Take a moment for yourself. Sit back, relax and allow yourself to dream for a bit about whom you’d like to be and what you’d really like to do with your life. If you could simply paint an image of who you want to be, what would that look like? Free-association like this can be incredibly helpful in realizing your goals.
Spend some highly productive time meditating on your dreams with these strategies:
1. Find a quiet time and place. This will be somewhere where you can reflect without interruption. You might take a walk in the park or a bike ride for an hour. Maybe you’ll choose to lay out on a blanket under that big shade tree in your back yard.
2. Encourage your mind to pursue any positive thoughts. Think about what you wanted to be when you were 10, 15, and 20. Was it the same occupation or way of life at each stage of your development? Or were you always coming up with something new you wanted to do?
3. Think about your deepest desires. Do you want to have a lot of money and travel the world? Or just settle down and have a family?
* Perhaps you picture yourself surrounded by many close friends with whom you spend a lot of your spare time. Maybe your preferred way to live is an independent, quiet lifestyle alone with your books, paints, and hobbies.
4. Visualize your living space. Where you live largely determines the kind of life you have. Living in a warm southern climate means you can be more physically active in warm weather year round.
* If you live in an apartment in the middle of the big city, you might live a life filled with wall to wall people, ethnic foods, and cultural experiences of all kinds. There’s rarely any quiet and you’re incredibly active, partaking of all that city life has to offer.
* A rural setting, on the other hand, provides its own sense of stability. You enjoy nature frequently. The sights, sounds, and smells of plants, animals, and the four seasons surround you as you walk or work outdoors. Stress levels are lower.
5. Make a wish. You might think that making a wish is just for kids. But for the sake of this exercise, if you could have just one wish for your life, what would it be? To be a husband someday? To be a mother? To travel to a few exotic countries you’ve wanted to see? To be an accountant or small business owner?
* Your wish will reveal a lot about you and what you desire.
6. Dream about your career. Continuing to paint the picture of who you would choose to be, where would you be working? What kind of job credentials would you hold? What would you be like in that situation?
* Because work is almost one-third of your life, consider your career choice as profoundly integral to your happiness.
7. Engage in a little planning. Now that you’ve reflected on your life and who you’d like to be, how close is your actual life to your desires? What can you do to help yourself become who and what you want to be?
You deserve to live the life you choose. Reflect on who and what you want to be. Let your mind go for a bit. Then, ask yourself what you want for yourself. Think about where you’d prefer to live. Think about the career you’d have if you could do it all over again.
Finally, ask yourself what you will need to do to get to the place of your dreams, physically, emotionally, and career-wise. You can be anything you want to be. Make some effort now to find out who that really is.