Assembling images of a desired future onto a board is a familiar American practice, taught in workshops and church groups alike. Its assumptions have a documented lineage.
The idea has nineteenth-century American roots
A cluster of nineteenth-century American movements held that mind is prior to matter and that thought influences health and circumstance directly.
These currents produced churches, publishing houses and healing practices, and their vocabulary entered general American usage far beyond their membership.
Later self-help writing inherited the core claim while dropping most of the metaphysics, which is why the assumption now appears in secular settings.
The strong and weak versions differ sharply
The strong version holds that attention or belief acts on the world directly, so that focusing on an outcome makes its arrival more likely by some non-ordinary means.
The weak version holds that clarifying a goal and encountering it daily changes what a person notices, chooses and pursues, with ordinary causes doing the work.
The two claims are routinely presented together in the same workshop, and separating them is the most useful thing a participant can do.
Attention effects are the uncontroversial part
Psychologists have long studied how stated goals and visible reminders affect follow-through, and the general finding is that specificity and review matter.
A board of images functions as a persistent reminder placed where a person will see it, which is a plausible mechanism requiring nothing unusual.
Researchers in this area also caution that vividly imagining a successful outcome can reduce effort in some conditions, which cuts against the simplest version of the practice.
The moral objection is the serious one
If circumstance follows from thought, misfortune becomes evidence about the sufferer, and illness, poverty and bereavement acquire an implied explanation.
Clergy, ethicists and practitioners in several traditions have raised this objection directly, noting the cruelty it produces when applied to people already suffering.
Teachers who take the objection seriously usually restrict their claims to attention and action, and explicitly decline to explain why hardship befalls anyone.
Where the practice sits in American religion
Versions of the idea appear in prosperity-oriented preaching, in secular productivity culture, and in New Thought congregations that trace the lineage openly.
Traditions that emphasize acceptance, providence or the limits of human control generally resist it, and the tension between those postures is old.
Understanding which version a given workshop is teaching is therefore a question about theology as much as about technique.
The board itself is neutral between them. What determines the practice is the explanation offered alongside it, and workshops differ far more in that explanation than in the materials they hand out.