Every year on News Year Eve or New Years Day, a group of my girlfriends and I get together and spend the night vision boarding. What is vision boarding you ask? Well, in addition to an excuse to get together with friends to eat, drink and discuss the latest Netflix show (seriously, have you not seen Bridgerton yet?), it is the process of selecting and pasting visual images of what the next year is hopefully going to look like for you onto a poster board. It’s an exercise that forces you to seriously consider the goals that are really important for you this upcoming year, and create a visual depiction of those that you hang on the wall as a constant reminder. Lots of pics from magazines, coloring books, word cut outs, stick on letters and numbers…whatever your inter-artist self imagines. It is something I highly recommend.

You can think of it as the modern day version of setting your New Year’s resolutions, except for maybe the food, alcohol, laughing, and group sharing that goes on in this version. While on the surface it seems like an easy exercise to continue this year, the real spirit of the exercise is the annual gathering of your tribe of besties who you can count on to tell you exactly what they see as good or bad about your vision. It often times forces you to build it bigger, accelerate it quicker, or even rethink it completely. COVID has made that gathering impossible for many of us this year. Just another reason to kick 2020 to the curb. We can add it to the list!

I’m not suggesting, however that you allow COVID to force you to abandon the vision board concept this year. Instead let me share with you what my version of that activity looked like. Instead of attempting to replace my tribe with a Zoom Happy Hour…(why am I the only one actually drinking at those?)…I decided to create a Tribe Trip Wall instead. Because my vision for 2021 includes reconnecting with all my tribes (yes I have many), I took an empty wall of my upstairs loft office and turned it into my Tribe Trip Wall. I printed out a bunch of 4 x 6 pics of all the great trips and special get togethers with my tribes, put them in frames, and hung them on a wall. Now everyday, I will look at it as I walk by on my way to my desk. It will be a constant reminder that my vision for the 2021 year is to travel, and hug, and laugh, and bitch about 2020 with the people that matter in my life someday soon. Yes, I have work and health goals too. But this year, my people goals seemed more important to feature front and center. So while ALL my goals are on paper, my tribe goals…they’re on my wall for all to see.