Short-term goals are necessary to make progress on longer-term goals. Ultimately, a dream that represents the best life you can imagine living is the big goal. Survey your current life, noticing how you feel about each area of your life. There are different ways to divide these areas and, naturally, they influence each other.
One strategy would be to look at your health, relationships, vocation/career and time/money freedom. Determine how you feel about each area, from very unhappy/dissatisfied to extremely happy/satisfied. Then, taking your time, come up with what you would love in your life. Let your imagination go free, letting go of any doubts, fears or needing to know all the steps and resources to get there.
Imagine what your life will be like in future. Add as many details as you can, knowing that the closer you get to the goal, the more details will appear and the clearer they will become. You want to write this dream down. The subconscious works with imagery, the senses and emotion. For the dream to become reality, the subconscious must experience it as if it is happening. The more sensory details and the stronger the emotion, the more real it is for the subconscious. Holding this vision as clearly as possible and reexperiencing it for a few minutes a couple of times a day will help it grow stronger and more real.
How important is a dream?
Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, worked for several years caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. “When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently,” she says, “common themes surfaced again and again.” She put her observations into a book called “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.” Here two of those five:
— I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
“This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was because of choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.”
—- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
“This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to themselves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.” FBN
