Do You Know What You Really Want Or Are You Pursuing Someone Else’s Dream?

As we draw closer to the middle of the year, it is time to review your progress, so far this year. How successfully have you been at focusing on and achieving your goals? If your progress is less than satisfactory, it may be that you are pursuing the wrong goals or are trying to achieve something, which you don’t really want. I want to share some insights into human behavior, which will serve you going forward and may help you to actually begin making some inroads towards achieving some or all of your goals, before 2012 is over.

Your brain is designed to allow you to focus your energy in a specific area and avoid doing things in other areas, because you have a different, higher or lower value, which you place in each area. You can never expect to achieve any goals in areas where you have a very low value or, said differently, you subconsciously do not see that area as very important to you. Every one of us is unique and is built with a hierarchy of needs and very different set of values. When it comes to placing importance on or prioritizing things in our lives, we are all completely different. There are certain areas of our lives in which we place a greater value and therefore have a much higher desire or need to achieve fulfillment in those areas.

We are therefore driven to achieve fulfillment only in the areas which are the most meaningful to us. As we go through the developmental stages of our lives this changes. As a young child our highest priority may be, mastering a video game or learning to ride a bicycle on one wheel. When you grow into a teenager it may be to look as attractive as possible and avoid standing out at all costs. Then as we progress into our 20,s it becomes far more important to start developing meaningful long-term relationships. The 30’s is the time when your career becomes our highest priority and as we progress into your 40,s and beyond, our health and well-being and creating wealth, may be our top priority.

At any stage in our lives there are voids, which we feel, driven to fill In other words, these are areas of our lives where we seek fulfillment. The word fulfillment means filling the mind, which has noticed the void as completely as possible. In other words any void or area of your life, which you perceive as empty or incomplete, you will be driven to fill. Anything which you feel is lacking in your life will be the thing you will most want to move towards. We are constantly looking to avoid pain and discover pleasure in our lives. If the lack of money is causing a void in our lives, which is obviously causing us pain, we will be driven to satisfy the void and remove the pain or invite pleasure into our lives. Whatever we feel is missing most from our lives, is the thing we will focus our energy and resources on bringing into our experience. The meaning and fulfillment you will experience in your life is directly proportional to your ability to fill these voids.

The challenge we have when we attempt to fill these voids, is that, as we look around our environment and see people around us with different values and voids to our own. We subordinate ourselves to their voids and values and mistakenly inject their voids and values into our lives, thinking that, what is important to other people, must be important to us too. This is where the challenges really start for us. We attempt to achieve things, which are not really important to us and are not related to our highest values, but are rather what someone else has injected into our experience.

Any time you attempt to be someone you are not or you attempt to force yourself to do anything, which is in conflict with your own values, you cause a conflict between your conscious thinking mind and subconscious doing or habitual mind. When you are out of sync and there is conflict between your conscious and subconscious or should I rather say your super conscious mind, your subconscious mind will win every time.

When you are attempting to achieve something, which is out of alignment with your needs and values. It means that you have looked around your environment and because you have subordinated yourself to someone or to a group of people. You think their values are more important than your own and as such you have injected them into your experience. These incorrect, injected values, are not aligned with what your needs or real deep rooted values really are, so although you try to be inspired and driven to achieve the things you think you want, you sabotage yourself and you never get to do the things you need to do to achieve your goals.

Anything you attempt to achieve, which is not aligned with what is really important to you, will feel unnatural and extremely challenging. Any time you try to be someone, you are not or you are trying to achieve something, which your conscious mind thinks you want, but is not what you really want, will cause a conflict between, your conscious and subconscious mind.

You will wake up every day striving to achieve something you don’t really want and as you know, it is impossible to live in conflict with your real values, so you will be unable to force yourself to do things you really don’t really want to do. You will constantly procrastinate and be thinking thoughts about what you should be doing, rather than actually taking action every day. If you set goals, which are not really what you want, you will need to be motivated by some sort of external force, which will need to force you to take the action you need to take every day to succeed. You can only become the master of your destiny, if you know what you really want, by discovering your true hierarchy of needs or values.

Action idea: Invest time to discover what is really important to you by exploring and discovering your real values? What do you really want to have, do and be. Do not allow yourself to be distracted by what society says should be important to you. When you uncover your own values and you know exactly what you really want to achieve, you become unstoppable and nothing will be able to deter you from achieving your “REAL DREAMS” Stop exaggerating or minimizing your dreams because you are allowing yourself to subordinate to anyone else. Once you become clear on your values and true objectives, you are able to convert your “REAL DREAMS” into a crystal clear vision and a set of action plans, which you will want to take action on every day.

The easiest way to know if your vision and goals are aligned with your highest values is when you wake up every day excited by the prospect of what your day holds and you get to finish your day, energized by the actions you have taken. You are a really special and unique individual. When you are authentic and true to yourself, achieving your goals becomes effortless and no obstacle, no matter how big it may be, will ever be able to stop you. Find your highest values, unlock what is really important to you and you can turn the remainder of 2012 into your best year ever.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za