YOU ONLY NEED TO SEE THE NEXT STEP

Attempt to logically work out how to get from the point you are at now - to where you desire to be, and you miss out on all the fun!
Rationally second-guessing the whole road to our destination is an utterly self-defeating exercise. Knowing where we want to arrive clearly matters a lot – the wonderful unpredictability of whatever will unfold before us getting there and recognising these opportunities through using our intuition is for sure the ridiculously exciting bit!
My first business venture for myself was a wholesale company selling to the alternative gift industry across the UK, some other areas of Europe and Canada. What became apparent over the course of running the business for a while is no trade magazine for our industry existed. With my background in publishing I said YES to creating just such a magazine to help gift shops find myself and fellow wholesalers. Producing and editing the magazine put me in touch with several exiting new trade contacts, which helped my wholesale business to thrive even more. Eventually as the internet started to become most gift shops primary resource, I stopped producing the magazine, but didn’t take the obvious step of going online with it. I believe we need to follow our passions, running an online directory failed to ignite much interest in me. What did happen as a result of my time spent running my own publishing house, alongside the wholesale business, is it placed me in direct touch with countless high-level media contacts. When I eventually turned full time with writing and life coaching there I already had a ready-placed arena to raise my profile (usually for free) and this quickly grabbed the attention of the very people I might help.
Did I plan all of this our beforehand? How could I foresee when I started my wholesale company that I would end up writing articles for magazines all across the world to help so many people change their lives for the better?
I have the habit of simply saying YES if it feels right, this has taken me far and it will do the same for YOU as well!
This is what led to me running a lucrative car-washing business at fourteen years old. A neighbour suffered from a migraine, with her dirty car parked on the driveway and me taking pity on her discomfort I offered to wash it for her. This resulted in half the rest of the neighbourhood relying upon my services to keep their vehicles clean each week. Again, had I planned this beforehand? Nope, I was only being neighbourly to help someone out; and yet found myself quite happy to say YES to all the other neighbours who liked the job I had done, and all the extra cash proved pretty handy as well!
Having a clear concept of where we are heading is vital, our inner vision of how our life looks in terms of when we get there needs to be treasured.
What also needs to be treasured are those opportunities which for sure will come our way on the journey. You or I never need to know before how every single step will play-out on the way, we do need to be flexible enough to adapt and just be ready to say YES when the time for action arrives. As it always does.
One more seriously bizarre example from my own life we briefly visited a little earlier in Alive to Thrive when we talked about comfort traps, also perfectly illustrates how saying YES to a totally leftfield offer can take us somewhere we would have surely never even contemplated before!
I had written poetry for years and enjoyed going to listen to hear performance poets live. Having taken myself off to see a local poetry collective do their thing I admit it did cross my mind it seemed quite fun to be up there sharing poetic tales. Talking to the organiser after to congratulate him on the awesome show, I found I already knew him through his having attended one of my life coaching events. He asked if I might like to perform at his next poetry event in a few weeks and I instantly replied YES.
Performing poetry opened a whole new area of creativity for me, leading to going on a few solo UK tours as a poet; and some outrageously unprecedented exposure through taking part in many radio interviews and tv appearances to talk poetry. Which led to me being offered and saying YES to my own arts radio show. Which moved on to now having my own in-house recording studio to produce my syndicated Beyond Poetry Radio Show, growing to be heard via multiple community radio stations by over a quarter million listeners around the world each week. The other beauty about having a recording studio is I can also produce my own audio books, be those coaching centred or indeed poetry. My audio books allow me to practically reach millions of people worldwide, many of whom would never otherwise have the chance to hear some of the essence of what I impart during one of my seminars.
Did I plan any of this beforehand? Absolutely not!!! I have always been ready for the chance to say YES and see where it might take me though.
It never ceases to astound me how one door opening before us and saying YES, can take us off on the most fascinating and outrageously wonderful journey we might never have imagined in our wildest dreams.
And you or I would miss out on all of this if we rigidly stuck to the way we had planned it all out before.
We need to be open to opportunities and flexible enough to take necessary action when we spot them. Learning to trust in our intuition, rather than attempting to logically pre-plan, is one of the most vital skills needed to live on our terms and most of all, have some fun along the way!

DO PLAN THIS THOUGH
It can be all too easy to find reasons to talk ourselves out of the life we deserve. Planning for sure does come in useful here in terms of getting started and keeping up the momentum.
So, what does your ideal lifestyle look like? What did you identify as your perfect career choice? Think it might be impossible to get there? Think again!
• Does it require qualifications you don’t already have? You won’t have the time to study? Take evening classes at a local College or University, if that is not practical opt to enrol for an online qualification that need only take a few hours a week out of your time. You might have to re-arrange your schedule to fit all the study in, in all honesty so what? I am sure you will agree it is worth the effort when for all the long-term brilliance it will bring to your life.
• Is experience needed? Ask if it is possible to observe or work in a voluntary unpaid capacity part-time in to gain experience. A friend of mine did this at a whole-food café and gained a wealth of experience in the functioning of such a type of business. Now he is well on his way to starting his own similar enterprise in another town.
It is possible to come up with a thousand and one excuses to not make that first move. You know what? The time is never right if you think it isn’t! The perfect time to start is always right now…you don’t need anything but the self-discipline and desire to keep on keeping on.
I promise you that when you do take some action and start to see the progress you are making to get to where you ought to be, the feeling is incomparable.
Take that first step now. Remember you really don’t need to know where the next step is, it will become crystal clear where and when the time has arrived to move things forward on to that second and then third step.