Unscripted Conversations: Mood boards and Journaling
So, like every other year, I get invested in self-improvement at the beginning of the year. I get into that "fix my life" mode and commit to doing something I never quite see through to the end of January. I've heard people talk about the benefits of mood boards and journaling and how it's helped them improve clarity and focus and helped them keep track of their goals and all of their thoughts down onto the page.
Did I believe it works? Probably not. But I can guarantee you that I have recommended it to a few people seeking clarity in different facets of their lives. Have I tried journaling before? Yes, 500 times, and the semi-written notebooks in my house can prove it! But I had never attempted mood boards. It just didn't feel like something I would enjoy doing.
Anyway, I am still on self-improvement at the beginning of every year; at the start of 2022, I saw a Mood Board Glam Party hosted by SheUp Shanghai. I thought to myself, my two favourite things put into one event, dressing up and getting my life together. If I'm being honest, I had no expectations going into this because it involved the one thing I keep telling myself I don’t need to try, it won’t for me. At this event, the speaker was a lady called Mable Monyela. When I interacted with her before we started, she was reserved, and I was on my usual chatty Cathy. The event started, and she started her presentation. She talked about goal setting, mood boards, envisioning your future, and how this has manifested for her. She spoke of the goals she had for herself in the previous year and how some of her goals had come to fruition. The most impressive thing for me was that she designed her own planner, the IAmAble planner, which took me a hot minute to realise it was her name! Quite witty. This planner looked like everything you want for yourself, from planning to journaling, reading, budgeting, mini vision boarding, and self-improvement, all packaged into a luxurious notebook. If you don't believe me, I will put a link below, and you can see it for yourself!
After her presentation, we got into making the mood boards. I actually tried and have evidence.
As mentioned before, I'd never made a mood board, and now I got a chance to do it with a group of other women. I was excited until I faced a blank sheet of paper…a very big one. I went through the magazines, and it got a lot more frustrating when I couldn't find the perfect picture of what I wanted. I knew what I wanted to put on the paper, fashion, lifestyle, blogger, graduation, niche business… I knew exactly what I wanted to put but no image to put on the paper. I watched everyone get creative with theirs, and I eventually started to make do with what I had, and the vision board finally came together. Not necessarily what I thought it would look like, but it came together. I got a picture, and I went home and put it in the cupboard.
Before I get into what I actually learnt about mood boards, I will also write briefly about my experience with journaling. As mentioned previously, I have a ton of notebooks, pretty ones, plain ones, minimalist ones, and even moleskins that never saw anything beyond 3 weeks of writing. I used journaling as a form of processing emotions, and I didn't like it. I saw something online and decided to try something different. Instead of buying new notebooks, I decided to make use of them. Every night before bed, I would rip out a piece of paper from any of these notebooks and write down my goals for the week or anything I wanted for myself, put it next to my bed and sleep. Each morning I wake up, read it and put the piece of paper away. I did this consecutively for a couple of weeks, and it is still a habit I have maintained, although I don't do it every day.
Now these are two different experiences. What have I learnt from them?
I also had not realised that having it in my head, my inner critic would also convince me that half those ideas would never actualise. And then it ends there. The idea is gone, we have a new one, and the cycle continues. What putting things down did for me, the little pieces of paper which you are probably wondering where I store them (because mess!), and the mood board in the cupboard, is that these experiences helped me see my ideas outside of my head. It looks more real once it's outside of your head and put out into the world. You are able to visualise and plan around the ideas and actively work towards them. The keyword across all these methods is "track" by tracking what we do, charting our progress. I'm able (ha, IAmAble) to see growth. Where it might not be evident, day-to-day progress is elusive, and as I easily get knocked off course, journaling and mood boarding is supposedly a powerful way to get a bird's eye view of our lives. It's April, and my self-improvement journey made it past the 15 January mark. I don't know, I'll report back at the end of the year on how this journey went, but this has been interesting so far!
