You have a dream. Maybe you want to scale Mt Everest, move to another country to earn money for your future, start your own business or even go back into the working world after spending a few years taking care of the kids.
Why aren’t you doing it? What’s holding you back?
Listen, a dream is a vision in our mind. Creative dreaming without action is a far-fetched realization to achieve goal.
Typical examples are the great wonders of the world, those landmarks that typify or define the greatness of nations. Landmarks like the Statue of Liberty of the United States of America, the Big Ben of England, the Taj Mahal of India, the Great Wall of China, and numerous more. Imagine if no one did anything about these great ideas, these dreams, will we ever have them to be enjoyed by people from every nation on earth? What kind of achievement will each nation have if great thinkers just sit on their ideas and never acted on it. Absolutely nothing. We would probably be facing each other blankly wondering why and what went wrong?
Probably you’d say: “Oh… well… we still have the natural wonders like Niagara Falls, Mt. Fuji, beautiful coral reefs everywhere on earth.”. Yes… but God created them. God did not create man in His own image if He thinks we won’t be using our creativity and put it into action. He might as well take it away from us. He expects us to take action and do something about it. So what’s keeping us from taking action and make our ideas materialize? We can name a few. Fear of failure is what stops most people from achieving their goals. Fear of being ridiculed, fear of sinking further to a depressed state than we presently are, fear of totally losing all we’ve got if we don’t succeed, fear of taking risks. We all have to take risk at one time or another. Risk may come to us in a variety of reasons, big or small. There are risks we can do without, but there are risks that leave us no choice but to take action and do something about it.
As you can see, risks come in many forms. For comparison purposes, let us consider two: risk similar to winning or losing when we gamble and risk in pursuit of a goal.
The risk involved in gambling is for non-thinkers. This is tantamount to luck risk, not good judgment risk. Risk of this kind has no room in goal realization. It is like ignoring safety on the road, just for kicks, come what may, short-lived, to satisfy a craving.
However, risk in pursuit of a goal has a definite lasting purpose, a purpose that will bring untold benefits once you achieve your personal goal. It is a risk worth taking for thinkers, not for happy-go-lucky non-thinkers. Risk in pursuit of a goal will bring stability and security in life, ultimately leading to happiness.
Whenever fear grips us, think positively. Look at it this way. Will we ever get anywhere if we don’t take the risk to act on our dreams? Will we be satisfied about not taking action now, five, ten, or twenty years from now? You may have noticed that there is one common factor that is holding us back from acting on our dreams, that thing called fear. Fear is the biggest stumbling block to acting on a creative dream that it practically holds everything still. So it is vital that we eliminate fear in our feelings to pave the way to our goal.
To overcome this fear, we have to face fear on the face, eye to eye, mano y mano. Let us take a very familiar example, say you have a fear of public speaking. I guess a majority of us do. The worst thing that can happen is you will get tongue-tied and spoil your entire speech in spite of having memorized the entire thing. You become the laughing stock of the audience. Don’t let it prevent you from speaking in public the next time around because if you do, fear has won over you and you will be cowering in this kind of fear for the rest of your life. To win over fear, draw lessons from your failure and capitalize on it the next time around. Don’t stop till you have successfully made a good speech. Once you do, you have actually turned the table around. This time, it is fear that fears you.
Another example with a somewhat different twist, say you are a lifeguard and you failed to save a drowning person who apparently should have been saved. Now this is a big failure because a life was at stake here. In spite of this, don’t give up being a lifeguard just because of one mistake. Think about the other lives you have saved before and will be saving if you continue to do so. Say you were able to save someone in an otherwise hopeless situation, doesn’t this offset or overcome the previous failure that happened?
The idea here is to give your best. Once you give your best, it just doesn’t get any better because it is already the best.
When you act on your dreams, think of your actions in a positive way. What you think is what will happen. What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve. Believe that the likely outcome of a thing that we do depends a lot on our mindset. Our actions take form from our thoughts and the result that we get is determined by our mind as well. If we think it will fail, it will. If we think it will succeed, it will. Mental thinking or attitude is the master of the actions we undertake. When your mental attitude has been focused on a particular direction for a long time, it is more difficult to change direction. If your mind is set on negative thoughts, the more difficult it will be to change to positive thoughts if you do not act on it immediately. However, if your mind is already programmed to think positive thoughts, it will remain steadfast on this attitude as time goes by. Defeat is the only outcome if your thoughts are in this direction. You may say: “I told you so” that an action has failed because you think it will, just to satisfy yourself when in fact, you are just looking for an excuse or easy way out. The end result is still a failure and what does that make you, a failure. You are just fooling yourself.
On the other hand, success is imminent when your thoughts say it will. Even if it fails the first time, you will learn from your failure and then try again. You will ultimately succeed as you gain more experience. Keep on trying and persevering. There should be no let up and when success is at hand, you would have defeated defeat.
Here’s another nugget of thought. When you go all out and risk everything, there is nothing left to risk. When that happens, there can only be success. Don’t give up your dreams without even fighting for them just because the risks are too great.
The greater the risk, the bigger the reward and success is sweeter. Either way, whether you achieve your dream or not, the experience will make you a better person.
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