Focusing on your goals & holding on to your dreams





Do you have goals you want to accomplish? Do you have dreams that you just cannot let go of?

If the answer is Yes, great!

Since I have worked on my spiritual life I have learned how important it is to focus on goals. Goals are very important to me. It feels so good when I've accomplished one.

For example, one of my goals since 2005 was to move my family out of public housing. In October 2007 that became a reality.  I had not been employed since March of 2005 when I was five months pregnant with my youngest son. After he was born I decided I wanted to go back to school. I knew that this was going to be the only way my children and I would get out of housing and living in a middle class neighborhood.

I appreciated the time living in public housing. I learned a lot about myself and my children learned a lot about tolerance.

Even when I returned to school I was not working. My children and I lived off of my student loan money and eventually child support. My youngest was 10 months old when we began receiving child support regularly.  My ex husband began paying child support for the oldest two in the summer of 2006.  We had to live frugal even in public housing.  

In August of 2007 I started a small job helping to maintain an Ebay store and an online store. After about two months I decided I was ready to move my family out of housing.

It felt good to accomplish that goal.  There was an attachment to that goal though.  I also had to come off of government assistance completely. That meant no more food stamps. The first month or so was hard. My kids were used to having enough food for two weeks or more at a time. Now we were all having to be penny pinchers, to be very frugal.

My ultimate goal for 2008 is to become financially stable.  My dream alongside my goal is to have a permanent home for my family. We are tired of the city life and have to have the country in our backyard!

What I do each morning is to wake up (obviously), think of things that make me happy, focus on the good that surrounds me and meditate. Often I will say some affirmations. You can use affirmations that others have created or create your own:

I am always a loving, caring and desirable person

I choose to live in abundance from this day forward

Fear is not an option

I forgive myself and others easily and quickly

I am a being of caring and compassion

I love prosperity and I give myself permission to share and receive richly
 
I am beloved of God and I feel this love continuously

I listen with an open heart and respon with generous grace

There is nothing to fear. Love shows the way.


I recommend as others have recommended to me that every morning and every night the first and last thing you do is read a few affirmations in the quiet if at all possible.  Repeat this for a week and see what happens. Then reflect on it after two weeks and on and on.  See if you realize a positive change is occuring in your life.

Write three very important goals you have. Place them where you have easy access to them and read them aloud if possible in the morning and before you go to bed. This helps you to stay focused on those goals.

Write down how you WILL feel when you have accomplished those goals. Continue to do this process as often as you can.

We must focus on ourselves in order to better our lives. How can we better those around us if we ourselves are not doing the same?  Can a negative, pessimistic person better another around them? Probably not.

How you are feeling projects onto other people.  Have you ever said or felt like someone was dragging you down because of something going on in their life?  Guess what, they are!

How can you focus on your goals and dreams if you are around someone who doesn't quite see the picture. They look at life as hopeless and whatever happens, happens.  They do not have any clearly defined goals.  How exactly are they going to grow?

Your goals are about you just as your dreams are.  You are ultimately the one who creates goals and has the choice of reaching as far as you can with your goals.  You are also the one who ultimately creates dreams and have the choice to stay focused on making your dreams come true.

An important thing to do is to mingle with positive, optimistic people. They will help keep you uplifted and focused in the right direction.

One of the books I recommend reading for those who want to focus on improving happiness, creating goals, focusing on dreams and living a more postive life is Ask and it is given by Esther & Jerry Hicks.   It is a favorite of mine as it reminded me often to stop the negativity and look at the positives.

It is amazing what happens in your life when you begin to change your thought process to a positive one.