers, tape, and an 8 ½ x 11 foam core board, exactly where I left them pre-sickness. Ah, yes, the makings of my annual vision board.
Many years ago, my friend Diana introduced me to her New Year’s Day tradition of creating a poster where your current dreams and goals come alive. No rules to this, she’d say, just write out your BHAGs — big hairy audacious goals — find or draw images that give you inspiration and promise to place your dreams-on-a-poster somewhere you’ll see it every day.
Keep in mind, this came way before The Secret or Oprah’s Soul Sunday. She was on to something. Now there are YouTube vision board tutorials.
I haven’t kept up with this ritual on a regular basis, but when I do, lo and behold, I seem to accomplish more things. I also tend to overestimate how much I can get done in a year.
My early vision boards were chock full of dreams, some big, some small. Through the years, I’ve scaled back to a more attainable list. Or at least I thought I had.
Back in early December, I bought a new work planner. The front of the planner is dedicated to listing annual goals, details for each goal and key actions to accomplish those goals. This thing even breaks every goal into daily and hourly accountability steps as well as a weekly reflection on what worked, what didn’t.
Like a good planning soldier, I filled in every single line and page. Some days, filling out the planner was so much work, I woke up an hour early just to complete it. This is progress, right?
As New Year’s Eve approached, it was time to transfer my dreams from the planner onto the vision board. Reviewing the list, I felt queasy. I would need help in order to meet these goals, as in another human or two. As in these goals were not humanly possible.
Now, several weeks later, I realize it was the planner that made me sick! Excessive goal planning had infiltrated the drinking water in my house. All of the action steps, workday rituals, focus details and details about the focus details had literally infected me. Someone should alert the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; this could be an epidemic.
When my fever subsided, so did my desire to bring down the industrial-day planner complex. Instead, I took a deep breath and checked myself before I over-planned myself. Now with fresh eyes, I worked on my vision board with a simplified scale of dreams. My BHAGs are few and not so big or audacious, but meaningful to me.
This year, I’m striving for attainable over audacious. I’m feeling better already.
