DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

The person with a fixed goal, a clear picture of his desire, or an ideal always before him, causes it, through repetition, to be buried deeply in his subconscious mind and is thus enabled, thanks to its generative and sustaining power, to realize his goal in a minimum of time and with a minimum of physical effort. Just pursue the thought unceasingly. Step by step you will achieve realization, for all your faculties and powers become directed to that end.-- Claude M. Bristol

We all have dreams and desires but if we do not know how to go about achieving them they are nothing but pipedreams. But with a clear plan in mind one can turn the pipe dreams of today into the reality of tommorow. In life, we need reasons for what we do. Goals keep us from just reacting to what's going on around us. Goals can inspire and motivate. They help us make our life happen rather than letting it happen. Most of all, Goals produce results. There are three main points to goal setting:

1. Clarifying your unique goal

2. Reinforcing your goal
3. Tracking, Measuring and assessing progressIn this article we will look at each one of these steps and access how they work.

All around us the internet is changing. Because of the so called recession, everyone is starting to charge for what once was free for the taking. Every site had free stuff. Some still do, but, for example, I had a free list at Listbot and now they are charging. I was quite happy with my site and thought about staying with them even if they charged. However my small ezine is not in a financial postion to pay the prices that Listbot will charge. So what to do? Why are people charging for everything that was free? The media tells us that stocks for dot.com's are down. All around us dot.com's are failing. So if this little ezine was to survive I needed to get a really good map of where I was going. Well, I am a person who dreams the impossible dream -- always have and always will. I have been told since I was a child that I was a dreamer.

Well I am, and as I said, will always be but the difference between my dreams and some others I talk to is that I accomplish them.Believing that I can accomplish anything I set out to do and I deserve success is the first step in accomplishing any goal. How did I get this belief in myself? Partly because to my parents I was the "apple of their eye." They believed I could do anything including fulfill their unfulfilled dreams. I never did do that but I have fulfilled a lot of my own dreams. So with experience behind me I learned that if I stay focused, I can accomplish the impossible dream. So why should a little recession or other dot.com's going down influence my little ezine? One thing I don't do is listen to the media much even though as an ezine owner I am part of that media. I need to stay focused, and that is why I do not listen to negative input from people or the media; it just breeds fear and fear never accomplishes anything. So I go apart in my own little world and I dream my impossible dream.

If I want to know where I am going I must have a clear picture of where I want to be in the next year, five years and beyond that. Life is for living and I intend to live fully until I die.I find that getting away from the computer and writing down my goals helps me. I personally have to sort through wants and desires, and values to define where I want to be. This step can't be vague. One has to be like that little child at Christmas that knows what she wants, that doll, that bike. Often when I am meditating on goals I try and recapture that feeling of childhood where I could feel myself playing with that pretty doll, brushing her hair, or riding that bike, wind in my hair. Wanting this one thing more than anything, thinking I would die without it. This is the kind of feeling you have to have for what you want before you write your goal. Then the next step is to weed out the wants, desires, brought on by what others say you should want and by family programming of what you should be doing. Well-meaning friends and family often make suggestions. But this is your goal and you need to draw upon your unique dream to pull out this goal. This is a process that can take weeks to or months achieve, but don't get discouraged that things are not moving fast enough.

This is a really important step because this is the basis of your map of getting what you want in life. One of the common pitfalls at this stage is to be in a all or nothing frame of mind. I want all of this now not later! It is important to set goals that are medium term and easily recognizable so one can say to themselves, "Yes, I am on my way because I have accomplished this goal. Now on to the next one."Another pitfall might be to set goals that disrupt everything else in your life. So look at this carefully. What would you do if you had no obstacles to doing anything you want in life. Believe in yourself you can do it. Don't be a perfectionist if everything doesn't go just as you plan and give up. This all or nothing kind of thinking has no room in this plan. You are developing a plan that is uniquely yours, that will make you desire having it just as you did that Christmas doll.

Also, choose who you share your goal with carefully as it is fragile, not yet manifested and of this world, and can easily be smashed. There is a time to share with others, but not yet. Solidify it on paper; this brings it as a real thing into the real world. So now in the next few weeks or months you will know where you are going and why you are going there. You no longer are lost in the forest. You soon will be able to draw a clear map. Next week I will write on the clear map. How not to buy a ticket to Seattle when it is San Francisco you long for.

Remember -- dream the impossible dream.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR==================Judi Singleton is the webmistress of Jassmine.com and Gotojassminesitenow.com, and the owner of Jassmine's Journal . She was a counselor for 20 years. You can receive her inspirational newsletter, Jassmine's Journal, by sending an email today to jassminejournal-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Becoming Passionate About Your Life

Living a life that you are passionate about, opens up a world of joy, fulfillment and abundance. It is one of the greatest life experiences. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, passion is defined as "boundless enthusiasm".

Imagine waking up every day eagerly looking forward to life? When we love the life we live and are using our gifts, we are then operating at our fullest potential. We are contributing something unique and special to the world.

Living out our passion is living our life's purpose. When we are on purpose, we are no longer restless, unhappy or searching for something more to feel complete. Our passion is our purpose and it is from there we can create and live our best life.

Passions nuture and feed the soul. In order to find our passions, we have to first rediscover our selves. The expectations of others coupled with the hectic pace of life and our own emotional baggage, often overshadow the essence of who we are as individuals. By reconnecting with our inner selves, we can begin to reclaim forgotten dreams, goals and even create some new ones.
How can you begin to eagerly look forward to life? What is it that you are passionate about? What excites you? These are just a few questions to help you discover your passions. Below are some additional questions, take your time and think about your answers.

Jot them down in a journal, notebook or on a piece of paper. Stretch your imagination;go deep inside to discover your answers. Write what your heart says is true and do not feel your responses are unrealistic or that others may not approve. The goal of these questions is to get you to start thinking about your life.
What are your hobbies or talents?

If there were no obstacles in your way, what type of life would you envision living and why?
What are some forgotten childhood dreams?
What do you think has been the biggest obstacle that has stopped you from living up to your fullest potential?

How can that obstacle challenge you to move you from where you are to where you want to be?
What would you not change about your life?
What type of feeling do you want to experience on a daily basis?
What is one thing you can do today to connect with your passion?

(c)2001 Tara Pray

Personal Choices

Sometimes we look around at our lives and wonder what we ever did that landed us in THIS mess. Well, we made choices along the road that we took and those choices had consequences. Those consequences are what we live with every day. And each day that we live we continue to make more choices. So, if our lives are not exactly where we want them to be, maybe we should change the way we make choices. Listening to older folks talk, I often wonder if they realize that they really did choose to be where they are at the time. Some of them are so bitter and angry in their lives. They have no understanding of how they got there, and they blame everyone else for being where they are, but they made the choices in their lives themselves. Then I look at my own life and wonder at the choices I’ve made.

It’s the reason and the situation behind the choice that often gets us into trouble. Looking back at my life, there were times when I made choices based on the situation of the moment, and not on the basis of my personal life goals. Some of these choices are necessary, but more often than not, making a choice in the moment isn’t a good idea. Choices made without a conscious view of where the result will be taking you, are the choices that leave you wondering how you got there. Those are often the choices that you ‘blame’ others for making, though you made the choice yourself. The circumstances were not of your design, therefore you didn’t think about your choice. You allowed circumstances to make the choice for you. It wasn’t that you didn’t make the choice, but rather that you didn’t make a conscientious choice based on where you wanted to be. Your choice was in part a default, because of circumstances, you allowed your choice to be made by the situation rather than conscientiously deciding to follow your life goals.
These kinds of choices are often made when a parent or sibling is ill; we choose to be part of their lives rather than moving on in our lives and getting to where we wanted to be. We accept the ‘defeat’ of giving up a part of our dream to be the kind of person we want to be at the moment. If we acknowledge our reasons for making this choice and adjust our life goals accordingly, we become better for making the choice. If we maintain our dream as it originally was without making allowances for the events in our lives, however, the default choice becomes a ‘failure’ in our thought life, and we begin to become bitter and blame others for our choices.

Becoming bitter is another means of failure in making our own choices. If we allow bitterness and blame to become part of our thoughts, we loose control of our conscientious thoughts and choices, and eventually we are the result of a mass of choices made by default and we feel like failures as people. Our lives become something that we didn’t envision and we begin to find others to blame for our failures to make choices that would have followed our dreams and goals. As a result of this process we begin to deny that we had control over our lives and that denial leaves us bitter and lonely as people begin moving away from us and out of our lives when we attempt to control them.
As we make feeble attempts to control others, anger becomes part of our personality. We become bitter, angry, and controlling as we attempt to find someone to blame for the apparent misery that we have created in our lives. The older we are, when we realize the ‘failure’ of not meeting our goals and dreams, the more likely we are to sustain the bitter anger as we attempt to control others into achieving our goals.
We have another option.

We don’t have to accept the bitter failure and angry control as ‘our life’ if we make an effort to recognize that the choices that got us to that point were our own choices. If we accept the fact that our ultimate goal was not consistent with the choices that we made along the way, we can reevaluate the goals we set for our life and acknowledge the real goals that were inspiring our choices.

Scenario 1: Often one child in a family will grow up bearing the responsibility of caring for an aging parent, while the other children go off to seek their fortunes and create families of their own. Neither achievement is any less worthy of the noble title of ‘success’. Often the child who CHOOSES to nourish the needs of the aging parent finds himself/herself needing to be nourished in their older years, and feels neglected by life.
If that person allows that feeling of being neglected to harbor and manifest itself in their lives, it becomes bitter anger. It will evolve into a feeling of hatred toward those who the person feels ‘took advantage’. If that hatred is aimed at a person the child/grownup chose to take care of, it will become a guilty ambivalence and the person will take on the dimensions of abstract importance, giving creed to the choice to stay and nurture the person, but making the person (being cared for) bigger than reality.
That person will actually become almost ‘God-like’ in the mind of the person who chose to nurture them. This ‘God-like’ person becomes so important that all others are compared to that person in ways that are unfair and unreasonable, but the guilty feeling is somehow submerged by attempting to make others feel less important or less worthy. While making others feel less worthy isn’t necessarily the objective, it is the result of elevating the importance of another person, particularly someone who is deceased.

The same can be said of the children who follow their dreams and leave the nurturing of elderly parents behind. They are missing a key component in the journey of life. They are missing the experience of loving someone more than themselves and giving to that person. Their goal may be empty – without proper value at the end, and their lives may feel empty and incomplete.
The ideal of life as a destination is hollow and desolate. Life is a journey with many obstacles that change the path and rearrange the road we choose to travel. By understanding the value of the steps we take, we give credence to the journey and distinction to the goals we achieve.
Suppose that the person in our scenario chose to recognize his/her choices, adjust the dreams and goals to include the actualization of his/her choices, and accepted a different ultimate life goal as part of their reality. The anger, guilt, and ambivalence would be unnecessary and the bitterness would fade away. Life could again be pleasant and fun, because they didn’t fail. They didn’t have to see their dreams burn up into smoke, because they adjusted their life goals to match the decisions they were making in their lives. The alternative of this is to maintain your choices in line with your life goals. Few of us are willing to blindly follow a goal that we chose as teenagers, so some adjustment is necessary as we make choices and mature in our lives.

Scenario 2: Entering college a guy has a dream of getting out, getting the job of his dreams, marrying the girl his heart has pictured, buying the car, the house, the dream. However, as the days go by, his education seems less important and that girl across the park looks better and better, so they go out and she gets pregnant, they get married, he can’t afford to continue in college, he gets a job, they can’t afford a car, they barely can afford an apartment, and the dream is disappearing a little every day. HE feels trapped, so does she. He blames her; she blames him. Who made the choices? They each made choices that didn’t follow their life goals, and the consequences are that their life goal is fading.

They can hang onto the goal and feel failure or they can adjust their goal to include the choices they made. If they choose to feel the failure, they are ultimately choosing a very bitter road to travel, the guilt of feeling angry toward the person they promised to love, honor, and cherish will eventually become bitterness and the love they felt will become unbearable.

A marriage will be wrecked and a child will hurt because two people didn’t accept the reality of their own choices and adjust their expectations to include the changes in their lives. So what is their option? Do they have to allow their failure to proceed toward their goals to ruin a life that could be well lived? Can they choose another goal and make better choices?

A life is made up of choices and decisions that lead us to our goals. Our goals can be the specific direction we choose in life as a teenager, or the adjusted and accepted goals that we determine as we move through life making decisions based on the circumstances and situations that we experience. The destination does not determine the value of success. The value of success is the cost of what you gave up to get there.

Are you willing to give up your values to get to your life goal, or is your life goal made up of your values? It’s a personal choice, often one that is made with many tears and heartaches along the way. Obstacles can become devastating to our goals, or they can become part of the journey.
By making choices along the way and accepting the changes that happen in our lives, we suddenly are able to control the happiness we encounter along the way. Is your goal to get there no matter what? Or is your goal to enjoy the path along the way? Whichever is your goal, are you willing to pay the price? Have you figured the cost of reaching for your destination?

Understanding the individual

Really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit. You simply don't know what constitutes a deposit to another person until you understand that individual. What might be a deposit for you - going for a walk to talk things over, going out for ice cream together, working on a common project - might not be perceived by someone else as a deposit at all. It might even be perceived as a withdrawal, if it doesn't touch the person's deep interests or needs.

One person's mission is another person's minutia. To make a deposit, what is important to another person must be as important to you as the other person is to you. You may be working on a high priority project when your six-year-old child interrupts with something that seems trivial to you, but it may be very important from the child's point of view. It takes discipline to recognize and recommit yourself to the value of that person and to subordinate your schedule to that human priority. By accepting the value of what the child has to say, you show an understanding of the child, and that makes a great deposit.

Our tendency is to project out of our own autobiographies what we think other people want or need. We project our intentions on the behavior of others. We interpret what constitutes a deposit based on our own needs and desires, either now or when we were at a similar age or stage in life. If they don't interpret our effort as a deposit, our tendency is to take it as a rejection of our well intentioned effort and to give up.

The Golden Rule says to "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." While on the surface that could mean to do for them what you would like to have done for you, I think the more essential meaning is to understand them deeply as individuals, the way you would want to be understood, and then to treat them in terms of that understanding. As one successful parent said about raising children, "Treat them all the same by treating them differently."

Attending to the Little Things
The little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. Small discourties, little unkindnesses, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals. In relationships, the little things are the big things. People are very tender, very sensitive inside. I don't believe age or experience makes much difference. Inside, even within the most toughened and calloused exteriors, are the tender feelings and emotions of the heart.


Attending to the Little Things
The little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. Small discourties, little unkindnesses, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals. In relationships, the little things are the big things. People are very tender, very sensitive inside. I don't believe age or experience makes much difference. Inside, even within the most toughened and calloused exteriors, are the tender feelings and emotions of the heart.