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Today’s article is part 3 of how the truth sets us free by acknowledging “How have you stopped yourself from realizing your dreams?”
I once heard that if it were easy to be in great shape and wealthy everyone would do it. There’s a lot of truth to that statement. It’s not easy to realize our dreams, but it’s simple. We just need to have most of the actions in our life be put in service of that dream that we want. If you want to write a book then it’s probably important to block off time in your calendar every day to write and most importantly show up and write. If you want to be a professional basketball player, it would probably benefit you to practice each day. We will get more into the path of your dreams next week, but lets go back to the big question for today.
First a caution for you reading this, we look back on our past to learn; not to beat ourselves up. So remember today’s article is not about beating yourself up for all that you haven’t done up to this point in your life, I know that’s easy to do. It is about generating awareness about the ways that you have been stopping yourself from realizing your dreams! So let’s get started.
“How do you stop yourself from working on your dream each day.”
I want you to think back to that dream that you had as a child, how did you stop yourself from accomplishing it?
I’ll share a few of my own ways that I stopped myself from becoming a professional athlete for you to learn from and hopefully do the opposite that I did. So here we go, here are the ways I stopped myself from realizing the dream of being a professional athlete.
I didn’t set clear priorities:
We can all talk until we are blue in the face about what we supposedly desire; however; if we are not working towards what we say we want, then we don’t really desire it. We all have things that we say that we want and often times our actions show us differently. If I say that I want to be a pro athlete and spend all my time watching tv and playing video games, then my real priorities are tv and video games. If your dream is to be in incredible shape and you don’t work out and eat junk food, then it’s not a real priority –even though sometimes junk food taste really good.
We can talk all we want about what we desire, but our Actions tell us what our real priorities are!
I didn’t make time for it each day.
Once we set clear priorities, we need to make time for them each day… If becoming a professional athlete was important to me than at least six days a week I would have been outside practicing for at least one-two hours. I couldn’t tell you how many days I even practiced, it wasn’t that many, and even when I did it wasn’t very consistent. Needless to say I did not make it to the NBA.
I didn’t get a clear vision of my dream.
An analogy I got from Jack Canfield was this, “It takes about two years for Pixar to make a movie like the classic Toy Story and we watch it in about 90 minutes.” Often times we sit to think of our dream for just a few minutes and then never think about it again. If you had to track how many hours you have spent on creating your clear vision of your dream, how many hours would you have spent? If I had been serious about being an athlete I would have taken time every day to make my vision clearer.
I didn’t visualize my dream every single day.
Once you have taken the time to make that clear vision and see yourself realizing your dream over and over, maybe you even add a classic training montage like Rocky has, then you need to watch it over and over and over. Your mind can’t tell the difference between reality and a power visualization, so when you are visualizing your mind and body is acting it as if it’s actually happening to you.
I made excuses instead of worked to get results.
In my case, I made up all kinds of excuses to not practice. I was too “busy” doing what lots of kids do, watching tv and playing video games. I was raised in Mesa, AZ in the summer it reaches at times 120 degrees, there was a great excuse, I don’t want to practice outside when it feels like I’m walking on the surface of the sun. Now, it’s really not that bad. I came up with plenty of excuses.
My biggest excuse is I would get bored. MASTERY is monotonous. The best of the best learn how to enjoy or maybe even tolerate doing the same thing day after day after day. They learn to enjoy the process of consistent improvement. At first it is so slow and then out of nowhere you finally see results. The people who have created their dream life have learned to do whatever it takes and the funny thing about doing what you love, when you understand that you are getting better it’s sometimes not as bad. Doing the same thing every day and seeing minimal improvement in the first stages.
Looking back on my life I can think of so many things that I wish I would have done better and dedicated more time to. The good news is I can start today and do better and the same for you. No matter how old or young that you think you are. You can start today, you may get sick of hearing this quote but it’s one of my favorites.
“You cannot go back and change the past, but you can start we you right now and change the ending.”
You, yes you that is reading this, I want you to know that your dreams that feel so impossible, throught just starting you can turn them and you into the “ITS POSSIBLE” and live a life beyond your wildest dreams.
What’s the tiny “It’s Possible” step that you need to take in your life to move just a little bit closer or a lot closer to what you want? Let me know in the comments below.
Then go ahead and do them, just give them a try, and you will make the impossible, the “IT’S POSSIBLE”
-The “It’s Possible” Guy
Joseph
Remember You’re okay, start doing what’s possible in Your life and you will create miracles!