Honoring your dreams - a reflection on what it means to carve your own path

I can’t think of a better way to start 2020 then to talk about living a life that is honest and aligns with who you are and what you want. I think in today’s world, more and more people are making time for self-reflection and questioning the path they are on –Is this what I want? How do I get closer to meeting my goals? What are my dreams for the future when it comes to career, purposeful contribution and love?

I love this quote from Maslow and I think it sums up well the choice we have to stay as we are or to step out in the water and take a brave step towards our dreams: “In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety”. Isn’t this part of what life is all about? To continue to grow and to find your place in the world, to learn more about yourself and to find your refuge, the place that makes you feel at home and the people in your world who help you to be the person you want to be?

To carve out the right path for you takes both time to reflect on what that is and what you truly want and it also requires you to set intentions, goals and begin to plan out how you will get from where you are to where you want to be. Our dreams take effort and commitment – they often don’t just happen. So how do you begin to take steps towards making this year one that honors your dreams and gets you closer to them? Here are a few ideas, some of which I’ve stumbled on unexpectedly and others that served me greatly in the last few years.

1. Reflect on last year. What was it like? What were the positive changes and realizations that happened for you and the challenges you faced last year? It can be helpful to write it out or use a reflective exercise with prompts, such as the one featured in the last issue (winter 2019) of Magnolia Journal, which you can download here https://magnolia.com/journal/

2. Set personal intentions and create vision statements. How will you know when you’ve achieved it? What do you want it to look like? I learn from many sources including people in my life who share interesting ideas, such as the idea of creating vision statements and intentions which came up in a recent conversation. It’s great to think about how you want your life to feel and what success would like like for you. I decided this year to create a vision board and set personal intentions for myself. As I got curious about this, I stumbled upon an interesting article worth sharing: https://healingbrave.com/blogs/all/positive-new-year-intentions . As the author says, “intentions aren’t goals attached to external outcomes. They help you align with what you most want from the inside out. They inspire how you approach situations and decisions. Your intentions are more about WHY you’re doing whatever you jot down in your planner”.

3. Think about where you want to be this time next year. Now it’s time to look at your goals and dreams for the year ahead. If you could achieve only one or two things this year, which would be most important? What are the things that you want to bring into your life and how will life be different in a year from now? It is by planning intentionally on where we hope to be that the chances of getting there increases. It also takes a strategy on how to get there and commitment, but in order for anything to happen you need to first chose to make it happen.

4. Consider what steps will get you closer to what you want. It’s time to create a game plan. What do you need to do to get to your dream? Maybe it means signing up for a course to get you closer to that career change. Or, maybe your dream is to carve out time to read everyday. Think about what’s going to stand in your way and get creative about coming up with a strategy that feels right. How can this time be different than the other times you may have tried? Think outside the box and find a time to fit it into your routine, even if it means just for a short amount of time at first.

5. Try something new. There are many ways to get to achieving your goals. If this is something you’ve tried to do for a while without success, there may be something to learn from this. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “If you want something you’ve never had, you’ve got to do something you’ve never done”.

6. Ensure you make some time in your schedule. Time doesn’t magically happen for us to be able to do these things. We have to create time. Be creative here to find a way for it to be feasible.

7. Invest in what feels right. Follow your intuition. Try new things. Stick to the ones that feel right and bring you closer to where you want to be.

8. Move forward with purpose. Always remember and come back to why this matters to you and the intentions you set earlier. In those moments that you feel like it’s too much and you’ll never get there, remember what it means to you and why you felt such motivation to pursue these dreams in the first place. You deserve to have the life you want.