Well sure look, it's the last newsletter of the year! Before I close my laptop and lose myself in lego, I wanted to give you one final piece of encouragement before the year is out. Because this year I tried a year-long experiment and I was quite shocked to see how well it worked and how helpful it was.
The experiment was... building a vision board.
Okay stay with me here. I know it sounds very "woo woo" and honestly that's not usually my thing. I'm not a "manifesting your dreams" person, I don't do affirmations in the mirror and I always had a kind of skeptical view of vision boards.
But at the start of this year I built one, I put it on my desktop background so I would look at it several times a day and watched to see what would happen.
Let's go back a bit, hang on, I never actually said what a vision board IS. A vision board is visual display of what matters to you, what your intentions are. It's not a set of target-driven goals, it's not a strategy, it's just a collection of images that represent the direction you want to go.
Here's the vision board I built for myself for 2025:
I built this, put it on my desktop and thought no more about it over the year. This is why I call it a lazy tool, it took zero effort over the year. But I was passively and unconsciously looking at this board all year long and I began to notice behaviour changes taking place over the year, which I attribute to the vision board.
For example, the midddle of the board represents play, travel, art, joy. This was an area of my life I wanted to focus on more so I could just be more playful and enjoy things more. Over the year I found myself doing a lot more art projects with my daughter, I built a little book nook for my home office, I travelled to Belgium, South of France, London, Slovenia, New York, Paris. I found myself painting in the evenings after dinner instead of scrolling my phone. And I started reading more fiction books.
Here's the Santa me and my daughter made from an old Amazon delivery box, some markers and some cotton wool from tesco:
And here's the book nook I built - this was a model I found online and it had hundreds of tiny little detailed pieces that you clicked and glued together. I LOVE the detailed, meticulous work that went into this and have already started to build another one.
I found myself doing lots of things for play and fun and just art-for-the-sake-of-art this year. I didn't feel the need to be "productive" all the time and just did fun projects that I enjoyed. And I think the vision board helped shaped that behaviour simply because I was passively consuming it every day and reminding myself that play and art were important to me.
In the left-hand side of my vision board I had an image of me speaking:
And to me, this represented professional speaking which is something I wanted to do more of in 2025, partially because it made me kind of nervous and I figured I needed to get over that by getting out there and doing it. And lo and behold, this year brought lots of professional speaking opportunities my way. I found myself delivering the opening keynote at the Public Relations Society of America in St Louis Missouri:
And I was also the opening keynote in SLOVENIA (how amazing!) for the annual conference with the Public Relations Society of Slovenia:
And I began to identify myself as a professional speaker, something I hadn't really done before. The vision board kept reminding me that this was important to me and I kept my focus on it all year long. I even merged this part of my vision board with the art-and-play part and made this poster which now hangs on my office door:
(My daughter felt it was very important to include the "blah blah blah" hahahaha)
What I found in general, when I looked back at the year and reflected, was that I had made progress in all four areas that I had put on my vision board: work, play, health and being unbothered. My behaviour had began to change in all four areas and I had moved in the direction I wanted. I was kind of shocked this worked so well and you better believe I'm now working on my 2026 vision board.
Why don't you try a vision board for 2026 too? Before you switch off for Christmas, take 30 mins to reflect on these questions:
- What's one area of your life you want to focus on in 2026?
- What's one behaviour you want to change?
- What's your guiding word or phrase?
- What would you be doing if you weren't afraid?
- What would make you feel happy next year?
Give it a go. You might be shocked at the results you get, simply from using my new favourite and laziest behaviour change tool in the world.
If you want more help creating your vision board, come join The Curious Tribe. You can find a recording from a session I ran earlier this month walking through my vision board results in detail and showing how to build your own. It's in the video library, available for all members. And in April, we're gathering in Barcelona for our first global meetup to nerd out on internal comms together and make deeper connections. If 2026 is your year to stop winging it, come join us.
This newsletter will be taking a break over Christmas, I'll be back in January. Thanks for all your support and good wishes over the year, I appreciate each and every one of you!
Thanks for reading and stay curious,
Joanna
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