4 Principles to Follow Your Dreams

“If your dreams don’t scare you, there not big enough”.

How many times have we heard it? “Follow your Dreams”. We see it played out in almost every Hollywood hit from “Peter Pan to “The pursuit of Happiness” But how often are we actually following are own dreams? And if we are not what is stopping us?

An estimated 87% of the worlds working population do not enjoy their jobs. Considering we spend almost 70% of our total week at work, makes this statistic an even greater tragedy. It really does beg the question too; why are more us not enjoying our lives and following our dreams?

One reason I believe we rarely do, what we really feel we want to do is because we are brought up with the mindset that to be successful/happy we need to follow a set pattern that society seems to expect. But the problem is, this very mindset is what prevents people from being just that! We end up denying ourselves the opportunity to follow our passions; allow creativity to flow and generate our own path to fulfilment.

Maybe your dream career is to own your own patisserie, or to become an artist, a singer, an Olympic horse rider! Whatever your dream is I’m here to tell you that a constructive mindset; how you react to your life and the things that happen to you combined with sheer perseverance, are the two core ingredients you will need to make your dreams become a reality.

Below are the 4 primary principles you will need to embody and accept if you want your career dreams to become your reality.

YOU ARE THE CAUSE OF YOUR SUCCESS

When you take 100% responsibility for your own success you become powerful. This stance is called living at cause rather than effect. When you live at effect you are at the effect of everything in your life and you allow life to control you. You take no responsibility for the situations you find yourself in and you live predominantly in your comfort zone. You feel more than justified in the story you tell yourself on why you are in your current situation and this story becomes the cycle of your life. This is a very sad place to be indeed.

The exact opposite is the place where you need to be, to really be successful, to be free and to be happy. When you are at cause you take full ownership of your life, the choices you choose and the way you react to the things that happen to you. Everything in your life becomes a choice. You begin to change your language patterns to suit this e.g. “I can’t” becomes “I choose not too”. Living at cause can be challenging and even uncomfortable at times and it is no wonder as you no longer have anyone or anything else but yourself to blame for the situations you find yourself in. BUT! It is also the only place where you will be able to grow and make your dreams your reality.

EMBRACE FAILURE

Every single person fails at something. But it is your choice to choose at what you fail at; What I really mean is, you can either choose fail at something you don’t even want to be doing, or at something you really love? The most successful entrepreneurs and leaders in the world lived through many “failures”. Look at Ghandi, look at Nelson Mandela, they experienced so many “failures” in the fight for freedom and yet they were never discouraged, they never gave up on their dreams and as a consequence their dreams prevailed.

Failure is simply a label we have attached to an event/situation that does not go the way we thought it would. Since we are living at cause, we are the ones that can choose to embrace or reject this word. I encourage you to accept the fact of failure but to relabel it as feedback. This way when you do fail and you undoubtedly will, you will begin to not see it as a real failure but rather as feedback on how you can improve next time and a lesson will have been learnt on what or what not do to. This is the exact perspective adopted by the most successful people in the world.

YOUR GREATEST STRENGTH LIES IN YOUR GREATEST FEAR

The very things we are scared of doing are the very things we should be doing, if we want our dreams to become a reality. You will never grow and move towards your goals if you stay in your comfort zone. If you want to get good at something you must take massive action towards it. If for a minute you imagine that your goal, your dream is waiting for you at the top of a sheer cliff face and the only way up is to climb. You have to ask yourself: Will you give it a go? At the bottom on the cliff stuff seems alright, you’re comfortable and you feel safe. The sheer cliff face doesn’t look particularly appealing from the very bottom and you’re not even a good climber! BUT you know you dream is up there somewhere and that inspires you to take the first step up. On the way, you scrape yourself on the rocks and the journey is not an easy one. But every time you make it to the next level you look out and the view is becoming more and more magnificent.

As you near the top, the journey is still is not getting any easier, perhaps it’s even getting harder! But as you finally pull yourself up onto the very top of the cliff face, battered and bruised, the view from the top completely takes your breath away. There may still be more steps to conquer and cliffs to climb to get to where you want to be next. But you know now that life lived from the top of the cliff is far superior to life at the bottom and you are amazed at how much strength and skill you have gained on the journey up, and thus every second of pain was worth it.

VISUALISE AND IT WILL BECOME

This idea is as old at time and is an ancient wisdom that some of the most successful and happy people in the world have been using to improve their levels for centuries. If you don’t already know about this it is called the Law of Attraction and it works on the principle that if you can see it in your mind you can hold it in your hand. But not without working towards it at the same time! In order to really make use of this you need to practice, practice, practice. Firstly, you need to imagine the thing that you want, then you need to visualise everyday how it would feel when you actually have that thing. Embody all the feeling that you will have when you actually achieve you desired goal. You can use vision boards, reminders, whatever works for you. Start small if you like and remember to put a time frame into the equation too. Notice the opportunities that start coming your way and always accept them and follow your intuition.

Adopting these four principles of success will change how you feel on an everyday basis and will also, over time, change the course of your life for the good. There really are no limits to the success you can have and it really is never too late to purpose your passion and live your life to the fullest.