Why aren’t you doing what you want to do?

Image: Sweet dreams cour­tesy of Raul A.

Ask peo­ple on the street if we are liv­ing in dif­fi­cult times, and most of them will say yes. Then ask them whether they would be will­ing to risk it all for the life they desire, and almost every­one will shy away from it. The truth is  most of us are  too afraid of change, and it has noth­ing to do with the cur­rent eco­nomic envi­ron­ment or with our cur­rent situation.

The life-change paradox

When life forces us to go through chal­leng­ing cir­cum­stances it can cre­ate the kind of per­tur­ba­tion required to make life-changing deci­sions. It is not rare for peo­ple that go through life-threatening events to undergo a sig­nif­i­cant re-evaluation of the lives they were lead­ing.  A great exam­ple of this is Brian Clark’s story.

Brian is the founder of Copy­blog­ger, and he suf­fered from a sub­dural hematoma as a result of a snow­board­ing acci­dent he had in early 2005. Unfor­tu­nately, at the time of the acci­dent he did not realise he was suf­fer­ing from a seri­ous con­di­tion. Soon after, he became nearly crip­pled with headaches and hal­lu­ci­na­tions. As the doc­tors dis­cov­ered the cause of his con­di­tion, they had to per­form surgery to relieve him of the con­di­tion. In his arti­cle “The snow­board, the sub­dural hematoma, and the secret to life” , Brian describes going into the oper­at­ing the­atre and becom­ing very aware that death was def­i­nitely in the vicin­ity. Luck­ily surgery went well and he recov­ered fully.It was then that he rein­vented him­self. By the first week of 2006, Brian had embraced his dreams of  oper­at­ing 100% on-line, and launched CopyBlogger.com.

At the end of his arti­cle Brian asks us a few sim­ple questions:

What do you want to do?

Why aren’t you doing it?

I don’t care what your answer is… this is the only shot you’ve got.

This is not a dress rehearsal.

Who are you to chase your dreams no mat­ter what, you might ask?

Who are you NOT to?

The life you were meant to live

Most of us do what Brian was doing up to the moment of his oper­a­tion: liv­ing the life we think we’re sup­posed to live. Deep in our sub­con­scious, all of us have a  script for what a respon­si­ble life looks like. And just as we are all unique indi­vid­u­als, the scripts are dif­fer­ent for each one  of us too.

The amount of pull and iner­tia of these scripts is noth­ing short of extra­or­di­nary. It doesn’t mat­ter if we rebel against it and decide to go back­pack­ing all over the world with no care for the future; or if we decide to blow all our money on an 18-month rock-climbing trek around the world after that suc­cess­ful and very lucra­tive first job we landed after Uni. Sooner or later, most of us will start  liv­ing life accord­ing to that script.

Amaz­ingly, no one imposed this script upon us;For that we can only blame our­selves. Dur­ing our for­ma­tive years, expe­ri­ence influ­ences and shapes our views on life, and it is this expe­ri­ence that seeps into our  sub­con­scious and starts form­ing that script. When the time comes, the strength of our ‘will’ to break free from those pre­con­cep­tions  is irrel­e­vant; most of us ends up suc­cumb­ing to the force of that script. It is, after all, what we believe to be the right thing to do.

Many take com­fort in the argu­ment that these scripts rep­re­sent the life they were meant to live. But that’s not nec­es­sar­ily true. These scripts rep­re­sent the life we live when we choose to just fol­low the path instead of actively choos­ing a path. The live we were meant to live may look, feel and smell very dif­fer­ent indeed.

Liv­ing your dreams

So how do we get out of our own heads and start liv­ing the life we were meant to live? You could go snow­board­ing, aim for a sub­dural hematoma, and use the pre­cious moments right before life-threatening surgery to reflect on this ques­tion. Or you could do it the easy way. Ask Brian Clark, and I am sure he will agree there are bet­ter ways to recog­nise your dreams, choose your path, and live the life you were meant to live.

The first step is to recog­nise your dreams. This sounds eas­ier than it is. Most of us have adopted a vari­ety of cliches as if they really were our inner­most dreams. Ask any­one to describe their dreams, and there is a good chance you will get a com­bi­na­tion of big houses, expen­sive cars, fast boats, and easy sex with wildly attrac­tive partners.

For­tu­nately, dis­cov­er­ing  your dreams can be eas­ily done. All that is needed is the devel­op­ment of a habit of vision­ing, reflect­ing and doc­u­ment­ing your aspi­ra­tions. You might have heard the old adage which says that  “fail­ing to plan is plan­ning to fail”; when it comes to choos­ing a life-path, this is 100% true.

So how do you adopt this new habit? There’s an easy to fol­low four-step process:

1. Decide how much time you want to devote to this activ­ity, and choose a reg­u­lar time for reflec­tion. Make it  daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly; it is up to you. What­ever you choose, please make sure you select some­thing you can stick to.
2. At the sched­ule time, sit down in a quiet place, put some sooth­ing music, and imag­ine you are liv­ing the life you have always wanted to live. Close your eyes.
3. Open your eyes again, and start writ­ing a descrip­tion of your day.Describe what you did; where you went; who you met; what you felt.  Describe every­thing in as much detail as possible.
4. When you’re fin­ished, close the book. Close your eyes and try to visu­alise the day you just wrote about.

As your rou­tine of mak­ing a diary of your ideal life becomes more estab­lished, you will notice changes will start to hap­pen. No, it is not that the Law of Attrac­tion is work­ing it’s magic; it is sim­ply that hav­ing that vision and being fully aware of it  helps you recog­nise the oppor­tu­ni­ties you have to make the changes required. As these oppor­tu­ni­ties arise, you will be more aware of their pos­si­bil­ity, and you will seize the moment and take imme­di­ate action. The more you do this, the quicker you will get to  live the life you were meant to live, As Brian Clark said, this is not a dress rehearsal. Why aren’t you doing what you want to do?

Tagged as: Dreams, Law of Attraction, Life