Are you happy with your life?
If you were to answer that question, I imagine that you could list at least a few aspects of your life with which you are happy, or at least satisfied. But, think a little deeper and consider things in your life you would change if you could.
Are you trying to lose weight? Are you trying to start a business? Are you trying to buy a house?
Having goals we are trying to achieve is one of the basic fundamentals of being a living human being. No matter how minute the goal is, most if not all people have at least a few objectives they want to accomplish in life. Let me tell you about one of mine and how I accomplished it.
Early in my college years, when I was still more about partying than hitting the books, I had a particularly rough semester academically. I was on financial aid via student loans at the time, and my academic performance was such that one of my student loans became jeopardized. Up until this happened I was always of the mindset that I would go to college, do my required studying and would make it through without issue. Staring at the real prospect of losing my ability to continue paying for and attending college was quite the eye opener.
I realized at that time that if I was going to make it through college and graduate, I needed to get serious immediately. I needed to set my goal of graduating firmly in mind and focus on that goal.
To help me in my goal of staying in college and proceeding forward towards my degree, I used a system that is over 600 years old. The Japanese use a form of this system, which in their culture is called the Daruma doll. The system is simple:
1) Determine the goal you want to achieve for yourself. This one was easy for me in this case. I wanted to get myself back on the right foot academically and progress on towards graduating.
2) Use an object with a face that has empty circles for the eyes.
3) Once you have determined your goal, color in one of the eyes of your object. I decided to shoot for getting myself on track semester by semester, so my goal was to turn around my GPA by the following semester.
4) Work on your goal with all your available energy. You can look back on your Daruma object with the one colored eye to think about the goal you have set for yourself. I increased my study time, cut back on my social and drinking time, and focused on school.
5) Once you have achieved your goal, color in the other eye.
Using what I described here, I went from being on borderline academic probation to making the Dean's List the very next semester!
I would like you to consider using this powerful approach to achieve whatever goal or goals you might have. While you certainly need to put forth a concerted effort towards any goal you set, you need to have a focused reminder of your goal that you can refer to at all times until that goal is achieved.
http://www.neworleansmagic.com/neworleansmagic_004.htm has a tool you can use like I did for your personal goal setting.
1 comment:
As a student of the Sufi path what I have learned is that fear is behind all troubles that we have as humans. Young people are particularly prone to this for several reasons. The young are still trying to make sense of what happened to them during their childhood, particularly with reference to parental relationships. This divided focus splits the available IQ between the two challenges. It also unbalemces the emotional stability. Anger, fear, jelousy and other negative qualities can cause us to sideline our priorities. Then there is fear of failure, fear of success, fear of not being accepted as an equal, fear of ridicule, fear of being alone, fear of fear and probably a few other types of fear had I the time to remember them all. We are motivated by fear. We desire an ideal but fear the possibility of falling short of it, and falling short of expectations. We are surounded by fear and yet, all the while, all these fears are imagined fears. They are not real. Just the same as the dolls eye is not real. You put it there and in completing your goal you put the other eye there also. To fear is what your unconcious mind wants you to do because it cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. Whatever is in "there" may be a complete distortion of several prior events that keep coming out in countless combinations and if you compare these possibilities with musical notes they are aways completely out of tune. The plot is always the same, dear lady but we convince ourselves that they are unique because of the circumstances of our lives. The clue to laying these fears to rest is to learn to go through the pain. Trust me, on the other side of that painful line one finds peace.
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