5 Simple Steps For Knowing What You Want And Making It Happen!

 

How do you feel your life is going? What about your business or job? How about your finances and relationships?

Are you finding your life, your business or job, finances or your relationships are stagnating? Do you feel stuck in a rut and have found yourself simply struggling getting through the day? Do you find some areas of your life boring and going nowhere, or even going backwards? Are you having trouble being positive about your life, your business or job, your finances or your relationships?

If you’re not experiencing joy and abundance in an area of your life, then you need to make some changes!

The way to live a satisfying life is to simply dream up the things that you want to be, do and have, and then make them happen. Whilst this is a simple statement, it doesn’t always seem easy and a lot of people fail to put it into practice because it seems like hard work!

To help you put this into practice, follow the five quick and easy steps below. These will help you to start getting your mindset tuned into what you want in life and making it happen!

Before you start, find yourself a quiet, comfortable location where you won’t be disturbed. Grab yourself a pen and some paper as you’ll need to write some things down. Although you can do these steps digitally, I’d strongly recommend writing them down as it will help you to get the ideas out of your head and externalise them.

Step 1: Brainstorm ideas

Take ten to fifteen minutes and write down all the things you'd like to have, be or do. Don’t worry about whether what you want to have, be or do is practical or whether you can, or how you’re going to, achieve these things. For example, if you'd like to go overseas on holidays for twelve months - don't stop and think whether you can afford it, or whether you can take the time off work.

Simply write down whatever you want. Be open to any possibility and don’t evaluate or question what you’re writing. We’ll look at evaluating what you want during a later step. This step is simply to get you to write down all the things that you'd like to do, be or have, assuming that anything was possible and there was nothing that could stop you from doing it.

Step 2: Prioritise your ideas

When you’ve finished brainstorming, you should have a nice list of the things that you’d like to do, be or have. Your next step is to review your list and sort it into priority order. Prioritise your list in order of how important or desirable they are to you.

As with the first step, it’s important that you don’t evaluate any of the items whilst you’re ranking them.

Number the items from the things that you want the most to the things that you want the least (1 being the most desirable or important to you).

Step 3: Evaluate your ideas

Once you’ve prioritised your list from the most desirable to the least desirable, look at the top three items on your list and ask yourself the question: "What’s stopping me from doing, being or having these things?”

Writing down the reasons you’ve come up with will help you to clarify what might be preventing you from achieving your top three desires. For example, if your number one choice is to go overseas for twelve months, your reasons for not being able to do so could be something like: “I can't afford it”, “I won’t be given the time off work”, “I can’t leave my family or friends for that long”, or “What if I don't like it when I get there?”

Spend some time on this step. Whilst you’ll probably come up with a few obvious answers quickly, spending some time to really think about what could be preventing you from doing the top three items on your list will help you to uncover some interesting (and deeply rooted) reasons.

If something in your top 3 items is actually unachievable for you when you really look into it, then go to the fourth item on your list, and evaluate that, and so on, until you have your top 3 achievable goals.

Step 4: Create an action plan

Once you’ve identified your top 3 achievable goals, your next step is to create an action plan.

Your action plan will take your end goal and look at the necessary steps that you’ll need to take to achieve that goal.

If it’s a big or long-term goal, it can help if you identify smaller targets that will help let you know that you’re going in the right direction and give you smaller wins along the way. Once you’ve identified the smaller targets, you can identify the actions that you think you’ll need to take to achieve these targets. Don’t worry too much about the actions and targets in the future. You can refine these as you start to make progress on the earlier targets and you start to get feedback on the actions you’ve taken.

When creating an action plan, it can help to find someone who has already achieved what you’re going after (or something similar), as they’ll have a very good idea of the actions that you’ll likely need to take. But don’t worry if you can’t find someone, set actions that you think will be necessary and the feedback that you receive will give you a good idea of what the next actions you’ll likely need to take are.

Step 5: Take action

If you don’t take action, you’ll still be in the same place in the future that you are now. A rough action plan followed up with action will always be more effective at helping you to achieve your goals than waiting for the perfect action plan, or having an action plan that isn’t acted upon.

Don’t spend too long worrying about whether the action that you take will give the best result, or waiting until the circumstances are perfect. This will just end up with you procrastinating and putting off taking action. The best time to take action is always NOW! Remember, your aim should be for ‘progress not perfection’. The feedback you get from taking action will be far more valuable in helping you to achieve your goals than waiting until you’ve identified the right action or for the circumstances to be perfect.