Dreams – The Fullfilment Project

Live Your Life Fully

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

When we spend our time thinking about the future and what might happen or the past and what has happened, we fail to be present in the moment. When we live this way we miss a lot of beautiful moments through focusing on our own anxieties and dreams.

It is good to have concern over certain things in life and to have aspirations, but much of our concerns will never come true and we will not reach our aspirations if we do nothing in the present to achieve them.

We also miss an opportunity to fully experience and understand the things that happen in our lives. In order to do this we need to be more present, to be mindful of what is happening moment to moment. As a great Buddhist once said, when you sit, sit, when you stand, stand, when you walk, walk. In other words, fully do the thing you are doing. Get out of your head and into the moment.

Be A Hero Not A Superhero

Happiness, Success

I came across this note I made in my journal some time ago and felt it may resonate with some of you.

I was having a dream that felt like it was happening, but I also knew it was a dream. I was part of a team of superheroes trying to stop bad guys doing something bad, I can’t remember what. I clearly remember a lady I used to work with, who has just had her second child with her husband, appearing in a corridor as I was about to go into ‘battle’.

She said “do you have any milk I could borrow.” I stopped and calmly said, “of course, it’s in the fridge down the corridor on the right.” I then joined the other superheroes to save the world or something. The revelation for me is that when I calmly gave my previous colleague what they needed, this was me being who I am, someone who helps others, not a superhero. This is enough for me.

Also, to help others in simple ways can sometimes make us a hero without intending to be one.

How To Achieve Your Dreams

Achieving Goals, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
Napoleon Hill

Imagine swimming through jellyfish and shark infested water for 53 hours without stopping. Imagine the training necessary in order to prepare to swim such a distance. There is a stretch of water between Cuba and Florida that is 111 miles that no one, since it became a goal in the 1950s, has been able to swim across. Diana Nyad is a marathon swimmer who had a dream of swimming this stretch of treacherous water. She has a team of around 30 people, shark experts, nutritionists, navigators, etc and they had tried 4 time before. She almost died on one attempt due to being stung by a Box Jellyfish.

In 2013 Diana Nyad at the age of 64, on her 5th attempt, made it across this stretch of water. The only person that I am aware of to have ever done so. Her mantra on this attempt was “Find a way.” She said in a TED Talk entitled “Never, ever give up“, where she talks about this dream and achieving it, that she is in the prime of her life at 64 years old, and I believe her. When she staggered up onto the beach in Florida after more than two days of constant swimming, she had three messages. Number 1, you should never, ever give up. Number 2, you are never too old to chase your dreams. Number 3, it looks like a solitary sport, but it’s a team.

Now, we are not all going to be endurance swimmers, or even want to be. The message is not about specifically what Diana did, it is about how she did it. She had a dream and rather than let the pursuit of that dream fall into apathy she studied everything she needed to know, she trained consistently, and she never, ever gave up. No matter what she found a way. We all have dreams, for some of us it is a hazy inkling of an idea, for some of us it is crystal clear, but for all of us the dream will not achieve itself. It takes drive and passion and consistent effort, and above all else the willingness to fail trying until we succeed. It is about failing our way to success.

In my opinion, life should always be a striving to live life well, to find fulfilment, joy and happiness, and to bring these things into other people’s lives as well. Life, like Diana said about marathon swimming, sometimes can appear like a solitary sport, but it takes a team. Our dreams are individual, but to achieve them it takes a community of friends, family and colleagues.

So, firstly we need to figure out what our dream is, something that is individual to us. Secondly, we need to research how we can achieve this dream. Thirdly, we need to create a plan to get from where we are to where we want to get to. Fourthly, we need act on that plan everyday, even if the steps are small. Fifthly, we need to look for and accept help from those around us, life is always a community effort. And lastly, never, ever give up.

Something to think about:

What dreams have you heard that others have that resonate with you? What do you value in life? What makes you happy? What pursuit could be your dream? Think about these questions and figure out what your dream is and how you can work towards it. #LiveDeeply my friend.

Fearlessness is a dangerous road

Happiness, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

– Nelson Mandela

Fearlessness

In our culture today there is a great emphasis on the need to be fearless. It is found in common turns of phrase, the media. It is also found in advertising, whether it be men’s aftershave or energy drinks, the word ‘fearless’ is banded around as if it was held at the same level as integrity or fortitude. I think we are mistaking being fearless with having courage, and they are not the same thing. The problem with being fearless that it encourages us to mask or block out our emotions and to discount our very natural physical responses to danger and stress, responses that have developed throughout the evolution of human beings in order to keep us safe.

If we were truly fearless then we would have no fear of running in front of a car or train, or skydiving without a parachute. These are extreme example, but this is the point, to be fearless means that there is less preventing us from going too far and putting ourselves and others in danger. It would be profoundly stupid to skydive without a parachute, and our intellect and experience would tell us that this would not be a good idea. However, there are situations that have unknown aspects and if we leap without looking, without consulting our intelligence, our experience and our capacity for rational thought then we do not know if we are putting ourselves in danger. A balance is needed.

The other extreme is to be so paralysed by anxiety that we do not try anything new and we retreat into our selves, even becoming housebound by our anxiety. I have had my own challenges with anxiety, that caused me to have pain in my chest and my hands to shake when in certain circumstances. This is not a good place to be, to put it mildly. As I have worked through the roots of my anxiety and developed strategies to reduce it, I have found a profound truth about fear that can put us on a more even keel. Fear is an essential part of our defense mechanism, it is integral to our survival, but it is supposed to appear when we are in danger and then dissipate when the danger has gone. To use a well worn example, if our cave man ancestors mistook a rock for a tiger in the long grass, causing then to run fast in the other direction, they would be safe. If they mistook a tiger for a rock and didn’t run, then they would have been the tiger’s lunch.

Finding A Better Path

Some of this is obvious to point out, but I feel in a climate and culture where being fearless is seen as a lordable quality, especially in men, then I think the obvious truth of the situation needs to be pointed out. We should not be pushed into either being fearless or to living with anxiety, a middle road is needed. There is one quality that I feel should be the focus of our intention in life, and that it the quality of courage.

Courage is not the same as being fearless, it is in fact acting in a positive way in spite of fear. It is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. As Nelson Mandela tells us “…courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” This of course needs to be reserved for situations that are not life threatening. We are are not, after all, talking about being a soldier or anything like that. I am talking about having the courage to go to job interviews, to tell someone that we love them, to stand up to those who bully us, to stand up for what we think is right, to follow our dreams, to try and improve our skill-set. All of these things are about living a fully, deeper life.

I do think that it is important to try new things and to push past our current limitations, to grow and improve our skill-set, especially in our careers. To live at the edge of our skill-set is a very courageous thing to do. There is also a very important reason we should try and get very familiar with the things that scare us in life. If we run from the things that scare us then we internally harden our hearts. We close down our compassion and we restrict our love. We close ourselves off from having meaningful, deep relationships with people. The people we care about becomes limited to family, friends and those who share our beliefs and values. We become tribal and divided, we get aggressive, even violent in extreme cases. We become part of the problem that divides up the world into us and them.

If we can extend our compassion to include others we disagree with, those who look different from us, even those who treat us badly, then the world will be better for it. Be warned though, it take courage to love your enemies, but if you can do it, then you will have no enemies.

Something to reflect on:

If you can get familiar with the things that scare you, and have the courage to live there, then the fear will dissolve and you will be stronger for it.

Just Do It

Achieving Goals, Success

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

– Winston Churchill

The slogan of Nike is “Just Do It”, which is a call to action, but the action is deeply personal. When we hear Just Do It we are directed in our minds to the thing we are unsure about, the thing we are scared to do, but we are drawn to doing. We all have things that we want to do but we don’t think we are able to do or we feel that it will end in failure, so we don’t even try. I think having such doubts comes from previous failure that hurt us deeply in the past, and have become a forgotten wound that has healed and left a scare deep in our subconscious.

There is a moment between when we think about doing this thing we are scared to do and our brains talking us out of it. It is this moment of a few seconds when if we don’t act then it is unlikely that we will Just Do It. Many of us feel that we need confidence before we can do new things or that we need courage to do it. Both of these are often true, but there is something that comes before confidence and courage. Before we can have confidence, or courage, I believe that we first need clarity, we need to know what our Why is. If we understand the reason why we do what we do we can understand everything that we do. It is the act of discovering our raison d’être, our reason for being. When we know our reason for being we develop confidence in our own abilities, fueled by our passion for what we value. First we need clarity, then we get confidence and then we take the step of Just Doing It by having the courage to give it a go.

Courage, by the way, is not having the confidence to do something before you do it, no, it is giving it a go even if you are scared. The courage always comes with being scared, and the more scared you are the more courage you need to give it a go anyway. The clarity we have in what we believe and value is a sort of compass pointing us in the direction our soul wants us to go to and our confidence is a platform we can use to jump from when we take risks and try new things.

I have had a difficult time over the past decade when my confidence has been shaken to its core and anxiety seemed to take over my everything. However, I am taking back my confidence and my courage by finding clarity and being willing to give new things a go. I know that you can do the same. We have all had things that have knocked us down, but it is not about how many times we get knocked down but how many times we get back up. If we always get up one more time than we get knocked down we can rebuild, restore and move forwards. As long as we are moving forwards baby steps count too. So think of that thing you are putting off doing and Just Do It.

Something to reflect on:

Knowing thyself is the key to success at anything. Clarity leads to confidence, which leads to courage. Whatever is in your heart to do, just do it.

How to achieve your dreams

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t you’re right.”
― Henry Ford

As we learnt in my recent blog post, How to be more confident, self doubt is a decision not to try, and it is also a habit. This might sound harsh, but those who achieve success in their chosen field do so largely because of their mindset. Here are a few ways in which we can make good choices when working towards our dreams.

Say “What if?”

When we come up against difficult challenges in our lives often we can back down and avoid doing anything risky or that involves us putting ourselves out there, open to criticism and possible failure. One way to get past this barrier to success is to say to ourselves “what if?” What if we did succeed, what if we managed to achieve our dreams, what if. This allows us to consider the possibility of actually succeeding, rather than becoming consumed by the thought of failure.

Start the day right

Often our days are influenced greatly by how they begin, we often say that someone who is in a bad mood has got up on the wrong side of the bed. Having a positive start to our day can have a massive impact on the decisions we make and whether we feel confident to make bold moves or to take advantage of opportunities. It is important to create a morning routine of positive rituals. If you are religious this could involve prayer or giving thanks to God. If you are not religious, giving thanks to the universe for being alive.

Studies have shown that gratitude is very important for our wellbeing and it can bring so much positivity into our lives. Doing some physical activity at the start of the day can be very energising. This could be just stretches, if you have a physical condition such as Fibromyalgia like me, or it could be doing some weights or going for a run or swim. Whatever your level of ability and health, some physical activity at the start of the day can set you up to have an awesome day. It is also important to set our intention for the day. You could ask yourselves “What am I going to bring to today?” and decide that no matter what you are going to have an awesome day. Our brains look for the things we focus on, so if we begin the day in a negative mindset we will look for problems, but if we start the day with a positive mindset our brains will look for opportunities.

Handling the negative

When negative things happen to us often we crumble or we react, getting angry or upset. If we let this happen we can push ourselves off course and away from our dreams. One of the most important skills we can learn is to pick ourselves up when life knocks us down, but more important than that is to become immune to the negative nonsense. If we develop the habit of letting other people’s opinions of us or little mistakes that we make become magnified through our focus on them, then we cripple our chances of achieving our dreams.

This self sabotage is a habit that we need to break. So, when minor negative things happen in our lives telling ourselves that we are OK and can keep moving forwards means that we will and we can. It is rare that we get knocked down to rock bottom, but we often have to deal with negative circumstances and people each day. This is what we need to build up an immunity to, so we can live with more joy and help others bring joy into their own lives.

Motivation is key

The Wright Brother successfully took flight in a manned powered plane on 17th December 1903. They were not the only people trying to achieve this. Samuel Pierpont Langley led a team who were very well funded, well educated and followed around by the press constantly. Whereas, the Wright Brother had no funding, no one followed them around anywhere and paid they for their venture from the proceeds of their bicycle shop. However, Samuel Pierpont Langley did not have something that the Wright Brothers did, which was the right motivation. He wanted fame and fortune for being the person who figured out manned flight, but the Wright Brothers had a vision of flight changing the world for the better. They were aiming at making advances for the betterment of humankind.

This is because their mission to change the world, their drive to succeed and their passion for what they were doing kept them going, even though they would crash several times every day, until at the end of 1903 they achieved their dream. If we want to achieve our dreams we have to examine our motivations. If we are only interested in self gratification and relishing the spoils of success then any success we have will feel empty. When we raise others up, when we make positive change in the world, when we bring joy and success to others, then we will be on the way to achieving the dreams that we can be proud of.

Tag: Dreams

Live Your Life Fully

Be A Hero Not A Superhero