To me the secret to living a wonderful life, filled with joyous experience and happiness, lies in knowing what you want. For some people this is extremely challenging and just to contemplate it causes them a headache. I’m pretty sure that this is normal.

The easiest way to tackle this is to begin to practice. Start simple with a small scrap of paper with 3 or 4 things on it that you want. It doesn’t have to be major things, anything will do. The most important thing is to have a list! Now the first thing that can happen here is that as you sit down to write your list your mind delivers a stream of useless advice - such as, “You don’t really want that”, “What do you want that for?” or “Don’t be stupid!” Most people crumple under the pressure and don’t bother. Here’s that old saying - “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”

So, make a decision that inspite of the negative doubts and self-critical thoughts, you are going to compile this list; even if they do seem silly or you feel stupid doing it.

Done that? Really? Do it now.

Ok, so now you have your list of things - we’re going to call this Life’s Shopping List. First things first, these are going to be things that you want and most of the time (but not always) they involve some kind of financial commitment. Make a promise to yourself that you are going to use money you have earned and not money you have borrowed from a bank, credit card or from money you would use to pay your bills. If this is not possible for you then get some financial help and sort out your money first.

Now, select one of these things as a goal - it’s best if it’s likely to take you about 2 or 3 months to complete or save for. Next - set a plan. Are there things you need to do in order to make it happen? List them down. How much money do you have to put aside in order to make it happen? Where are you going to save the money?

Lastly - the fun part! Working towards your goal and then the celebration. Find someone to be accountable to, if it helps you. Your family or friends are usually the best people to start with; or of course you can hire a Life Coach. You can do simple things like stick a photo of your goal on the fridge to keep you motivated towards it.

If you need to, you can review the goal as you are working towards it and if necessary adjust the timings accordingly. If you’ve selected something simple as your first goal, then hopefully this will not be necessary and you’ll soon be celebrating your achievement.

Once you’ve done it once, it’s a simple matter of rinse and repeat. You certainly don’t have to restrict yourself to one goal at a time - it’s likely that you’ll have many on the go at once, some short-term, some longer-term plans. A great idea is to get yourself a dream book and begin to fill it with things that you’d like to be, do or have. Some categories to help you think: Home, Physical, Service, Family, Spiritual, Relationships, Work, Money, Personal.

I like to have one goal per page of my book and then I can make notes and stick in photos and other things as I’m moving towards them. It’s wonderful to sit every day for a few minutes and review your achievements and progress and maybe add a few more things that you’d like.

For those of you for whom thinking of things that you want is difficult, as you practice you’ll find it gets easier as you start to achieve little things.

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Technorati Tags: accountable, achievement, Action Plan, celebration, dreams, goal, Goals, happiness, Life Coaching, money, wonderful life

I read a lovely blog post the other day that can be found here and asked the author a question about what age we can be considered responsible for our own thinking and actions. I received a great and comprehensive reply which you can read in the post comments, but I really wanted to share a few thoughts now about this idea of being responsible.

As we grow from being small children, we receive gifts of wisdom, knowledge, beliefs and much more from our parents and carers. As we evolve into adults, we carry on our beliefs (and a few that we’ve made ourselves in response to our experiences and situations) and some of these do not serve us very well. At some point, hopefully, we become conscious of these beliefs (or limiting beliefs) and we are able to make changes to change these into positive beliefs that can help us.

However, what if we don’t become conscious of these beliefs, can we be held responsible or accountable for something that we created as children when we are unable to do anything about it? In America, there was a case where a man got his prison sentence changed from murder to manslaughter because his lawyers claimed that he had been eating Twinkies (a high-sugar food) and therefore couldn’t be held responsible for his actions. This became known as the Twinkie Defence (the loophole was quickly closed in US Law) - you can read about that here. Obviously I’m not talking about Murder here - but for everyday stuff, are we responsible for things that we are doing unconsciously?

Maybe our responsibility is in educating others that such a thing may be happening to them unconsciously and to be vigilant to our own actions . If they appear to be out of line with who we are, such as being angry for no apparent reason, then it’s possible that we’ve reacted unconsciously and there is an opportunity to become conscious and act differently another time.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this - it’s one that I’ve pondered over for a long time now!

Technorati Tags: accountability, accountable, conscious, Defence, knowledge, Law, reaction, responsibility, responsible, Twinkies, unconscious, wisdom