Driving Toward Goals and Leaving Dreams Behind
Have you considered what it would take to live a life that truly makes you happy? Have you asked yourself how many trips you would like to ideally take in a single year? What about how often you'd want to shop for new clothes, accessories, skin care and other products or services that put a smile on your face? I recently realized that I haven't been allowing myself to dream,let alone allowing myself to dream big. Aside from that, I also realized that my idea of dreaming big had been distorted by society's version of "big dreams".
At the end of last year, I took just an hour and a half to really decide what my "dream" life would look like. I put the word dream in quotations because I quickly came to the conclusion that what I thought was only a dream was in all actuality a very realistic version of what my life could be with the proper work and consistency. Going back to the idea of a "dream" life, it only took 90 minutes for me to really think it through -meaning I put my "dreams" on paper and added words and numbers that correlated to what I had been visualizing. I figured out how much this "dream" life would cost by determining how many vacations I wanted to take, how many shopping trips I wanted to go on, how many beauty appointments I wanted to schedule, how much I was willing to pay for a home, what kind of car I wanted to drive and so on. Once I got the ball rolling, this exercise was a blast. However, getting the ball to move at all took the most amount of time, because I realized that I had limiting beliefs around what was possible for my life.
Before I could write down this detailed plan for what I wanted my life to look like, I had to reconcile with the fact that I didn't believe I deserved any of it.I thought that the lifestyle I wanted for myself was reserved for celebrities and people that came from families that weren't broken. I believed that my life could only include struggle and hardship. Now,I obviously didn't get over this all in one sitting, but being honest and accepting my current mindset allowed me to take back control in this area of my life which then lead me to do something about it. Once I admitted this to myself, I was able to outline the life that I wanted on paper in a matter of minutes.
Now that I know what I want, I'm able to make the necessary decisions that will move me forward - even if it only moves me one step. Forward is forward,regardless of the distance. Over the past six months or so, I've positioned myself in a way that makes what was once just a "dream" life a version of my life that will be within my reach in the very near future. Along this journey I've had to check myself time and time again about what and how I've been thinking, digesting and creating. I've had to stop comparing my life to others, I've had to enforce stronger boundaries and take myself more seriously than ever. I was so used to giving my power away by giving others more authority over my time than I had, allowing others to trespass across my boundaries and trusting others' opinions and ideas of what I could and could not do more than I trusted my own.
Sometimes we scroll through social media and see everyone smiling and travelling and celebrating and we end up thinking we aren't as far along as we should be. Sometimes we allow people to do/get away with things that we know we shouldn't. Sometimes we don't make time to spend with ourselves because we're too concerned with making others happy. We end up limiting ourselves mentally, physically and emotionally because we aren't being true to ourselves and our desires. I'm learning that the moment we flip that switch and begin living our own lives, separate from the highlight reels, opinions and expectations of others, the world concedes with our desires and grants us the necessary wins to accomplish what some may say is "just a dream". Let this be the sign and/or motivation you need to go from cruising on autopilot to taking control of the wheel, putting your destination into the GPS and driving full force toward goals instead of dreams.
