Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes walks through a cognitive-behavioral vision board technique organized around three categories: people, things, and experiences. She shows her own board (family, health, career, animals, farm, spirituality) and explains how to add descriptive sheets listing barriers and action steps, then use it weekly to track where your energy actually goes.
Hey there everybody, and welcome to this video on how to create a rich and meaningful life. Vision Board, a cognitive behavioral therapy technique. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. When you define your rich and meaningful life, it helps you define how to effectively use your time and energy. So the first thing you want to start out with is defining your values because your values will guide your actions. For example, you may choose your values to be compassion, loyalty, dedication and integrity. These are the things that form the foundation and sort of nurture your rich and meaningful life. The next thing you want to look at are who are the people that are important in your rich and meaningful life. And you'll notice here that I put self first. Why is that? Well, if you don't have a good relationship with yourself, if you don't have a strong self esteem, then often it's going to be hard to have a rich and meaningful life because you're going to have a lot of anxiety. You may fear abandonment. So once you feel secure within yourself, then you can develop healthier, more secure relationships. Family. Who in your family is important in your rich and meaningful life? Maybe you're really close with everybody in your family. Family from your sister to your seventh cousin. Okay, great. Maybe you're only close with your nuclear family and you've never met the rest of your family. So who is important? Same thing with friends. Which friends are most important in your rich and meaningful life? And which co workers and mentors are important and your rich and meaningful life. Now these people may not be there right now. These people may be people that you want to reach out to and integrate into your rich and meaningful life, but you want to kind of put them there so you know that that is something that you want to use your energy to work toward things. What things are important in your rich and meaningful life? Now there's tangible things like clothes, food, medicine and a safe place to call home. It may not be a house that you own, but a safe place where you can create that feeling of home. And then your health, that's sort of intangible. What is important in terms of your health for your rich and meaningful life? Some people want to have certain health parameters and be 60 years old and still have the body of a 30 year old. Other people don't care that much. They want to have okay health. They don't want to be in the hospital or in pain obviously. But health is not a super focus of their rich and meaningful life. So it's important to define where does health fall and how much of your energy, are you going to devote to that? And then experiences. What experiences are important in your rich and meaningful life? Your hobbies, for example, like rock climbing or farming or crochet or whatever your hobbies are. That is going to take time. That is going to take energy. But those are experiences that help add richness to your life. For some people, travel is an experience that is really important. For others, career is something that is an important experience in their life. And it could be the experience of getting a particular award or doing a TED Talk or maybe a particular job. I have some friends who are very content being therapists. They have no desire to be upper middle management or even a CEO of their own company. So the jobs that they choose are going to influence how they spend their energy in their rich and meaningful life. And then I put competitions on here because for some people, like athletes, competitions like getting to the World Series or going to the Olympics may be important experiences in their rich and meaningful life. For others, competitions like STEM competitions and engineering competitions may be important for their rich and meaningful life. So thinking about these, and I abbreviate it, pte people, things and experiences, which ones of those are important in your rich and meaningful life? So once you've started to think about that, and I encourage you to make a list, then find a picture of each person, thing, or experience that is important in your rich and meaningful life. Attach to that picture a description of what that is like in your rich and meaningful life. It's not enough just to say, I want to have my Aunt Jan in my rich and meaningful life. Well, okay, so you just want her to sit there or what? What does your relationship with your Aunt Jan look like in your rich and meaningful life? So you'll describe that additionally for that same person. Identify what you can do to address and nurture that relationship into what you want it to be. So that's going to be an addition to that sheet that you attach to the picture. Then on another sheet of paper, identify any barriers to what you hope to achieve and ways to address them. For example, my Aunt Jan lives in South Florida and she is not able to travel anymore. So how can I have the rich and meaningful relationship that I want to have with her, despite the fact that we are 800 miles away? So I would put that on my sheet for that particular aspect of my rich and meaningful life. And you'll do that for every person, thing and experience in your rich and meaningful life. Does it take a little bit of time? Yeah, it does, but then you end up with something that you can see, you can visualize. When you have time, when you have energy, you can look at it and go, where do I want to spend some of this energy? When you are trying to make a decision about whether you have time or energy to do something, you can look at your board and you can say, do I have time and energy to do this over here, or do I need? Am I spending my energy on the things that are important to me and that helps you move toward implementation? What I have a lot of my clients do as well as I do myself, is to create a vision board. And for a lot of us, being able to see this and to visualize it kind of puts things into perspective. It's a very easy, quick look, summary, abstract, whatever you want to call it, of what's important in your rich and meaningful life. So this is an example vision board that I created. And on the bottom, I have the values. Remember I said the values nurture your life. The values guide your decision making. So if you're living a life according to your values, then your rich and meaningful life will likely flourish. And then I have my two children, I have myself, I have my husband, my husband's brother, and my uncle. I don't know who I really intended that to be in this particular iteration. And then I have my in laws. And those are all important people in my rich and meaningful life. Now my parents and my grandparents have all passed on, so that's why they're not on here. Not that I don't love them. They do are not present in my rich and meaningful life or needing my attention in my rich and meaningful life at this point in time. Then I have the heart, because health is really important to me. I have a therapist sitting over here in a tree. And my career is very important to me. And what I do with YouTube, as well as what I do in practice is really important. And then I have my critters, and I stopped at three, well, four cats and two dogs, which we actually have three dogs now. But you get the picture that my animals are very important to me, making sure they have a happy life. And then my farm in terms of experiences. I love being able to grow my own food. I love being able to nurture the animals that I have on my farm. Now I actually have a pig, but the pig happened to be in. In the picture that I selected. But. And then the sun and the dove represent spirituality to me. Those are important in my life, so I have them as part of my vision board. So when I have downtime or when I'm feeling in a funk, I can look at my vision board and I can say am I using my life or my energy to enhance my rich and meaningful life? And I can really get some perspective on how have I spent my energy over the past week and has it moved me closer to or further away from my rich and meaningful life? I hope this technique is really useful. It's helpful for people who are visual in nature, so try it out, see how it works and let me know in the comments.
