Life is all about creating yourself

Take a second look at the picture before you read further. Is that a male or a female protagonist? Do you see YOURSELF in it?

There are times in our life when we ask some difficult to answer questions of ourselves. Who am I? Why was I born? What am I supposed to do with my life? How can I make a success of my life? What are my value systems? What motivates me? What influence do I have on others? If you haven’t asked these questions of yourself perhaps this is the best time to ponder over them. The answers will become the blueprint for you to create yourself anew!

No matter what your age, gender, background or status in life you can still improve, grow, change and create the person you want to be. Here is how you go about it.

Think out of the box – Either due to peer pressure or a lack of self confidence, most of us have trodden the beaten path, often to our omnipresent regret. So now is the time to dust the cobwebs in the mind, crank up the shaft of imagination and get the engine of life started. You should now identify your passions, imagine varied possibilities, visualize the happiness you can embrace and try to touch the pot of gold at the end of that imaginative rainbow. To make it more meaningful channelize your imagination into broad categories. It could be categories like personal happiness, comfort and security, my indulgences, philanthropic initiatives etc or it could be simply personal goals, financial goals, professional goals, self growth goals etc.

Sketch your own blueprint – Now that you have imagined it and possibly embraced and touched your dreams figuratively, it is time you actually sketched it out literally and figuratively. This goes a little beyond writing down your goals and is not so difficult to sketch, just in case you are worried that you are no Picasso. All you need to do is take the effort of identifying specifics about your dream and you can either physically create a dream book or have it done as a PPT. The key is to get the specifics clearly visualized. E.g. Don’t say I have a dream car that I hope to own  but instead find the picture of your dream car and paste it.

Assemble the resources needed– If you have started on your dream book or the dream PPT, you have assembled the most crucial resource. If you haven’t done this, stop reading further and at least open a new PPT and call it MY Dream Outline. The key resource that actually limits our dreams from taking wings is financial security; either lack of resources or the fear of going bust. So think long and hard on how best you can cope with this uncertainty. Jot this down too for now you have begun to assemble the brick and mortar required to give concrete shape to your personal blueprint. Now that you have got the right start don’t get bogged down by self doubt, fear of failure, lack of motivation, criticism or any form of negativity from forces within or outside. E.g. If you have identified that being a Chef is your dream but your family consists entirely of engineers, once you have put pictures of dreams menus, dream kitchen, the chef coat and perhaps even your dream eatery you will reinforce your self belief.

Begin from anywhere but begin – Lethargy and self doubt often paralyze good intention. They bring about rigor mortis in the living. The most common excuse for not giving life to your good intentions is that you do not know where to begin. Ever tried pushing a stationary car? It is tough to get it moving but once it gets the initial thrust it is easy to push it. The same principle of physics applies to life too. So the stress must be on beginning. Then keep that momentum going somehow. Look at the picture above and you will notice that the protagonist is sketching the left leg even though the right feet is still undone despite the rest of the right leg being fleshed out.

Give it the finishing touch with love – Sometimes we fail to live upto our expectations and it can deflate our ego / self confidence at other times we get irritated and frustrated and occasionally we just get over with the challenge we set ourselves as an antidote to our feeling of being a failure. No matter where we are in the continuum of our pursuit, the outcome even if half done must measure up to our standards of excellence. This is possible only if we enjoy what we do and inject a healthy dose of love in to doing what we want to succeed in. e.g. list out those tasks that are terribly boring for you but inevitable.  Now visualize yourself doing an excellent job of the task and do it with that spirit. You will find a marked improvement in the end result. To give you a more tangible example have you ever gone through the process of covering your younger sibling or children’s school notebooks. After some time it is get boring, tedious and frustrating. If you simply see each neatly covered book as a a thing of beauty or if you can see the joy of the child when he/ she sees the neat pile of books your output will be fabulous.

Try this:

1. Identify 3 tasks that your mom or best friend does exceedingly well but something you haven’t ever tried. Your challenge is to attempt each of these tasks over the next 2 weeks and show improvement in each attempt.
2. Try and make a kite and try to fly it along with a group of children. (Ideally I suggest you try and make more than 1 kite so that you have one or two more spare kites just in case the first one gets cut loose or torn)
3. Write down what you would do with the following sums of money

• If you had 1 USD
• If you had 100 USD
• If you had 1000 USD
• If you had 10,000 USD
• If you had 1,00,000 USD

This post is courtesy www.actspot.com

You are also invited to visit our Inspirational and Motivational Blog

www.poweract.blogspot.com