WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?

It's so easy in life to get off course, to travel one road only to find that road does not lead you to the happy life you thought it would. It's okay to find yourself on the wrong road for you. What matters is not where you are but rather what you are willing to do about it. If you continue to do what you've always done, this time next year you'll be in this same predicament. It doesn't get better unless you are willing to take the necessary steps to change course. Your vision for success needs to ignite your passion so that you become more committed to it than you are to things remaining the same. Your "comfort zone" is familiar territory, even if it's been uncomfortable for a long time.

WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT IN LIFE?

Many people know exactly what they want. "I want to be a pilot." Or, "I want to travel the world." Really? Is that what you really want? Will that make you happy? And is what you're doing right now contributing to your goal or moving you in another direction? "I want to be married and have children." What are you doing to make yourself attractive to your ideal mate? Do you reallywant to raise children? (It's the toughest job you'll ever have!) Or is this what you think you're supposed to do in life?
Whenever a client tells me what they want, I always ask more questions because sometimes what they think they want is not really what they want at all but something someone else wants for them. Or it may have been something they wanted when they were younger. "I always wanted to go to medical school," one gentleman told me. But he didn't go. Life took him in different directions and now this man is a medical technologist with a master's degree who has tremendous expertise in his field. Yet he is being held back in his mind by this old possibility of wanting to be a doctor. This idea impacts him today by limiting his success because it whispers in his ear, "You're not good enough because you didn't go to med school." Hogwash!
This man needs to throw out the old idea or possibility, and accept the choices he made, that those choices took him in exactly the direction he needed to go to fulfill his life's work. He needs to learn to make the best of his skills and his talents and let go of the ideas of the past. He no longer wants to be a doctor; he is not interested in making that kind of commitment for educating himself in that way. So why let this hold him back from being great today?
Others, however, don't know what they want. Ask people what their dream is and they will not be able to answer. They stopped dreaming a long time ago. For clients who come to me with this problem, it's not hard to get them dreaming again. It takes some practice, that's all. Most people know what they don't want and that is a great place to start - eliminate what you don't want. This will create space for you to add what you do want to your life.
And that's what creating a great life is all about. It's not complicated; it's just not necessarily easy in practice. You eliminate what you don't want and add only those things that make you happy and bring you joy. Vision is the key to keeping you focused so that you can bring in what you want to bring into your life. With vision, you learn to say no to the things that will not help you on your journey to achieving what you desire.

HOLDING THE VISION

Having vision helps you to design a life with purpose and intention. If you know what you want, then each day you make decisions about how you spend your time, what you do and who you do it with, based on whether it brings you closer to what you want. Will doing this add to you or to your knowledge base in some way? Is this a positive interaction that is beneficial or adding value to you? Or is this person depleting your energy? Are you gaining something or is this merely a distraction? Is what you are doing moving you directly in the path toward your dream or is it moving you away from achieving your dream?
Without vision, it's harder to ask these questions. If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. But if you know where you want to end up, then you can be careful which road you choose and make choices each day that move you closer to achieving what you want.
It's so easy to be distracted by the day-to-day minutia. Vision keeps your eye on the horizon so that you don't get too immersed in simply caring for the ship. Too many people get caught up in simply running in the cage, like the mouse on a wheel. You're spinning your wheels dealing with whatever is in front of you and not looking where you are going. You have to look up, which may mean accepting responsibility for where you are. Perhaps you're not happy with your life in some aspect right now. It's okay wherever you find yourself. This is an important step to creating a great life. You must start with where you are and go from here. Awareness is the first step. Willingness to do something different is the second. If you got yourself here, you can make some changes to your route and go in a different direction but you need to know where you want to go and you need to learn to make different choices so that you break the habits that got you to the place you are now!

MOVE FORWARD WITH PURPOSE

Creating what you want in life takes more than just vision: it takes 1) doing the inner work to evolve yourself so you can achieve more in your life; 2) creating a new environment in order to help you create and sustain the new you and your new success; and 3) taking purposeful and persistent action. It also takes time on this new road to travel the distance required to create what you want. The journey itself is your life and when you move forward with vision and purpose, you achieve the results you want and you enjoy yourself along the way.