Making Dreams Happen and Reaching your Goals

‘A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.’
J R R Tolkien.

I wrote about dreams and why they’re important in a previous post, but how do you put them into action and achieve them?

To start with you need dreams – as Tolkien said one dream is more powerful than anything real, but to harness that power you need to do something to make those dreams reality, so you can grow and dream loftier and higher desires. 

I began life as a contemplative dreamer…a quiet, shy child with an imagination that spanned so many ideas. It took until I was thirty to turn those gossamer dreams into concrete goals, but I did, and now I’m working hard to keep those dreams-turned-goals alive!

There is a difference between gossamer dreams and concrete goals.

Putting something in writing or into action changes the aspect of a dream into something solid.

Choose to put your dreams into action, choose to make them happen.

Printable found at: LDS Printables

Sometimes circumstance prevent us from achieving, but sometimes we are the ones who put obstacles in our way. My favourite barrier to achieving my dream is procrastination and I’m very good at it! We need to know how important our dreams are to us, and we need to prioritise to be sure they remain important. So often we say how much we want something to happen, but we make no effort to achieve it. How often do we want to be slimmer, but don’t want to put in the work to lose weight or alter our eating/exercise patterns? Do you ever say how much you wish you could visit (insert dream location)…but fail to plan or save, or make an effort to go there?

Merlin’s Hill from our house and looking back from Merlin’s Hill…

We sometimes sabotage our own dreams by failing to realise that we actually could accomplish them.

I wanted to walk up to Merlin’s Hill, which is a flat topped hill we can see from our bedroom window, but without deciding to do it and walk the six miles there and back, it would have just remained the view from our bedroom window. Simply taking a two hour walk helped us to achieve something we wanted to do.

Reaching our goals is the result of a choice and a decision to recognise and to work towards making something happen in our lives.

The stages of achieving are thus:

1. Recognise your dream, the thing you desire.
2. Write it down, it’s been proven that putting something on paper makes it more concrete and more likely that you will do something about it.
3. Make a plan. Save for that holiday, outline that novel, change your diet…
4. Decide to do it and don’t give up until you reach that star.

Quote found at familyshare.com

Will Self said on writing: “Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.”

Just three minutes…I can attest to that – so write it down!

Dreams have meant so much to me that my first book ended up with the tag line ‘It’s those silly dreams that keep us alive’. We need dreams to inspire us and we need to turn some of them into reality to make us grow. Goals are a way of growing and achieving, and we have those airy fairy dreams to give us hope and inspiration, but we need to do something to actually make them happen!

Live Your Dreams…

What dreams do you have and what are doing to achieve them?