How to Create a vision board as a Financial Advisor
Grant Hicks, CIM
Practice Management Expert, President of Advisor Practice Management, Author, Speaker, Coach for Elite Financial Professionals. Are you looking to grow your practice in 2025?
A lot of the time, especially in January, people get excited about new goals, but then normal life quickly takes over. Before you know it, it’s Christmas again, and you’ve forgotten about the things you wanted to do. So today I’m going to show you how to make a vision board.
Because unless you take some action towards those goals, they aren’t going to happen.
Visualisation is very powerful, so one of the things I recommend is creating a Vision Board. You may have heard of them before, as it’s a very popular tool. Having a constant visual reminder of your goals can really help you reach them. That’s what a vision board is: a collection of images that remind you of and help you visualise your goals. So, how do you make a vision board?
Determine what’s important to you
Vision boards need a bit of structure, so start by picking the key areas that are important to you in your life. These are going to be represented on your vision board.
I usually recommend four to six areas. You might have family, health, work, home, wealth, and travel, for example. But you can also have spirituality, social life, your business, learning, and much more.
Some questions that can help you find out what’s important to you are:
- WHAT is important to you?
- WHO is important to you?
- What do you want to BE?
- What do you want to DO?
- What do you want to HAVE?
What does success look like?
Once you’ve picked your key areas of importance, you have to think of what you want to achieve for each of them. What does success in each area look like? How will you know you’ve achieved it? What are your measures of success?
You can use the wheel of life exercise for this. That’s another very popular coaching tool that will help you get crystal clarity about what’s important to you and why.
And because you’re building your Vision Board, try to start thinking about your goals in images rather than words.
Find meaningful images
The next step is the most involved, but also the fun bit: filling up your vision board. You can have some text on your vision board, but try to avoid it as much as possible. Images are much more powerful. Visualising your goals makes them more real.
Looking at my own vision board, I enjoy Nordic walking, so I have a picture of someone Nordic walking. I would like to own a grand piano, so I have a picture of that (next to the Classic Fiat 500 I’d also like to have). Those images are more meaningful and motivational than the words would ever be.
Start with one of your key areas, and go find some images that represent the realisation of the goals in that area. You can get them from anywhere. I’ve found Google images works well for me, but you could also cut them out of a magazine or something. The important thing is that the images are meaningful to you and represent what you want to achieve.
Create your Vision Board
Once you’ve got your key areas, the goals you want to achieve and the images that represent them, you can create your Vision Board. You don’t have to think too hard about this bit. There are two important things. You have to able to put it somewhere you’ll see it regularly and you have to be able to add things to it.
A magnetic whiteboard or a cork drawing board would be good choices, but my vison board is a piece of A4 paper stuck on the wall in my office. You can also make an electronic version that you use as a screensaver on your desktop or your PC.
Have more than one Vision Board
You can have more than one vision board if that works for you. For example, you can have one for what you want out of life in general and one for what you want to achieve this year. Or you can have one for your personal life and one for your business.
Remember, you have to see your vision board regularly, so put it somewhere prominent and don’t let it get covered up.
A vision board is a very fun thing to make and the result can be very inspiring. I hope you enjoy the process, and it helps you to achieve some amazing goals in 2019 and beyond.
Click HERE to request a few examples of vision boards.
Thank you for reading!
To book an obligation appointment with Jeff to discuss practice management or coaching, click https://calendly.com/jeffthorsteinson/30-minute-q-a-explore-apm
Written by Jeff Thorsteinson who is a partner in Advisor Practice Management, an organisation that helps financial advisors build world-class practices through innovative concepts, tools, and systems. Jeff works with individual advisors, investment dealers, insurance firms, and fund companies. For more information about Advisor Practice Management, contact jeff@jeffthorsteinson.com or 1-800-223-9332, or visit the website at www.apm.coach
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