I’m not a particularly prolific writer. It’s so tempting for me to get caught up in editing for others, and journaling is something I often do after the fact – my mind usually latches on to images and concepts before words.
My coach knows this and will give me reflection prompts than can be done without conventional words – meditations, dances, mindmaps, visual art. We work with how I think (it’s easier for everyone).
One thing I’ve enjoyed doing over and over in times of transition is sort of a… digital visioning collage? It requires some amount of image editing skill, but not a TON of skill. I’ve sometimes done this with teams, where it becomes an interesting collaboration around both strategy and aesthetics, but I enjoy it most as an activity for one.
- Ask yourself a question, with an image search in front of you
- Just start guessing single-word or short phrase answers and typing them into your image search (I’m usually pretty cautious about using Flickr or something else with Creative Commons licensed images, but it hardly matters if you’re doing this for your own personal use and don’t plan to publish whatever you make)
- When you see an image that you connect with, save it
- Do this until you run out of answers or have a stash of images so huge you can’t imagine you can use them all
- Open your image-editing tool of choice (I use Pixelmator since it moves back and forth between tablet and laptop well and is cheap, but you do you)
- Start arranging images as you see fit – I use a lot of layers and transparencies and quirky brushes, but look, I grew up in the early 2000s everything/nothing sites and that really influenced my taste
- Themes emerge. That’s just how art works. It doesn’t have to be good or beautiful.
I was laid off in August and just recently started doing this about myself and my mindset, right now. I’d been wearing myself thin trying to market myself and lost my sense of play and creativity a bit. Plus, it’s now my birthday month! An ideal time to adopt a new mindset.
This one’s unusual because I decided to choose a couple of specific photos from my recent anything-but-work sabbatical, including some music I’ve played, a selfie I took while interacting with a late 80s art project from the collective General Idea, and then filled in images of quiet, beaches, music, play. And yes, there are some weird brushes.
I like to use things like this as desktop images or phone backgrounds, so I see them over and over. In this case, I just want to gently shift my thinking, but other times I feel like they almost manifest the future (like the year I did a collage that included images from southern Africa, India and China… and ended up being asked to go to all of those places as part of a new job).