A few nights ago I was listening to a podcast with Lauren Lapkus in it. You know: Lauren Lapkus of Jurassic World, Comedy Bang! Bang! and Orange Is The New Black fame. I find her really clever and respect her career, so it was a good listen.

And in this very long, inspiring chat with the hosts of Forever35 she admitted she’s prone to doing a vision board of her goals. In fact, the last one she completed turned out super successful for her — most of the things she tacked on there came true!

Listening to it, I had to do a double take. A vision board? As in, an Oprah Winfrey-inspired, Pinterest board scrapbook full of one’s hopes and dreams? The one that extremely sketchy early-2000s self help book The Secret touted?

Yes, it was the very one. My bullshit meter ran into overdrive. But because I’m a mindless follower and listener of celebrity advice, I felt like I needed to do one too. First: I had a look at whether they were worth it.

The Fors

According to extremely legitimate website www.makeavisionboard.com, a vision board is “a tool used to help clarify, concentrate and maintain focus on a specific life goal.” You basically cut out lots of photos, sayings and affirmations that reflect the kind of life you want and then you sit back and wait for them to come true.

Vision boards are based on the “law of attraction”: that you visualise things in your live and the universe will conspire to make them happen. Putting aside what exactly “the universe” is and why it gives a darn about us, setting goals for our future seems like a pretty positive thing to do.

“When you create a vision board and place it in a space where you see it often, you essentially end up doing short visualisation exercises throughout the day,” Elizabeth Rider wrote for Huffington Post.

She cites that Olympic athletes have been using the tool of visualisation for decades, and that a study showed brain patterns that occur when weightlifters lift weights are the same as when they think about lifting weights.

The Againsts

However, in his article for Psychology Today, psychologist Neil Farber pointed out a couple of studies with evidence contrary to the claims that vision boards work.

A study from the University of California compared three groups of students who participated in different kinds of visualisation before an upcoming test. The first group visualised how great it would feel when they won, the second group visualised how they’d study, and the third didn’t visualise anything.

Interestingly, the first group did markedly worse on their tests, but they felt fine afterwards. The second group, the one who visualised studying, did the best.

“Fantasising about your perfect world and your perfect life may make you feel better in the short term but will limit your ability to transform your dreams into reality,” Farber writes. “Convert your vision boards to action boards.”

Action Boards

It seems that if I were to have a go at it, action boards are the way.

And the same goes for you, I guess, if you’re also vision-board-curious. If you want to achieve something — straight HDs, a new car, a month-long trip to the USA — you should visualise how you’re going to achieve it, rather than what it’s going to be like. Use them as the means to an end, not the end itself.

As Lapkus said on the podcast, it’s more about just convincing yourself that your goals are something you deserve. “When you know exactly what you want, you’re able to talk about it,” she said. “You’re bringing it into the world by talking about and sharing it with people and feeling like, “Oh I deserve this to happen. It’s not crazy for me to want this thing.”

Good luck, dreamers.

(Lead image: Happy Endings/abc)