A prison cell?

Do you have a goal? A focus in life? Have you invested a great deal of time, effort, money to achieve and yet feel you haven’t made it yet? For all your effort do you still feel that there is something missing in your life? It is obviously very important to set goals in your life. It gives you a focus a way forward a mechanism for making decisions when faced with a number of options. However, it can also be a prison cell.

How can making goals and having a focus be a prison cell we hear you ask. It becomes a prison cell when you create goals based on your past experiences. You look back at your skills and capabilities and then decide what you ought to focus on. In other words you set the future on the past. It creates the illusion that you are going forward when all the time you are stuck within the boundary of your past capabilities. It’s like driving your car by looking in the rear view mirror all the time. You have a great vision of what happened in the past but haven’t a clue about what is coming in front of you. The point is: whatever happened in the past is not a true indication of your potential. 

As Alan Cohen stated: "To grow, you must be willing to let your present and future be totally unlike your past. Your history is not your destiny." 

In other words if you continue to do what you have always done then you can only expect to get what you’ve always got. If you constantly focus on the past, the negative or on what is missing in your life you have no alternative but to create limited goals and focus. You are back in that prison cell again. 

You need to break the cycle. How do you do it? You change your thinking.

To give yourself the chance of changing your thinking. A chance to create the life you want. A chance to create a focus and goals that you want to achieve. Start by answering the following questions. They are not easy, but they will enable you, in time, to become very focussed. 

Where are you now? Where are you in life?

Describe your current situation.

What are your priorities in life?

How important are your close friends and relations to you?

What influence do you have on your partner’s life? How do they influence you? Do you like this?

Do you like where your life is going?

Where do you want to go?

What is success to you? When you are on your death bed looking back at your life what would you like to think your life was about?

Visit the questions often until you feel you really understand where you are now and  where you want to go. How you get there will become obvious as you progress. Don’t rush, you have plenty of time. Keep focussed inside, on yourself. Think of yourself as opening a bank account of the self. The more time you put in, the more credit appears on the bank account and therefore in time the more is available for withdrawal. 

Now the crucial question:

What holds you back? What stops you going for what you want to achieve in your life?

It is not enough just to create  a focus and a plan. To understand where you are now and where you want to go. To change something you have to DO SOMETHING. Put your plans into action. Until you have put your plan into action, you haven’t changed. You are still doing what you have always done. 

Become a member of the 20% club. That’s the percentage of successful people in the world. Put your focus into action. It’s your focus, you have thought it, designed it and built it, now have the enthusiasm, desire and aim to implement it. 

Change the I can’t into I can. Think for a moment. Is this fear real? Or is it that your imagination has taken over, stopping you from embracing the future? Because, at the moment, you have no evidence of what is going to happen. The only evidence you have is in the past. And as you have not done this before, at this time, then you have no evidence.

Don’t worry about your capabilities. Can I do this? I have never done anything like this before? What will I do when……….? There is something magical about this process called life. Whenever we are faced with an incident we have never faced before somehow the answer arrives. Somehow we have the capability. They appear just when you need them most. If you look back over your life we are sure you will find, like us, that most of the time you set out to do something you didn’t have the capability before you started. The biggest example is education. When you started  did you know all the knowledge you had at the end or did you become capable as you went along?

All you need is courage, enthusiasm and discipline. Have the courage to drive towards your goals, the enthusiasm to keep going and the discipline to create a new habit even when it is tough. Keep focussed, keep learning.

“The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting goals and achieving them. Even the most tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through each day convinced that every task, no matter how menial or boring, brings you closer to fulfilling your dreams."-Og Mandino

To give yourself a better than average chance of success. Each night before you go to sleep ask yourself: What did I do today to bring me closer to achieving my focus, my aim and objective in life?  Break out of the prison cell.