Picture this: It’s the end of 2024 and you’re sitting in bed thinking about all that you’ve gotten done this year. You decide to dust off the journal that’s been sitting in your nightstand drawer since January to check out your list of New Year’s Resolutions, prepared to check off all the amazing things you’ve accomplished this year…only to realize you didn’t do any of it.

Whether your New Year’s Resolutions weren’t feasible, you didn’t put effort into getting them done, or you just got busy, there’s no denying that just writing down a random list of things isn’t going to help you this time around. The best way to plan your year and your goals is by visualizing them and being specific with your intentions. Here’s a foolproof guide to vision board your ideal 2025 with your friends at your vision boarding party or by yourself!

1. Ask Yourself Specific Questions

When you’re planning your New Year’s goals, being specific helps. At your vision boarding party, go around the circle and ask each other these questions. Have your journals on hand to start the night out with some deep thinking. (Questions are modified from a worksheet from ourquadcities.com).

• What have you always wanted to do but never had the courage to do?
• What do you wish you had more time for in your life?
• What makes you happy? When are you at your best self?
• What are things that will keep you motivated?
• What goals do you want to achieve? How?
• What do you want to learn this year? What new things do you want to try?
• What do you want to continue doing? What old habits do you want to stop?

Once you have this list of questions answered, it’s important to set intentions that will help you get to the happiness you tried to uncover in your responses. When setting intentions for your year, think about the aspects of your life that may be most important to you. These aspects may include, but don’t have to be limited to:

• Career
• Community
• Education
• Family & Friends
• Financial
• Fitness
• Hobbies
• Love & Relationships
• Mental Health & Spirituality
• Travel

Write specific blurbs to decide how you want every aspect of your life to look. We’ll come back to this later!

2. Cultivate Your Mood Board

Maybe you already have photos or content you want to use to outline your next year, or maybe you’re starting entirely from scratch. Either way, this is the best place to be intentional and refer back to the blurbs we wrote earlier. Try to pick out 1-3+ images for every aspect you want to target a goal for. It’s easiest to do this on a social media site like Pinterest, but if you have physical photos printed already or magazine cutouts you feel compelled to use, those work too!

3. Get to Collaging

This is where your artistic skills can really come out to play. If you’ve cultivated a Pinterest board and that’s all you need, that’s perfectly fine — just make sure to refer back to it throughout the year.

If you want to go the extra mile, you have a variety of options for collaging:

• Physical collaging (on poster board perhaps)
• Milanote (a website to make mood board projects)
• Canva (you can create a laptop background with the images you collected)

Be as free and fun with this as you wish! You can add words or phrases that will motivate you as well. Once you’ve finished the fun arts and crafts portion of the night, make sure you put your mood board collage in a place where you’ll see it every day of 2025. If you can visualize the life you want, it’ll be within reach!

Now, no matter what you put on your vision board, your life won’t change unless you make it! You’re entirely the arbiter of your own life and the only one who can make your 2025 vision board come true. Have fun vision boarding and being intentional about the way you spend your time!