innowen over at D*I*Y Planner posted a good article yesterday about Making a Motivation Collage. She suggests putting together a collage anytime there is something you want to motivate yourself to do, such as buying a house or losing weight. She advocates keeping it focused on one theme, and giving yourself permission to include things your rational mind doesn’t believe are possible yet. innowen writes:
So what’s a collage got to do with getting motivated? Actually a lot. Let’s say you have a goal to buy a house. You work through the traditional resources to get your finances all in line for mortgage brokers, you read books on buying homes and you look around town for good areas that fit your price range. You’re doing everything right and yet, it takes your friends and/or significant other to actually drag you from the sofa to go house hunting. However, let’s say you make a collage of pictures and color paint chips of everything you want to put IN that house. You start collecting images of furniture, funky tables, new bedspreads, even small cut outs of house design and landscapes you seem to like. Then you paste them down on one single page and tape it to your refrigerator. And all of a sudden, just seeing those things every day, makes you want to go buy your dream house so you can start buying the things on that page and fill up your home with your style.
Collages are a very low-tech/high return method of advertising to ourselves. I think one reason they are so effective is that the time you devote to cutting and pasting your collage is a moving meditation on your goal. Collages also employ the basic principles that many of our methods are based on:
- Find images of what your life will look like when the goal you want has been achieved.
- Place those images in a place where you will see them a lot – like on your computer or refrigerator.
We can display pictures collections to ourselves in many other ways – for example a screensaver or widget slideshow. However we choose to display them, innowen’s article reminds us that it’s very powerful to create a collection of images around a specific theme – especially when they show us concrete details about the future we want to achieve. As she says, showing ourselves these pictures can make the difference between staying on the sofa or getting up to achieve our dreams.
