So – did you make a vision/mood (visi-mood?) board?  What do you see?

This is meant to be an exercise that allows you to explore your thinking on what you’d like to accomplish (translation – your goals) for the year.  I hope you did make a board.  It’s an interesting way to get started on moving forward to where you think you’d like to be.  It’s certainly not writing up a load of resolutions or wishes.  If nothing else, it’s a compelling way to go about thinking about what activities you’d like to contemplate for the coming time. 

I did one.  I liked that it really required thinking.  It meant not only conceiving of what to do and focus on, but also then find a graphic way to represent it – yikes! 

Going graphic meant that I really had to examine all the things I was thinking about and generate ways to represent that.  Here’s what I came up with.

How about yours?

Of course, mine doesn’t mean anything to you – it’s my board!  But it does incorporate all my big goals for the year for my music.  More importantly, it helped me figure out which were actual goals (things that I can actually accomplish with a defined finish line and more than just a little detail on the process for getting there) and which were just wishes (of course I’d like to do all kinds of big and exciting stuff …but a lot of those things are just colossal stretch – and more a hankering than a goal). 

Making a board also really shone light on the “shoulds” that were crowding in.  You know the sort of thing – I should do x and if I really wanted to move forward, I should do y (where x and y are things that maybe a lot of other people are doing but that I just don’t value or am just not interested in doing).  The problem with shoulds is that they weigh a lot but don’t actually help you move.  Being able to identify those shoulds let’s you set them aside and focus on the goals you want to meet rather than to fixate on things of no import.

So, did you make a visi-mood board?  Did it help you define your goals for this year?  Did you learn anything?  Do you feel ready to codify your goals for the year?  Let me know in the comments!