Visioning with a 5-Year Old

by

I may not be the craftiest mom. I may not be the best at academic prep. I’m definitely not the one throwing the football. But there’s one thing I know I can teach my kids: how to create a life they love.

It is the start of a new year, so we are working on our vision boards. My 5-year old created one last year and saw some amazing results. This year, my 3-year old is getting in on the action too.

“Back in the old days” (as my 5-year old likes to say), people would create vision boards by cutting out pictures from magazines and arranging the pictures on a poster board. I went to parties where people did this activity together. In 2017, technology makes the process even easier.

Here’s how we do it in my house:

  • Setup: We sit together in front of a big computer screen. On one side of the screen, we open a blank PowerPoint page. On the other side of the screen, we open a blank Safari page.
  • Image Search: I ask my 5-year old what kinds of pictures he’d like on his vision board. He says “water slides” or “rock climbing” or “swimming underwater.” I enter that into a Google search and click on images. Then we scroll through the images to pick one or more pictures that “inspire” him (we had a fun conversation last night on what “inspire” means).
  • Image Capture: Here’s the fun part – You can just grab the picture from the safari window and drop it into PowerPoint. Shazam! Then in my family, there’s a long step related to sizing and positioning the picture just right. Yes, colleagues, we have a future intern on our hands to help us perfect our presentations.
  • Discussion: The last step is my favorite. I like to ask what he likes about a certain picture. The water slides didn’t surprise me, nor did the RV, but the picture of the solar system? Where did that come from? Well, a couple days ago, he told me he wants to be an astronaut and go explore all those planets. Cool.

We’ve been doing this for a few days now, finding a few pictures every night, and I’m sure we’ll do it for a few more days before it is complete. He gets so excited after dinner when I say, “Do you want to go work on your vision board?”

The picture above is where we are so far. Yes, there are still a lot of water slides, but we have lots of topics still to cover. More to come on that.

Do you want to go work on your vision board? I’m working on mine too!

READ MORE

The Magic of Mortals

The Magic of Mortals

Daily we wake up to new developments in automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML). Across sectors and industries, automated solutions prove highly successful in surpassing the capacity of the human brain for certain tasks, improving...

read more
Leveling Up: How to Hone Your Skills at Home

Leveling Up: How to Hone Your Skills at Home

Leaders have been trying to crack the code on talent development for years. Recent studies have shown, however, that strength-focused leadership [read: intentionally elevating the qualities that already come naturally to us] is the clear winner for developing talent...

read more
Fake Case Study: Jack of all trades vs. Master of One

Fake Case Study: Jack of all trades vs. Master of One

  Listen to any earnings call or executive presentation and you will likely hear the terms “top line” and “bottom line.” These are words used to describe a business’s performance. According to Investopedia, the words are defined as follows: Top line refers to the...

read more
Your Personality Is Showing

Your Personality Is Showing

There I was, minding my own business one evening, digging into my organization's SEO performance (as one does), when I came across something interesting. Search terms related to "MBTI" — or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, developed by Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel...

read more
Lessons From a Change Manager Who Hates Change

Lessons From a Change Manager Who Hates Change

Hello. My name is Monique, and I’m a change manager who hates change.   After years of receiving “consulting therapy” from various mentors, I am now able to say these words out loud and proudly. But for a long time, it felt more like an admission of guilt. I mean, who...

read more
Creativity as a Cure

Creativity as a Cure

The topic of creative solutioning has been front and center these days as we talk more and more about organizational adaptability in the face of dynamic and uncertain times. For example, I recently read about a project that got me thinking about specific priorities...

read more
Thought Ensemble, a Pariveda Company — Why Now?

Thought Ensemble, a Pariveda Company — Why Now?

Big news over here as we close out the year - we have been acquired by Pariveda, a 750-person consulting firm in 12 markets across North America! We are now “Thought Ensemble, a Pariveda Company” and I’ll be serving as the Managing Vice President continuing to lead...

read more
Thought Ensemble Joins Pariveda Solutions!

Thought Ensemble Joins Pariveda Solutions!

Dallas, December 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pariveda, a leader specializing in solving complex technology and business problems, announces the acquisition of Thought Ensemble. With the addition of Thought Ensemble, Pariveda now provides holistic business strategy,...

read more
Thoughts on Colorado’s Equal Pay for Equal Work Act

Thoughts on Colorado’s Equal Pay for Equal Work Act

It was about a year ago that we first started hearing about Colorado’s Equal Pay for Equal Work Act (SB19-085) and I knew it was going to be national news. We’d just gotten past the “Rocky Mountain High” jokes, and our lovely state was trying to break new ground...

read more