I consider myself to be a very creative person, and I happen to be a maladaptive daydreamer. I spend hours a day living inside my own vividly imagined world and playing out storylines that I created with little to no effort inside my head. Even the smallest details of this nonexistent world are vibrant inside my mind’s eye, so naturally, I assumed visualizing my desires would always be easy.
Imagine my surprise when I realized that I was struggling to come up with a clear image of myself living with my desires inside my desired reality — the attainable one, I mean. The one where I’m not the most famous person in the world, best friends and close family with Beyonce, the love interest of seven South Korean men, and about 3 sold out, 500k capacity stadium concerts away from officially reaching billionaire status.
Anyways. When I realized I was struggling to daydream about my real-life desires, of course, the first thing I did was start searching Google and every social media app I could find for visualization tips. But the more I searched, the more I didn’t find. It seemed that all the tips were about the same, and none of them were thorough enough to help me.
I thought it’d be helpful if I had a step-by-step guide or maybe some sort of list of questions I could ask myself to help me really visualize my desires. So, I made one, and I hope this article will help all of you master manifesters who are struggling with visualization!
About Visualization
Before we get into it, let’s talk about what visualization actually is. If you’re new to the manifestation space, you may have heard this term a lot, but you may be unclear of what people mean when they say you need to visualize your desires.
Visualization simply refers to the process of imagining things. To visualize is to imagine. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all visualized things before, whether we meant to or not! If you’ve ever found yourself daydreaming at random times or thinking about all the worst-case scenarios that could possibly occur, then you’re certainly no stranger to visualization!
However, the goal of visualization when it comes to manifestation is to visualize only the most positive situations and the best possible outcomes. Visualizing is powerful. Your thoughts are powerful. That’s why it’s important to visualize your desired outcomes.
Visualization can help you get into your desired state, live in the end, and embody what it means to be the person who already has what you want — because you are that person, at least in the 4D, and your 3D will reflect your 4D in due time.
If you’re scratching your head and wondering what on Earth I’m talking about — 3D? 4D? Living in the end? What does all that mean? — consider reading Common Manifestation Terms You Should Know first, then feel free to come back here for in-depth guidance on how to visualize.
If you’re already in the know about common manifestation terms, then let’s proceed!
Table Of Contents
Visualizing With Vision Boards
Visualizing With Senses
Visualizing With Questions
Visualizing With Vision Boards
First, let’s talk about vision boards.
One of the most common manifestation methods is manifesting with vision boards — and if you’re searching for more methods, you can find 24 more here — because this method is both fun and effective. Visualization is an extremely powerful manifestation method — the more you can vividly envision your desires, the more you can energetically align with them and attract them into your life or embody the state of the person who already has them, depending on whether you follow LOA or LOASS.
You may be thinking, ‘That all sounds good, but what exactly is a vision board?’
A vision board is like a display filled with images and quotes that symbolize your desired life, what you’re working toward, and what you’re manifesting. Your vision board should be filled with images that elicit strong, positive emotions from you. The images and quotes on this board should resonate with you and encourage you. This is important not only for visualization purposes but also for motivational purposes.
You can also make a vision board every month if you’d prefer, but people most commonly make vision boards every year before the new year and update them every three months as their goals may change.
A lot of us feel super determined as we prepare for the new year. We make goals and resolutions as we prepare to start fresh — and there’s nothing wrong with that, no matter how much some people try to make it seem silly or pointless. There’s something very special and incredibly inspiring about getting to enter a new period of time with a fresh start. Some of us just need a reset, and the new year is the perfect reset. So, we write down all our goals and all the things we want to accomplish during the new year, and we create our vision boards, determined to make everything on them come true…And then around February or March — if not mid-January — when the excitement has worn off, and the motivation has dwindled, we tend to pick up old habits, get back into old routines, and give up on creating the life that is represented on our boards.
This is precisely why a vision board is so important in the first place and why you should carefully curate it so that it strongly resonates with you. Your vision board should be the thing you can look at when you’re lacking the strength, energy, and motivation to continue working toward your goals. Your vision board should be a reminder of what you’re working for and why you’re working for it.
Life gets difficult sometimes. Things happen, you get busy, you have bad days. It’s not easy to continue working at your goals when life gets like this — but when you look at your board, you should be filled with the motivation to continue on. I stress this point because a lot of people end up making ineffective vision boards that they don’t truly connect with. This usually happens because you’re trying to make your board as aesthetic as possible, so you only choose pictures that fit the aesthetic, and not the ones that truly mean something to you. If you can make your board super cute and ensure it matches a color scheme and stays on theme while also making sure that it accurately represents what you’re working toward, then great. But don’t worry if your board doesn’t look Pinterest-ready and instead looks a little cluttered. Just as long as you truly connect with each and every image on it and can look at it and be reminded of what you’re working toward, that’s all that matters.
With that being said, there are a number of ways to go about making a vision board. Traditionally, you’d buy a poster board, some tape, or some glue, and then find some old magazines and flip through them, cutting out the pictures that connected with you before gluing them onto the board.
Nowadays, it’s more common to create your board online, but if you do want a physical board to keep sitting in your bedroom or your favorite space at home, you can also consider printing out the pictures to go on it if you don’t have access to any magazines. You can invest in a photo printer or have your photos printed at places like Snapfish, CVS, Walgreens, or Walmart.
If you prefer to create your vision board online, you can find images online and create your board using a photo editing app like Canva, Picsart, Prequel, etc. Most commonly, vision boards online are created with Pinterest.
You can find basically any kind of photo you’re looking for on Pinterest and create a Pinterest board to save them to. Organize your board the way you want to, and then come back to look at it any time you need to.
If you’d like to change or make updates to your board frequently, then creating boards on Pinterest will make it easy for you since you can just add, reorganize, or delete images from your board at any time with little effort.
After you’ve created your vision board, use it to visualize your future. You can look at it every morning as soon as you wake up and every night before you go to bed. Stare at it while you say your affirmations and saturate your mind. Allow yourself to feel like the person who already has all these things would feel. Listen to subliminals while looking at it.
Your vision board is a powerful tool that can assist in helping you connect with the things you’re manifesting — or, I should say, have manifested because you already have what you desire right now!
Here are 11 Of The Best Apps for Manifestation in case you’d like to know about some more super helpful ways to manifest with the help of your device, and if you’d like to know more about the benefits that come along with manifestation — including the benefits of visualization — you can read about them here.
Visualizing With Senses and Finer Details
One of the best ways to ensure you have vivid visualizations is to utilize all five of the senses. The five senses are taste, smell, vision, hearing, and touch (feeling). We’ll also go over emotions, thoughts, reactions, and finer details in this section.
In my opinion, the best way to teach you how to utilize these senses is to walk you through an example of a visualization. So, let’s think about the following scenario — and keep in mind that you can and should change the relevant details to suit you and your desires when you try this out on your own.
Let’s say we’ve decided to manifest a new home.
First, we’ll decide what this new home of ours looks like. For the sake of this example, we’ll say that this new home has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large kitchen with a pantry, a living room, a den with a fireplace, and a laundry room. Each of the bedrooms has walk-in closets, and each of the bathrooms has a separate bathtub and shower. There are three storage closets in this new home, and the house has huge windows that let in natural sunlight, beautiful white and grey marble counters, and separate heating and air conditioning units for each of the rooms. The living room and bedroom have fluffy carpets, but every other room in the house has hardwood flooring. All walls in the house are white, all carpeting is grey, and all hardwood flooring is Hickory brown.
The house is surrounded by tons of greenery. The front and back yards are big and beautiful! The front yard has a cobblestone pathway, a beautiful garden filled with colorful flowers, and a carport over to the side that can comfortably fit four cars. The backyard is gated and has a big storage unit and a circular above-ground swimming pool.
Now, we could get even more detailed about what this house looks like — and for visualization purposes, you absolutely should — but for the sake of this example, we’ll leave the description here.
We have an image of what the house we’re manifesting looks like in our minds, so now, let’s pay it a visit! Imagine yourself standing up from the bed, couch, or wherever you’re sitting and walking out of the room. Now imagine walking through your current home until you get to the front door. Imagine yourself closing your eyes, opening the door, stepping out, and closing the door behind you. Now, imagine opening your eyes and looking around. The scenery is different. You’re not outside your current house, but rather, you’ve stepped inside of your new home. You’re standing right in the middle of your new living room! Picture yourself taking your shoes off and slowly walking over the living room carpet. It’s very soft beneath your feet.
The living room is a little chilly, and it’s not yet furnished because you haven’t gotten around to furniture shopping yet, so you decide to keep moving and explore another part of the house. You walk out of the living room and into the nearby den. Suddenly, the bottoms of your feet are cold because the den has hardwood flooring. But the rest of you is starting to feel warm because the fireplace is on, so the den is nice and toasty.
Next, you head into the kitchen. You hear the faucet dripping as soon as you step inside. The counter and the large Island in the center of the room have beautiful marble countertops, which are cold underneath your fingertips as you slide your hand along the surface. You head over to the fridge and open it to take a peek inside. Again, it’s empty because you haven’t gone shopping yet. You make a mental checklist of some of the food you’d like to get as you close the door and head toward the bedrooms.
You first step inside the master bedroom. You’re suddenly hit with a wave of excitement as you realize that this is your bedroom! You can decorate it however you want to. You start to wonder, ‘How am I going to paint the walls?’ ‘Should I place my bed on the left wall or the right wall?’ ‘Where should I hang my posters and picture frames?’
You open the door of your walk-in closet, and you’re happy with how big it is. It’s so spacious! You wonder how you should organize it. Which rack will you put your shoes on? Are you going to put your vanity in here? Maybe you should put a mirror on the door, so you can get dressed in here every morning and see your outfit. You have extra closets as well, and you wonder what to do with them. Of course, you could make them into storage closets, but you also think about making a reading nook inside one.
You leave the closet and head to the next bedroom. For some reason, it smells like lemon in here, as if someone recently used some cleaning products here. That reminds you, you have to buy some cleaning products to give your new place a deep clean soon. You wonder what kind of products you’re going to get, and then you look around, trying to see which parts of the room need the most cleaning anyway. The windows could be wiped down, and the wall is a little dusty.
You’re once again excited as you imagine cleaning your new house from top to bottom. You don’t usually like to clean, but this is different because this is your house. You’re moving in any day now, and this place is yours. You finally have your own space, and it’s everything you wanted it to be and more. Your eyes tear up a little as you think about it. You’re proud of yourself for accomplishing one of your biggest goals, and you’re elated and relieved that the problems you had with your previous living arrangement are now a thing of the past because you have your brand new home, and it’s perfect for you.
And scene! This is a fairly vivid visualization example, but it could be even more detailed. You can think about things like what you’re wearing when you visit your new home, where your new home is located, what each of the rooms smells and feels like, and what emotion walking into each of the rooms elicits from you. You could imagine yourself visiting your new home with someone else and the conversations you’d have with them while walking through it. You could give each room more in-depth descriptions and focus more on what you hear while walking through them. The list goes on and on.
The important thing is to try your best to completely embody the person who already has this home. What would the person who just got their new home be feeling and thinking about? Shopping for food and cleaning products and trying to decide how to decorate are some examples, but what else? Maybe they’d be creating a to-do list of things they need to get done in the new house, such as setting up cable, internet, and other bills or going shopping. Maybe they’d be creating a list of stores they’d want to go to. They’d likely be feeling a little overwhelmed and even scared but excited and overall happy to embark on this new path.
What else would they be hearing and seeing in each room? Maybe they can hear birds chirping really well from one bedroom while it’s mostly silent, aside from the sound of a ceiling fan whirling in the other. They might hear the crackling of the fire in the den and the sound of cars passing by from the living room. Maybe they can see trees from the kitchen window and the neighbor’s house from the bathroom window.
No detail is insignificant. The more you can imagine yourself as the person who has your desire and think about things from their perspective, the better. And understand that this is not merely your imagination but also your reality. Think of yourself as a psychic having a vision about your very near future. Or think of it as having Deja Vu. You’ll be reliving the exact moment you visualized in no time. What you envision is destined for you as you have already manifested it.
When you’re satisfied with your vision and ready to leave your new home for the time being to re-enter the 3D, picture yourself happily walking out of your new home’s front door and reappearing back inside your current home. Allow yourself to feel giddy with excitement or overcome with relief as you realize that this current home is temporary and is no longer your place of residence as you have officially gotten your desired home. Now, appreciate your current circumstances and take comfort in the fact that your time in this current home is limited, and you will likely never get to experience living in this place again, so you may as well enjoy it while you still have time because soon you’ll be embarking on a whole new journey!
Visualizing With Questions
Another method of visualization is visualizing with questions. Once again, this method helps you truly embody the state of the person you desire to be, who has all the things that you desire to have.
Let’s use manifesting a new job as an example. Let’s say you’re a writer who’s applied for a job as a scriptwriter at a company that you really like. We’ll call this company ‘Writers World.’
You want this job for several reasons. You like the company’s environment, you like the people that work there, you like the work, and you like the pay. It’s your dream job with your dream salary! With all this in mind, let’s ask some questions that will help us get into the state of mind of the person who already has this job.
- How did I learn that I got the job at Writer’s World?
Did I receive a congratulatory phone call or an email? What was the phone conversation like, or what exactly did the email say?
(TIP: You can ask ChatGPT to create an email from insert the name of the hiring manager at the company you’d like to work for and then read it, knowing that you’ll receive an email just like this once you’ve got the job, which you already do!)
2. Where was I when I learned that I got the job at Writer’s World?
Was I lying in bed inside my bedroom, cozy in my pajamas on a Sunday night, binge-watching my favorite show? Was I all dressed up, eating at a nice restaurant with my friend group? Was I dressed in warm clothes, taking a walk through the park on a cold winter day? Was I wearing my workout clothes on my daily run or on my way back from the gym? Was I sitting at my desk in the middle of a workday for my current — or should I say, previous, job?
3. How did I feel and react when I learned that I got the job at Writer’s World?
Did I keep my composure while getting the news and then start jumping up and down and screaming a few minutes later? Did I start crying because I was so happy to hear the news, or was I wearing a bright smile for the whole rest of the day? Did I put in my two-week notice or immediately walk out of my job?
4. Who did I tell that I got the job at Writer’s World, and how did I tell them?
Did I rush to tell my parents, my siblings, my favorite cousin, my best friends, my significant other, my coworkers, or my current boss? Did I text them, call them, or tell them face-to-face? Did I come right out and say it, or did I try to surprise them or make them guess?
5. How did they react when I told them I got the job at Writer’s World?
Were they happy, surprised, or smug because they knew I’d get it? Was my boss angry? Was my coworker sad that we would no longer get to work together? Was my significant other proud of me or relieved because of the extra income?
6. How did I prepare before starting the job? What was my first day on the job like?
Did I pick out my outfit days before my first day? Did I go shopping for new clothes? Did I buy new electronics or office supplies to work from home or start researching the best way to commute to and from work? Did I rearrange my schedule to prepare for my new work hours?
Was I nervous or excited on the first day? Were my new boss and coworkers friendly and helpful? Was my first day stressful and overwhelming, or was it super calm and slow to start? Was I tired after the end of my first day or bursting with energy? How did I celebrate my successful first day? Did I treat myself to my favorite food, make plans to go to my favorite place this weekend, or simply get home and go right to sleep?
7. After one month of working at Writer’s World, how do I act and feel, and what is my life like?
Have I settled in and feel secure in my new job? Have I adjusted to my new schedule? Am I still super happy with it? Have I caught up on my bills as a result of my new, high-paying salary? Has the excitement worn off, and now it’s just a job that I’m thankful for but not as excited about?
8. After three months of working at Writer’s World, how do I act and feel, and what is my life like?
Have I made new friends at this job or found my favorite coworker? Have I already taken on more responsibility and a bigger workload? What are my goals now as opposed to what they were when I first started?
9. After six months of working at Writer’s World, how do I act and feel, and what is my life like?
Have I started going on more frequent shopping sprees? Have I started studying more as a result of having more time to expand my knowledge and skillset with this job? Am I starting to think about moving up in the company? Am I starting to think about moving on to the next job?
10. What habits and routines did I start after getting my job at Writer’s World?
Did I have a more steady and consistent schedule that allowed me to schedule in more time for things like studying, reading, exercising, hanging out with friends, spending quality time with my family, or going on pre-planned date nights with my significant other? Has this job made my schedule more inconsistent and sporadic? Did I start sticking to a regular bedtime or morning routine after getting this job? What kind of routines do I do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis since getting this job?
11. What do I want to accomplish at my job at Writer’s World? What do I want to accomplish next in my career, in general?
Do I have a specific goal that I want to accomplish during my time at this company? What’s next for my career, and how can I ensure my time here helps me continue moving on up in the career world?
12. What kind of lifestyle do I live while working at Writer’s World?
What are my spending habits? Do I live frugally or go on frequent shopping sprees? Do I have to wake up early and go to bed early as a result of working at this company? Do I spend my weekends at home or let loose and party? Do I travel frequently due to this job?
13. What do I wear to work at Writer’s World?
Am I allowed to dress casually, or do I have a uniform? Do I wear business attire, or can I work in my pajamas?
14. What is my work persona at Writer’s World?
Am I the friendly and talkative coworker, or do I stay to myself? Am I known for being a lazy worker or an extremely hard worker? Do I come across as professional or unprofessional? Do I talk super formally here and informally elsewhere, or am I the same at work as I am at home? Am I known for being best dressed, or do I wear whatever I can find outside of the dirty laundry basket?
15. What are my favorite and least favorite parts of working at Writer’s World?
Do I love or hate having meetings and presentations? Do I love my lunch break or dread it? Do I love working alongside the boss or hate it? Do I love how my schedule has changed as a result of working here, or do I wish I could still have the schedule I previously had? Do I love waking up early or wish I didn’t have to? Do I love how I have to dress for work or wish I could just wear what I want?
16. How have I changed since working at Writer’s World? How has my life changed? What have I learned?
Am I more well-organized and responsible now? Am I less stressed? Have I grown accustomed to corporate talk, or have I been able to be less high-strung than I was at my previous job? Have I learned new skills as a result of working at this company, and if so, what are they? Are things in my life more stable or chaotic now? Do I have more or less time to spend with the people I love now? What sacrifices have I had to make because of this job? What goals have I achieved, and what rewards have I received as a result of working at this company?
17. What does my office look like at Writer’s World?
Do I have a home office, or work inside a little cubicle, or have a large office at work? Is my office filled with elegant-looking furniture and beautiful paintings or old, rusted decor and tacky furniture? Is my office pastel pink, dark grey, all black, white, or some other color? Does my office look super cozy and comfortable or sleek and sterile?
18. What do I do on my days off?
Does this job at Writer’s World allow me to take time to travel on my days off? Am I drained and only capable of sleeping on my days off? Do I spend my days off preparing for the work week ahead or catching up on late work from the prior week? Do I spend my days off looking forward to getting back to work, or do I spend my days off dreading heading back to work?
These are a lot of questions, so don’t overwhelm yourself by thinking you have to have an answer for them all. Ask yourself as many of these questions as you want to and answer them the way the person who has the job you desire would. This will just help you connect with your desire and embody the state of the person who already has it. And if you’ve been wanting to manifest a new job but have been struggling to figure out what it is exactly that you even want from this new job, these questions can help you figure it out.
Use these kinds of questions to help you visualize anything you’re trying to manifest, whether that be money, love, relationships, success, or anything else.
Final Thoughts
Visualization doesn’t have to be difficult. It gets easier with practice, and soon enough, you’ll be doing it with little to no effort! Just remember to utilize each of your senses and ask yourself questions that can help you get into the state of the wish fulfilled. I hope this article will assist you in doing that. Thanks for reading, and please let me know your favorite visualization tactics in the comments below!
