How to Define and Accomplish Your Goals: Beginning Steps

This post is part of  The Awakened Heart Project

Week 12: How to Define and Accomplish Your Goals: Beginning Steps 

“One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.”

 ~Sidney Howard

Free Yourself to Be Yourself

The last few weeks we’ve spent a significant amount of time discussing how fear and beliefs from the past create a wall hindering forward movement and personal growth. Fear is a very real part of stagnation in life. If you want to create your great life and build a life where your dreams and aspirations can be realized, releasing yourself from the shackles of your fears is your first priority.

FYI: A body will remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force. A ball will remain on a table until nudged right? Yes! This is also true for humans. We will remain stagnant until acted upon by an outside force. Or, in many cases, an INSIDE FORCE! The uniqueness we have as humans is that we have the choice to choose the inward forces as our primary means of transportation; that is, our heart and minds. I encourage you to really think about that for a minute. Outside forces can push us yes, but outside forces don’t always push us in the right direction. They often push us in the direction that is best for the outside forces. What do I mean by that? Well, your boss might push you to complete a task and do it in a particular amount of time. His task and time frame may be ridiculous and appear almost impossible to you. You may think, “How in the hell will I ever do this? Why would he even ask this of me?” In truth, his motivation is likely for the betterment of the company, or even himself. Don’t think it’s for your betterment, its most likely not. So you get motivated to complete his task at whatever cost. You scarifies your personal life, time with your kids, exercise, sleep, etc., etc., etc. You tell yourself that this outside force is critical to your wellbeing because it’s your job and you need it to survive.

Then one day, you wake up and an inward thought emerges from your mind: What if this wasn’t the best thing for me? What if I didn’t work at this job? What if I quit? I don’t even like this job. In fact, I kind of really hate it!

Just like that, your inward self gives you that nudge to start recreating the life you always wanted. It’s no longer about the outside forces. It’s no longer about doing what society expects of you, or working the job your father always wanted for you, or “Keeping up with the Joneses”. IT’S ABOUT YOU!!

“Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion.  You must set yourself on fire.”

  ~Arnold H. Glasow

Another scary thing about outside forces is that they often come crashing creating complete and total chaos. Tragedy is one of the outside forces that can cripple a person for a time being, and then as they rise from the ashes of their misery (if they ever do), find the strength to recreate the life they always wanted. “Don’t wait until something tragic happens,” they’ll say, “life is too short to keep living like this and taking another day for granted”. The lesson is: start today. Plus, when you make the choice to start anew on your own terms, you get to be in control. It’s no longer about making the journey through the path that was carved for you. It’s now your journey. You are the construction worker. You are the master.

You remember the post, Are You a Chicken or an Eagle right? Declare today the day you stop being a chicken and begin to live your life as the eagle that you are. Stop conforming to what your friends think you should be, or society, or you parents, or peers and starting living for yourself. You can be the Lotus that rose from adversity using inward strength and determination and a little help from the sun above to blossom into a beautiful flower. You must continuously tell yourself that following your heart and mind is not selfish, but a symbol of self-respect. Your must remind yourself that flowers instinctively lean in the direction of light and sucks up the water in the soil below (both which give it strength and the ability to grow). Flowers do not worry if other flowers will judge it or think it is selfish or if it will be mistaken for a weed. It simply does what it intrinsically knows how to do,  -SURVIVE AND THRIVE! Don’t let the world of your fear, judgments, and status quos impede on your chance to survive and thrive! This is your life. This is your world. Follow your heart. Follow your inward forces and get ready to soar.

Creating Harmony in Your Mind and Heart

You set some goals last week and the weeks prior, and I’m going to have you look at those over again. You should spend some time each week going over these goals and redefining them as necessary as well. But before we go any further with our goals, it’s very important we discuss the baggage that we carry with us and how that impedes on accomplishing our goals.

You may have a whole list of goals you want to accomplish, short-term as well as long-term goals.  I doubt they’re all new either. So why haven’t you accomplished any of them? Why do they only reside in your head and on paper? I’ll tell you why: Because attaining our goals often requires us to go against everything we’ve been taught and everything we thought our life would be, and we become emotionally and fearfully polluted with fear of judgment and failure. The only way to get past this, is to unlearn.

You need to unlearn your feelings of guilt, fear, jealously, judgment, insecurity, and pain. The best way to start this process is to make a list of all of the things YOU DON’T WANT. This will also make it easy to define the things you do want. Make a list of categories. For example: Money, Relationships (friends and love), Sex, Family, Career, Happiness, etc. You can create your own categories if these do not apply to you, but these are often the ones people think of first. Now, for each category, write down your negative views. This should include fears, feelings of guilt, resentment, pain, judgment, or anger, and insecurities. When you’re done, go through each category again and write down the thing you don’t want from that category. Here’s a common example of what people write under Money:

MONEY

Beliefs

Things I don’t want!

As you read through this list you’ll see that the things that this person does not want require this person to have money. But if this person also feels that people with money are cheaters, superficial and jerks, acquiring money will always make this individual feel emotionally conflicted and not in harmony with his/her belief system. Not to mention, this person will never seek opportunities for that will give he/she the life he/she wants. You can’t seek to fix something if you’re beliefs about those who have already fixed it is negative. To help combat that, go through your list of goals from the previous weeks, what goals do you have that would fall into this money category? If you did not make a list prior to this week, start by writing a list of goals and aspirations for the money category. It might look like this:

Things I Want

You can see form this table that the wants are not outrageous, or superficial. You might think a 5-bedroom house is, but what if this person has 6 children? What if they don’t? Remember don’t pass judgment on yourself or others. Traveling the world is not an intrinsic characteristic of a cheat or a superficial jerk. Not wanting your children to have mountains of debt is not a bad quality either. Neither is wanting to care for your parents in their old age. Money doesn’t have to be negative, but many of us carry what our parents told us, and what society showed us as the all-encompassing-truth. When in reality, truth is often in shades of gray, -you make your own truth. Yes, some wealthy people cheat their way to the top, and are superficial jerks, but that doesn’t mean you have to be!

Do this exercise with each of the categories you’ve created. Sometimes it’s easier to write a list of goals and then go back a day later and write the list of beliefs and things you don’t want. For others, it’s much more difficult to decide what they want, rather than what they don’t want. When you’re done, look through your answers and restructure your beliefs like we did above. Trade in the negative beliefs for positive ones. This is the only way you’ll be able to truly step forward and achieve your goals. You must be in harmony with your beliefs and actions. Further, when you’re in harmony, you’ll notice that what you want will begin to come your way. It’s the law of attraction, and you’ll be shocked at how quickly things will change when you allow them to. You simply need to open the door of opportunity.

Next week we will take your goal setting a step further. That inward forward motion should be what you look to from now on. They will be the strongest forces of change.

Reflection:

• This week, complete the charts on negative beliefs, goals, things you don’t want.
• Redefine your goals is necessary or add to the list you already have.
• Reflect on the goal exercise and discover harmony in your beliefs, and let go of the beliefs and judgments holding you back.

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