The more aware of what we want, where we are stuck, and what we need to move ahead, the better chance we have of making it happen. ...

Make sure that your goal holds passion for you and is in line with your value and priorities. If there is no real energy around what you want to achieve, it is going to be difficult to keep your momentum going forward. ...

Have I chosen the most direct route to reach my destination? Looking at where and how you want to be at the end of your journey, are you working in the best area?

Remember: Creating a clear road map for yourself will help ensure a greater degree of success in achieving your goals.

Self-talk is no mystery

Arguably, there's never been a better time to be a woman. In this day and age, in this culture, a woman has unprecedented opportunities to chart a course according to her own lights. 

But along with the abundant possibilities comes the need to make abundant choices, many of them tough ones.

More than ever before, defining what it means to be fulfilled as a woman, living the life you want to be living, is a personal challenge, one that you must meet on your own terms. 

We've written this book to help you meet that challenge. Rather than listening to myths, men, mother, the media, and other influences that are all too ready to tell you what you should want, we will encourage you to trust yourself, ask some good questions, and begin to reason and act your way toward the answers that are true for you.

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking used when we created them," wrote Albert Einstein, who also said that if he were given one hour in which to deal with a difficult situation (we are, of course, paraphrasing here), he would spend the first fifty-five minutes asking himself the questions that defined the issue; once that was accomplished, he'd solve the problem in the remaining five minutes.

Self-talk is no mystery. It's actually something you do all the time, for it is the internal conversation that points you in one direction or another, toward this choice or that one. 

It is a force you can take charge of and harness -- but only when you know who's doing the talking. Are you actually following others' voices, thinking they are your own? How do you know? And what do you do about it?

The self-talk you will go through in the following chapters is the process by which you learn to better understand what you really want, how you really feel, and what may be the consequences of particular actions.

Despite my deep outrage at the unfairness of it all, the simple reality was that I was paralyzed.

I thought it would be selfish and unfair to my wife and three children to remain alive because of the care I would need. 

But it was my wife, Dana, whose words gave me the courage and the motivation to live, when she knelt by my bedside and said, "You're still you, and I love you."

Those words sent both of us on a journey we could not have imagined. But that's the way it so often is with change in our lives. 

In Remarkable Changes, Jane Seymour talks about how one decision can create a cascade of challenges in our lives that require us to work harder and try more diligently than we ever thought we could.

How do we find the will for such tests? I'm often reminded of the adage, "Fake it until you make it." Sometimes it seems that setting a goal and taking the first small steps toward it are all you need to really get rolling toward significant change. 

Just doing that can help us find the inner resources to actually make a change we need.

I, like Jane [Seymour], believe that we all have a choice in how we live our lives every minute of the day. 

Even though I'm paralyzed and in a wheelchair. I still have freedom of choice. I'm still making the decisions that govern my life and I'm as much in charge of me as I would be if I were on my feet.

What happens to many people who are fully functional physically is that they become paralyzed in an emotional or psychological sense. 

Perhaps they have low self-esteem, are still influenced by their upbringing, or failed too often to be willing to try again. But just as surely as we can allow ourselves to become paralyzed within, we can also choose to set ourselves free.

Since we live in a culture that says more is better, we derive our sense of importance and status from the quantity of stuff we have.

Consequently, the human motivation setting is on the wrong setting of "more." That's a formula for personal, social, political, and environmental disaster. 

We've increased our power to consume but find that all it's producing is more stuff to worry about. It's time to go back to enough -- that pleasurable state of having everything you want but nothing in excess.

..
..
"The Creative Voice is infinitely more powerful 
than the Critical Voice."

This statement is often hard for artists and other creatives to absorb, especially if their Critic has been in the lead, either consciously or unconsciously. 

But our intuitive center is always urging us toward healthy new risk, like a lighthouse beacon calling us to reach our creative potential. 

Many of us must listen more clearly to our Creative Voice, truly listen.

Then we must trust it enough to act upon it. If we do act, our journeys will begin to unfold organically. 

We will grow closer to who we are, who we are meant to be, in closer alignment with our potential.

There are all sorts of reasons why dreams get delegated to the bottom of the heap. Part of the problem is that many people have too little sense of their priorities.

In fact, they've given no thought to priorities at all. If something is on their To Do List, it has the same importance as anything else on the list, but petty chores do not deserve the same attention as a major dream. It's up to each of us to identify our true priorities and then align ourselves with the highest and best on our list.

I've always loved this thought from Annie Dillard: 

"Thomas Merton wrote, 'There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.'

"There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus."

Other people erroneously think that the present moment is insignificant. I talked to a man last spring who had started a project that could have helped many people live better lives. 

Unfortunately, he was promoting it badly and it was going nowhere. He defended his failure by saying, "It will all unfold in its own time."

Nonsense. 

Dreams need people to champion them and act on their behalf. This wait and see attitude ignores another essential truth: dreams come with an expiration date.

If we don't do something about them, they either wither or take up residence elsewhere. ///

"Behave your way to success," urges Dr. Phil McGraw. 

It's sound advice. If there's a dream that's dying because of your procrastination, perfectionism or lack of focus, create new habits that counteract those failure traits.

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Dreams come in all shapes and sizes. Maybe it's opening a restaurant, having a family, finishing school, being a musician, a doctor, a pilot...even the crazy dream of being an actress! 

Believe me, that's a scary thing to announce when you're a young mother living in Portland, Oregon. 

I was surrounded by "practical" people who laid every possible guilt trip on me. So I didn't rock the boat for a very long time. I settled.

But I felt like I was dying inside a little more every day. Can you relate? Finally one day a notice for my ten year high school reunion came in the mail, and a question asked, "Have you achieved what you thought you would ten years ago?" 

It hit me like a ton of bricks that I was only living everybody else's idea of who I should be. And I was spurred into action.

In fact, everybody said "You're crazy, you're way too old to ever make it!"

But you know what, I'd be the same age I am now anyway, even if I'd never tried it. 

I'm glad I didn't listen to them! Yes, it's been a struggle to achieve success in this crazy business I'm in, and there have been heartaches and poor times, believe me. 

But I have so loved my life and my journey! I get paid to do what I absolutely love to do! Isn't that unbelievable?!!! I still pinch myself. And giggle. ~ ~ ~

Without Milton Katselas, my dreams would have never come true. His book, "Dreams Into Action.." is the most inspiring book I’ve ever read. Go get it. I pull it out a few times a year to get myself back on track.

We go on and live our lives with these subtle, and sometimes not so subtle messages running in the background.

Many of us live our whole lives listening to the messages with the loudest and most persistent voices, and often these voices can be the ones that represent fear and limitation. ...

Here are 4 questions to discover if your life is being shaped by thoughts and feelings that limit your wholeness and expression of who you truly are.

Are your thoughts often fearful and based in the need to survive?
Do you sometimes feel unfulfilled and unsatisfied?
Do you often say to yourself or others "that's just the way I am"?
Do you eventually default back to limiting thinking even when things are going well?