By Caitlin Brock, Ed.S., M.Ed., NCC—
In life, we face many distractions that cause us to lose sight of our hopes and dreams. Visualization involves clearing those distractions so you can focus your mind and activate your creative subconscious. As a result, you are able to enhance insight, hope, and motivation.
For this activity, we will start with a creative visualization exercise that is centered around living your best life. But what exactly does this mean? Living your best life means to live up to your potential in the present instead of putting it off for some time in the future.
Find a quiet and comfortable spot. Start to imagine what it would look like to be living your best life. Imagine yourself living up to your full potential. Imagine having and doing exactly what you want in your life. Allow yourself to freely imagine this without thinking of barriers or obstacles.
Some ideas to think about:
- Where are you? What city? What state?
- What does your home look like?
- Who do you live with?
- What are you doing?
- Are you in school? What is school like for you?
- Are you working? What is your job?
- Do you have a car? What kind of car do you have?
- Who is present in your life? Do you have friends?
- Are you in a relationship? What is your relationship like?
- What feelings are you experiencing?
- What are your hobbies?
- What are you accomplishing?
- How are you living up to your full potential?
After you have a clear vision of living your best life, now create this image through art. You can use whatever art supplies you have available to create this- draw, paint, sculpt, collage, etc.
Once the art work is completed, it is important to reflect on what you created. I encourage you to journal your experience.
Some questions to consider:
- Does anything particularly stand out from your artwork?
- Did you add something that you didn’t originally visualize?
- Did you leave something out that you visualized? Why?
- What was your potential that you identified?
- What is present in your life now that was also present in your visualization?
- What are the big differences between your life currently and the life you visualized?
- What are you doing currently to get closer to living your best life?
- What insight did you gain about what you want in your life?
- What are your hopes for your life?
- What will motivate you to start to live your best life now instead of putting it off for some time in the future?
Once completed, set an overall intention for what you want in your life. Write this intention down on your artwork as its title and place it somewhere that you can see it frequently. Spend time continuing to visualize living your best life on a regular basis to help your mind learn to focus despite any distractions that are occurring. When you are focused, you will begin to find opportunities to move towards living the life that you want.
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Caitlin Brock (Ed.S., M.Ed., NCC) is the owner and founder of Creative Expression. Caitlin’s unique approach to counseling implements creative art expression and play therapy techniques to help children, teens, and young adults with freely and naturally expressing themselves through creative outlets. Caitlin is dedicated to help individuals with building trust, gaining hope, feeling understood, positively connecting, expressing thoughts and feelings, and improving overall well-being. She leads a pre-teen social skills group, teen girl self esteem support group, and an anger management group for teen boys.