Featured Commentary:
To follow my dreams, do I drive?

by Bill Gray, CCSP Staff Writer
December 11, 2004

Dreams and the pursuit of... How? You know dreams can be pretty elusive characters, especially if you are not sure if you have one. So how do we catch one? Well there are many dream catchers on the market and all will achieve what you wish them to achieve… if you believe in them, enough.

First of all, what is a dream?

A condition or achievement that is longed for; an aspiration: a dream of owning your own business.

Could this be construed to mean a goal; What is a goal?

The purpose toward which an endeavor is directed; an objective.

Now I know you have heard it all before… Go after your dreams... You have to have a goal...

Actually Goal needs only one change of letters and you get gaol (which is the British spelling of Jail) and that’s what most people perceive a goal as!!
Something that ties them down to a particular way of living or something that stops life as you can’t have fun AND achieve your goals.

The thing is about dreams is that it’s not so much that you have to change your complete lifestyle or anything as drastic as that. You can continue living mostly as you do its all about focus not change. When you focus on something, your life naturally heads that way.

Don’t believe me? Well let’s look at negative thoughts. “Life is tough” Oh here’s a good one… “Money doesn’t grow on trees” have you ever seen anyone with that concept having so much money that they can flaunt it, usually, even if they do have heaps of money, they never spend it or enjoy it because it doesn’t “grow on trees” you know.

So we use these concepts every day. You can actually make a great list of these statements and you will be surprised at how many you use. Try it as an exercise!
Make a list of all these negative comments;

Here are some to get you started…

Money doesn’t grow on trees
Life is tough
I’ll never be rich
You can’t have it both ways
There’s no such thing as a free lunch

Now you will have maybe heard of a couple of these, if not, you will certainly get the idea from them. These are comments that actually hold people where they are…
Take “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”, what if there actually is such a thing as a free lunch. Imagine what you are missing out on because you reinforce your beliefs by continually saying there’s no such thing.

I had a free lunch the other day… I believe in them.

I have a friend that always says she’s emotional and she is right… always. She gets very upset with things and it becomes an issue for her because it affects her work and her play. Her emotions go to town and she can get very upset about things. She keeps saying that she can’t help it, she’s just emotional. It’s the old “what came first? The chicken or the egg scenario. Its like, is it that she says she is emotional because she is, or is she emotional because she says she is?

The other day we had an interesting discussion around this and she became quite emotional. I asked her to see if she could stop being emotional and she did… immediately. It was an example of taking control of it. Rather than letting it affect you, you affect it. So you actually start to take charge of your position.

There is nothing wrong with being emotional as long as it isn’t driving you to distraction. When it does that, then you are being at the whim of your own decisions. The decision in this case was to remain emotional. This is where decisions of a negative type (or goals that we set to remain a certain way actually come true, The same way as if you face life in a positive fashion, those dreams can also come true for you. What I suggest is that these negative thoughts are used as an excuse rather than a way to live. Make positive thoughts the excuse and suddenly a new way opens up for you.

This isn’t magic here; I am just asking why we put so much passion into the negative ideas and so little faith in the positive ideas?

Why is it that we find great excuses why we shouldn’t do something, rather than finding great excuses why we should do something?

We can so easily become fixated on our current position and judge everything from that place rather than looking at a place we would like to be in and then working towards that.

If you want to drive to a place but you are unsure how to get there, what do you do? I always look at a map. I then follow the roads that lead me to that place. I have to stop sometimes to check but following a road is quite easy, especially if your map shows the roads to take to get to your destination.

What happens if you just hop in the car? Do you get there?? and notice I didn’t say where. That’s what you are doing if you don’t have a dream to aspire to. You are in the car getting emotional.

Now what happens when you get half way to your destination and you see something that you decide is more to your liking? What’s wrong with that? I don’t have any problem with you changing your mind. That’s the great thing about us and the dreams we follow. We are able to change our minds. I would point out, though, that your mate is still in his car being emotional back there. You see, he didn’t even put the car into gear and start driving because he didn’t have a destination. You are 40, 50, 100 miles down the road towards your cause!! He’s back there being emotional and believing in being emotional

The negative/positive debate can continue all it likes but I know where I would rather be. Sure I get scared that I may be making a big mistake but time has proved that I my mistakes are always followed by some recuperation and then I can carry on towards my dream. My dream has changed a few times… some changes were forced on me and others happened as my view got clearer. The fact is that I am no worse off now than when I was younger. I have lost all my material things by virtue of staying in a position for too long and loosing it all. I have accumulated pieces again and now no one would know the predicament I was once in.

I ran a building company, my own company that ran into strife when a couple of bad debts turned into court cases and I had to walk away, close the company and 12 people who worked for me lost their jobs, along with the 20 or so contractors who I used on a regular basis. It wasn’t long before my marriage fell over as well. I was tossed out and I walked away with the tools of my trade and a suitcase of clothes (oh and a truck)

I used to think I was hopeless. I used to stress to others that I needed them to make decisions for me because I was scared of making a bad one. Life actually stood still for me. Nothing changed and I remained stuck as an individual until I had a piece of good luck… I won $1000 on the radio. The guy I was working with and I blew $200 that night on a little food and a lot of drink, the rest I was determined to make into my savior. My savior was going to be a trip to Australia to visit an old mate (I was living in New Zealand which was my home)

The trip turned into a great ego trip. I met friends I used to know some 15 years earlier. Within two weeks I had rediscovered myself, had a job and a place to stay. I went back to New Zealand and visited a child counselor and discussed the impact of this shift on my children and with her blessing arrived in Australia to start my new life.

Within a very short time I read a magazine and there was an article on Coaching. I decided that was something I could do and so I signed up for a course and began. Within six months I was coaching paying clients and now I coach people around the world.

Now I could have stayed living my poor wretched life but I found something to live for and that started the snowball rolling, good turned to great, hard turned to easy and life turned to fun. I had short term goals and they worked for me. Where I used to complain about how tough it was, I found a joke book and concentrated on telling jokes where I would have told a painful story.

Look, I know life can be tough but how you face it, is the thing that determines your persona. You can be a victim and you will be perceived as such. You can grin and bear it and then make sure it doesn’t happen again and people will comment what a great person you are. Both of these are your choice. Now I aren’t looking for public adoration but positive comments are something that I would rather live with, than negative stuff that does nothing to help.

The lesson for today? Find something to like about yourself and then live it. Cut out this negative think and find something positive to say, and then live it. Dream about something that you would like, and then live it.

Don’t fool yourself any more, don’t slip into the realms of negativity. Its Christmas time and so make it come true.

Whatever you put your mind too, will come true to a greater or lesser degree. Negative or positive. Say you are dumb and you will be. Say you are happy and you will find happiness. It will be there, trust me. How do I know? Well look around, are there people you know who are happy? OK it shows that happiness is there to be had; your job is to find it. Look at the negative people around, what do you think? Negative? Happy? What’s your choice going to be?

Until next week
Cheers… Bill


by Bill Gray aka Blast, CastleCops Staff Writer

Bill is a Business Coach. Working with Individuals, Businesses and Organisations to create better environments and to develop and enhance business 'potential', into successful business practices.

Website in the Company of Coaches
Sydney, Australia
Ph +61 413 949 521

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