You’d be forgiven for not noticing the difference between a vision board and the Collage Coaching Technique™ (CCT), the creative coaching approach I developed. They both use images taken from magazines to create a collage and at first glance, they appear the same. But there are significant differences in purpose, process, and outcome that makes the CCT the most distinctive vision board alternative in coaching.
Vision Boards
Vision boards are so named because the focus is on visualising the future. As a coaching tool, a vision board helps you focus on what you want for your life or the year ahead. While you may be encouraged to choose images that resonate with your desired future, the instructions are predominantly to select images that represent your goals.
Essentially, the focus is on identifying goals first, then creating a visual resource that depicts this future. For this reason, the images, words, ideas, and emotions expressed on a vision board are chosen to be positive, uplifting and future oriented. They may be related to material, emotional, physical, or spiritual desires. Some facilitators advocate separating these into different areas of the board.
Many people believe that in creating a vision board they’ll manifest their future through the law of attraction. Others see them working because in focusing attention on the images, actions also become focused in that direction.
The Collage Coaching Technique™
The CCT is a psychological coaching tool with foundations in Jungian psychology, art therapy, and neuroscience. It is based on the philosophy that the soul already knows who you truly are and, having an aligned and authentic presence occurs through deep self-awareness, reconnecting to and trusting your intuition. From this foundation you are empowered to live a creative, fulfilled and enriching life that ripples outwards.
When you come to coaching, you may or may not be aware that you’re facing internal conflicts, barriers, or resistance to change. Often rooted in fear, they keep you stuck in your current situation, unable to create the shifts that enable transformational change.
Until there is a possibility to identify and address these feelings, unhelpful mindsets and behavioural patterns, your truth and identity remain trapped in borrowed narratives and ways of being that do not serve you.
For this reason, the CCT focuses first on accessing your unconscious mind. Because when self-selecting images for a vision board you may, consciously or unconsciously, avoid things that feel challenging, carry uncertainty, or hold tension.
Unlocking the Unconscious Mind For Transformation
Working with the unconscious means, unlike a vision board, an image may resonate with you that you wouldn’t have thought to look for. Yet this image will capture exactly what needs expression and your attention. Therefore, your collage will include images you find challenging or uncomfortable. For example, those relating to difficult experiences, internal struggles, and unfulfilled dreams.
Fortunately, these images appear alongside your motivators, strengths, passions and values. So that what emerges is a holistic representation of yourself in that moment. Furthermore, most of the images on your collage will carry significant symbolic, metaphorical, embodied and emotional meaning.
My role, and that of other CCT coaches, includes working with you to deepen personal understanding and create meaning through the exploration of these images. This leads to increased self-awareness, clarity, and the confidence to trust your intuition as you determine the next steps on your journey.
Significantly, starting with the unconscious naturally invites slowing down and mindfulness, facilitating authentic expression that bypasses the self-editing that shapes a vision board. Many people describe this as liberating as they lean in and let go.
Aligned and Authentic Presence
When coaching with collage, each session begins with a theme chosen by you to focus on an area you wish to explore, or where you sense something isn’t right. For example: authentic self, well-being, my successful self, career transitions, or leadership.
I also apply creative constraints, such as setting specific durations for each stage of the process. This allows space for your unconscious wisdom and intuitive knowing to emerge more freely. Otherwise, there’s a risk that you’ll start to overthink, as your conscious mind begins to question your choice of images or ponder too long over their placement.
Once completed, like a vision board, you’re guided to place your coaching collage where you’ll see it regularly. But unlike a vision board, it’s not there just for motivation or to keep you focused on a fixed outcome.
Your coaching collage is alive.
A tangible representation of your inner truth that continues to unfold over time. Its symbolic images and visual metaphors carry layers of meaning that reveal themselves gradually, when you’re ready to see and work with what is offered or asked of you.
Each new layer deepens your self-awareness, reconnects you to truth, strengthens trust in yourself, and increases your confidence to live with greater authenticity.
10 Key Benefits of Coaching with Collage:
1. Bypassing the blocks caused by editing and cognitive overthinking.
2. Surfacing thoughts, feelings, insights and truths that bring early breakthroughs in the coaching journey.
3. Strengthening trust in your intuition and inner wisdom.
4. Using creative play with images to explore identity and authentic self-expression.
5. Self-expression through visual metaphors and symbolic images allows connections and patterns to emerge that might be missed with words alone.
6. Gaining holistic insights that integrate unconscious, intuitive, emotional, embodied and rational ways of knowing.
7. Supporting authentic presence, so decisions and actions flow more naturally.
8. Experiencing deep personal development and professional growth organically.
9. Releasing the pressure to perform and remaining open to what truly resonates.
10. Living from a place of alignment, authenticity, and self-trust which naturally flow into and impacts all areas of life.
This is the heart of coaching with collage: not striving for more, but releasing what’s already within you; clarity, trust, creativity, and the freedom to live and coach authentically.