Top 10 Reasons You Aren't Where You Want To Be - Reason #2

Reason #2: You Don’t Have a Plan to Get from Here to There

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.
Eleanor Roosevelt

You can know specifically what you want to achieve, what it looks like, and when you want it – but without a plan, you’re like a vacationer to Paris who forgot to buy his plane ticket. Whoops!

The next natural step after determining WHAT you want is laying out a plan for getting it. Where many people make mistakes is assuming that having a plan is an all-or-nothing proposition: They need to have a carefully scripted path from A to B, and then on to C and D, with no unknowns, and no changes.

Not so! In fact, ask any visionary who’s achieved anything of merit, and they will say that the path they thought they were going to take wasn’t what ended up happening. But they’ll also tell you that knowing the first few steps and committing to them were critical to their success.

Take someone who wants to lose weight. They know what they want to weigh, and they’ve decided to try Weight Watchers combined with walking 30 minutes a day. That’s all they need to get started because it gives them the next steps: To sign up for a meeting, attend the meeting, and begin walking.

What they can’t anticipate, though, is the weather. Or pizza night with the girls. Or the fact that they seem to be having trouble losing weight on the prescribed plan after a few weeks of success and need to shake things up a bit.

Situations change; that’s a given. Rare is the plan that is laid out in excruciating detail on Day One and followed without adjustments. You have to be prepared to make changes along the way, but you also have to know what “the way” is. Without any plan at all, you are a victim of your circumstances, not knowing what’s going to move you closer to your goal and what’s going to take you farther away.

So after you’ve set your end goal in living color, figure out that one next step you have to take. Trust that when you take that step, you’ll see the next one and the next, forward to success. You’ll know when you need to move left or right, but only if you move until the point you see ahead of you. Sometimes it’s only in retrospect that the whole path is clear, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs strewn behind them.

Come back on next Tuesday, 9/6/11 to see what your next step in reaching your goals is!

Laura Allan, MA, LMHC, CPC LinkedIn
Live. Learn. Grow

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Top 10 Reasons You Aren't Where You Want to Be - Reason #1

Reason #1: You Don’t Know What You Want

If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
Jim Rohn

Before you can get anywhere, you need to know where you are going. It sounds simple, but when it comes to life goals or dreams, it’s not so clear. We think, “I want my business to be a success,” or “I want to be happy.” But ask 100 different people to define success, or to say what makes them happy, and you’re going to get 100 different answers.

That’s why when it comes to getting what you want, the first step is to decide – specifically – what you want in your life. Not in generalities, but in specifics. For instance:

NOT: “I want to be skinny,” but, “I want to wear a size 10 and have my BMI, blood pressure, and cholesterol in healthy ranges.”

NOT: “I want to be financially secure,” but, “I want to be debt-free and have $100,000 in the bank by the time I’m 50.”

NOT: “I want a new job,” but, “I want a job that allows me to work flexible hours from home, making $20 an hour, using my skills in word processing and business management.”

Specificity is critical in goal-setting for several reasons:

1. If you only have a general idea of what you want, you can only get a general idea of how to achieve it. It’s like driving: If you know you want to drive from Portland to Philadelphia, you have a general idea of how to get there – and you may end up in the Schuykill River or on the wrong side of the tracks. But if you want to see the “Rocky” statue in front of the art museum, you can fine-tune your approach to get yourself exactly to the point you want.
2. Being specific saves time. You will intuitively be able to sort through opportunities that are presented to you and know immediately whether they are in line with your goals or not.
3. Being specific helps your mind create a vivid picture of what you want. Once your mind can picture it, it’s much easier to achieve it.

If you’re having trouble specifying your dreams, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What does it look like?
• How will you know when you’ve made it?
• When do you want to achieve this goal?
• What does it feel like, taste like, smell like?
• What would a day in your dream life be like, from the time you get up until the time you go to bed?

Write these answers down and revisit them frequently to see if they’re still true, and to remind yourself of what you’re working towards.

Tune in on Thursday, 9/1/11 to find out Reason #2...

Laura Allan, MA, LMHC, CPC LinkedIn
Live. Learn. Grow

Laura Allan Counseling and Coaching:Facebook Twitter

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206-999-1192
www.LauraAllanCounseling.com
Laura@LauraAllanCounseling.com

Top 10 Reasons You Aren't Where You Want to Be - Intro

This is the first of 12 postings about why you're not where you want to be, and how to get there.  Look for a new reason - and what to do about it - each Tuesday and Thursday for the next 5 weeks.

Introduction

When you look at your life, you may be miles away from your goals and dreams – so far you wonder if you’ll ever get there. This gap can be especially frustrating when you feel like you’re working hard to move forward.

Unfortunately, just “working hard” doesn’t assure success. There are a lot of other elements and factors that determine how far you go and how close you come to achieving the life you imagine. We will discuss ten factors that play a part in holding you back from your dreams. If you can surmount them – or even a few of them! – your efforts will be supercharged, moving you past obstacles that formerly held you back.

Don’t try to tackle all ten at once. Read through each posting and see which one or two resonate with you the most strongly, and start there. There’s plenty of time for the rest.

One note: In these postings, the words “dreams” and “goals” are used interchangeably. In reality, they are very different things: After all, a dream is a goal without a deadline. But since the principles here are equally applicable to goals AND dreams, I’ve used them as synonyms.

Tune in next Tuesday, 8/30/11 to find out Reason #1...

Laura Allan, MA, LMHC, CPC  LinkedIn
Live. Learn. Grow

Laura Allan Counseling and Coaching: Facebook Twitter

Laura Allan Career Coaching: Facebook  Twitter

206-999-1192
www.LauraAllanCounseling.com
Laura@LauraAllanCounseling.com

Lessons from waiting for the Sears repairman

Last week my washer started leaking. I scheduled an appointment with Sears to come and see why. Of course they can only give a 4 hour window of when they will arrive, but you can call on the day of the appointment to get it narrowed down. So, my window was from 8am to noon. I called at 7 that morning and was told the repairman would be there between 11:30 and noon. They also told me he would call when he was on the way.

Okay, I would have preferred to be on the earlier end of that 4 hour window, but at least I knew what to expect and could plan my morning accordingly. When 11:30 rolled around and I hadn't receive a call, nor had the repairman shown up, I called again to get an update.

I was told that an appointment took longer than expected and he would now arrive between 12:30 and 1:45. Well...I was pretty upset about this change, to put it mildly. After allowing myself to spin for a while on the same thoughts that were making me upset, I thought perhaps I should take my own advice, and apply some of the tools I teach to clients.

Using the basic concept of cognitive therapy, which is that our thoughts about an event create our emotions related to that event, I took a look at what I was telling myself.  What it boiled down to was that I felt unimportant, that my needs (and time) didn’t matter and that I had no choice but to put up with being treated badly by Sears.

I then came up with alternative ways to look at this situation.  Sure, it would have been nice to get a call that the repairman was running late, but separate from that I really did understand that they cannot predict how long any given service call will take; i.e. it didn’t mean that they thought my time was unimportant.  They are running a business, and trying to provide this service in the most cost effective way possible.

Secondly, I did have other choices.  I don’t have to use Sears’ repair service (and believe me, initially my self-talk was that I never would again).  I could have chosen at that point to cancel my appointment and schedule with another plumber or handyman instead.  For convenience sake, I chose not to.  But it was a choice, my choice.

After going through this process, I did feel better.  I still didn’t like that I had to wait around for a couple more hours, but I didn’t feel nearly as upset about it.  It also helped that when the repairman arrived, he was friendly and helpful.  I found out that he had to drive from Carnation (I live in Seattle) and he could have been just as grumpy as I had been feeling, but he wasn’t.

Additionally, I discovered that my tweets on Twitter had been picked up by Sears (isn’t technology something?), and they called me to see how they could make things right.  Of course they couldn’t give me back the extra time it cost out of my day, but I did get someone to listen to me and my pain, which I think was all I really wanted anyway.

Change Yourself - Change The World

“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.” -Aldous Huxley

For many of us, it's easier to look outside ourselves and see what needs to be changed in the world, or in other people.  How many times have you thought "If so-and-so would just do xyz, then everything would be fine."?

It's true that we do not have the power to make others (or the world as a whole) change in a specific way.  We only hold the power to choose how we would like to change ourselves.

However, by changing ourselves, we are changing the world.  This is true in several ways:

1. By definition, we are part of "the world."  If I change, the world is not the same as it was, hence the world has changed.
2. When I change the way I interact with you, it forces you to change in response.  I cannot necessarily predict how you will change, but certainly our interaction will be different if I am different.

As each of us makes conscious choices to change, the world cannot help but be changed.

As it was put so eloquently by Mahatma Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the world."

Changing the Fabric of Your Thought

“He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress.” -Anwar Sadat

A friend shared this quote recently, and it really resonated with me and the work that I do.

Cognitive therapy, mindfulness, law of attraction and many spiritual beliefs all hinge on the idea that our thoughts create our reality.  They can't all be wrong!  By changing our thoughts, we can change our experience of life.

As I frequently explain to clients, any given event is neutral; it has no intrinsic meaning.  It has only the meaning that we give it.  As long was we stay stuck in old thought patterns that attribute meaning that bring suffering to us, we will not be able to change our reality to something we might prefer.

This is true of communication between two or more people, as well.  As long as we attribute motivations to others that create a negative experience for us, we cannot move into a place of changing and growing those relationships.  We are destined to stay stuck in a place we do not like very much.

It thrills me to know that we each have the power to alter how we experience any given event or interaction.  How great it is that!?

Is it Time to Break the Pattern?

Many times what brings clients in to work with me is that they are stuck in a pattern of behavior that is no longer working for them.  One pattern I see on a regular basis is the client doesn't like conflict, and so they avoid it or accommodate the other person.  Of course their needs don't get met this way. Over time they become resentful and eventually reach a point where they just can't take it anymore and choose to leave.

This may happen primarily in one situation (perhaps at work), or may be more pervasive, occurring throughout most relationships.  Regardless, the client comes to realize that they have a pattern and the way they are handling conflict is a not working for them.

Sometimes it is difficult to acknowledge that our way of coping doesn't work.  It can make us feel wrong, or feel stupid to continue doing something that doesn't work.

I remind people that the strategy did work at one point in time, or they would not have developed the habit of dealing with similar situations in that way. We don't repeat behavior that doesn't work the first time (usually).

It's helpful to acknowledge that this behavior did serve you at some time in the past, just no longer.  When you are able to accept that your old ways no longer work, you can open yourself to find new ways that do work.