Proactive Action

Make Your Dreams a Reality

Don’t you have dreams, visions or plans about things you’d love to have or accomplish? Having the dream is the easy part. Making it a reality can be more challenging. However, the good news is that there are proven techniques that can get you from where you are to where you want to be.

Follow this process to bring your dreams to fruition:

1. Turn your dream into a goal. When you have a goal, you have a true target. For a greater chance of success, your plan should have a deadline and it must be measureable.

* It has been said that dreams are goals without a deadline. Give yourself the gift of setting a deadline and things will start to happen.

* You want your goal to be measurable because, if you can’t measure it, how will you know when you’ve succeeded?

* For example, this goal is measurable and has a deadline: “On or before June 1, I will weigh 150 lbs. or less.”

* Make your goal as desirable as possible without being unrealistic. If you feel that your goal is unreasonable, it’s much more difficult to encourage yourself to actually pursue it.

2. Prioritize your goal daily. Read and write your goal each day.

* You give instructions to your brain thousands of times a day. Let your mind know that your goal is something more important than, “I feel like eating a ham sandwich,” or “I need to stop at the grocery store on the way home.”

3. Make a list of negative associations. You probably have negative associations with achieving your goal; otherwise you’d already have it. So make a list of all the negative stuff that pops into your mind when you think about achieving your goal.

* Examine that list and think of ways to work around those challenges.

* Each time you notice a new negative association with your goal, add it to your list. Things will tend to change over time, and new challenges will reveal themselves.

4. Make a list of all the positives about reaching your goal. How would it make you feel? How would it change your life? How would it change your perspective of the world and yourself? What would your next goal be?

* Make your goal as attractive as possible. Envision your life after achieving the goal. This will help to keep your motivation levels high.

5. What do you need to make your goal a reality? Do you need to special license? Do you need a laptop? Is there some knowledge you must acquire? Make a list of what you need and figure out how you’re going to get it.

6. Catalog your available resources. Who do you know that could be helpful? What expertise or items do you need that someone else might have?

* Achieving difficult goals can rarely be accomplished alone; you’re likely to need some help and guidance. Look at the list you made in step 5 and see what you already have in your life that could help you on your path.

7. Track your progress. Measure your progress each day.

* Tracking is critical to making continued progress. You can only adjust your approach if you know how you’re doing. Consider making a chart if that’s applicable to your goal.

In many ways, working toward a goal is like baking a cake: if you follow the recipe, you’ll always pull a perfect cake out of the oven. Likewise, if you follow the above steps, you’ll find it much easier to achieve your dreams.

Do you Need an Attitude Adjustment

Do you feel like your life could be happier? A better tomorrow could start with something as simple as your attitude. Our perspectives have a huge effect on our overall level of happiness. They can affect our success as well.

Over time, attitudes become habitual. Because of this, they can take a bit of effort to change, but such work is well worth your time!

Try these techniques to bring greater happiness and success into your life:

1. Start each day by making a mental list of things you’re thankful for. You can do this while you’re lying in bed just before you get up, in the shower, or while driving to work. This simple mental exercise will adjust your focus to the good things that you already have.

2. Love life, not stuff. Do you feel that having more possessions will make you happy? What usually happens is that, after you acquire something, it never seems to mean as much to you as you thought it would. After the newness wears off, you’re back to wanting some more new stuff! So the joy in most new possessions is temporary, at best, and leads to more “wanting.”

* The quality of your life itself is what will bring you the most happiness, not the quantity or quality of your stuff.
* Spend some time each day doing what you love.
* Build meaningful relationships that uplift you.
* Take action to create a life filled with what truly means the most to you.

3. Be patient. Our society has trained us to be in a hurry and expect immediate gratification. However, some of the great things in life take time to bring to fruition.

* Enjoy the process of creating the life you desire. Each day will bring you one step closer. Being impatient tends to push your goals farther away.

4. Believe in yourself. Life is much more pleasant when you have faith in yourself. Remember: You’ve already done things that are much more difficult than just about anything you may still wish to accomplish. So you know you can achieve your future plans.

* Consider learning to walk. How many times does a baby fall before they finally can stand up unassisted, let alone walk? And we keep learning more over time. Even a 10-year old doesn’t walk as well as a 30-year old. It takes many years of practice.

* How many times are you willing to fall down and get back up now? When you believe in yourself and expect success, you’re more likely to succeed. Your upbeat attitude will lead you to seek solutions to your challenges until you reach your goal.

5. Sometimes being smart is sufficient. We often believe that everything worthwhile requires a lot of work. However, many times, approaching challenges by working smart instead of working hard can save a lot of time and grief.

* Sit down and reflect on your situation from the perspective that there’s a simple solution to each challenge. You might be surprised how clever you can be if you make an effort to find an easy but satisfactory solution.

6. There’s no such thing as failure. Each time your plans fall short, analyze where they went wrong, learn from the experience, and continue moving forward.

* When you “fail,” all you’ve really done is discovered an ineffective way of trying to do something. That’s all. The knowledge gained only makes you more capable in the future.

Adjusting your attitude and making the changes permanent will take some work, but this effort pays off. Your attitude affects your perspective, what you notice, and what you fail to notice. So by adjusting your attitude, you can shift your whole reality!

Examine the attitudes you already hold that may be limiting your life and happiness. What perspectives and beliefs would serve you better? Use the above ideas to start the process of adjusting those ineffective attitudes today for a happier tomorrow.

No Family is Perfect

Families are complex and all of us are bound to experience some negative emotions from things that happened as we were growing up.

No family is perfect, and although your parents might have made every effort to ensure you a safe and happy childhood, unanticipated events occur that might have been out of your parents’ control at the time.

As a result, you might have developed feelings of sadness, disappointment, fears, and even hurt about your early years.

You’ve most likely heard the expression about carrying around “old baggage” with you. Baggage is an expression used when referring to unpleasant emotions and feelings we “carry” throughout our lives, unless, of course, we do something to let go of that baggage. Letting go of old family hurts is critical to living the life you deserve.

Following these steps can help free you from the limitations of your baggage:

1. Write a list of what you feel hurt or disappointed about. Your list might be quite lengthy or it might be brief with just one or two items. Whichever the case, recording what you feel hurt about will help clarify what it is that’s bugging you.

2. Go more in depth about each issue you listed. Specific to each item on your list, record how you felt at the time and how you feel now about the situation. The writing process will help you explore your feelings and identify how you truly feel about the past event.

* Upon completing this exercise, you may discover that you aren’t as upset now about an incident as you once were and realize that you can give yourself permission to let it go.

3. Recognize how this baggage is affecting you now. The way you handle many aspects of your life today could be related to things that happened in your past.

* Do you avoid getting too emotionally close to others for fear of being hurt?
* Do you jump in to relationships too quickly – only to find the other person not to be someone you would normally like to spend time with?
* Maybe you allow your anger to wear away at your close, loving relationships.
* Whatever it is, try to connect past incidents with what you’re doing now to express the negative emotions from those events.

4. Know that you’re worth living a life without the old hurt. You deserve to have a life unfettered by wounds from your past.

5. Make a decision to let go. Tell yourself you’ll no longer be affected by something that happened so long ago. You might want to try these ways to help you let go:

* You could write your old hurts on small snippets of paper and put them in balloons. Then, blow up the balloons, take them outdoors, and let them go. As they float away, imagine your pain floating away, too.

* Another way to let go is to write them down on paper and burn the paper. As you watch your writings safely burn in your fireplace or a barbecue grill outdoors, visualize those hurts being burned up and disappearing from your life forever.

6. From your adult viewpoint, you may now understand what happened. Once you clarify the event, consciously tell yourself that you now understand what occurred and why or how it happened. You’ve gained some insight into the issue. Now you can leave it in the past.

7. Commend yourself for your efforts to let go of your emotional baggage. After all, it weighed you down for quite some time. Now you’re free of it. Praise yourself for an important job well done.

You can let go of old family hurts by following these steps. You’ll feel so much better when you release the painful feelings you’ve had for some time. Create the life you so deserve by banishing the past to where it belongs – in the past.