- From Rocks to Roses: Make Your Dream Come True
- Networking with a Purpose: Plan Ahead
- One Hint for Stress Management
- The 7 Elements of Making an Effective Request
- Noticing and Overcoming the 4 Obstacles to Manifesting Your Dreams
Four obstacles to fulfilling your personal calling or life purpose
According to Paulo Coelho in the book The Alchemist
Adapted and elaborated upon by Leadership Coach, Jeanine Cogan, Ph.D.
- It’s buried. We bury our personal calling after a lifetime of being told that what we want is impossible, we can’t have it, or is otherwise impractical. We need the courage to reconnect with and rediscover our dreams and life purpose. Begin pealing back the layers of shoulds, can’ts and have to’s to allow your true passion to emerge. A way to being in this process is to remember what really excited you when you were young. Did you spend time taking things apart and figuring out how to put them back together? Did you spend hours playing teacher with your friends loving the chalk board, and lesson book? Did you spend endless weeks concocting formulas and almost blowing up your fort in the backyard for a science project? Explore what your passions were as a child to help you tap into what you buried.
- Love. We know our calling in life but are worried that pursuing it will hurt others in some way. We may have a fear of surpassing our father’s success, or letting down the expectations of our mothers, or hurting someone else that matters to us in our lives. The antidote to this obstacle is to deepen your understanding of how love can be an impetus toward pursing your dreams. Those who genuinely want you to be happy will support you on your journey – even if you are "marching to the beat of your own drum”.
How can the people you love support you in manifesting your calling?- Do a freewrite on this question and see what emerges.
- Also make a list of those you care about and for each person answer the following questions:
- What are the stories I tell myself about how this person will react to my success?
- Is this story true?
- Give evidence that this story is true. What is the counter-evidence (thus the story is not true)?
- When has this person supported me to be successful?
- If I were to ask this person to support me – what would I ask of them?
- Based on your answers start asking those you love to support you towards realizing your dreams.
- Fear of defeat. It may seem less painful to not pursue your dream than to pursue it and fail. When we go for our dream with 100% effort and fail we cannot attribute our failure to not really trying – and so that is an enormous threat. Yet defeat, setbacks and challenges are part of any journey – so we need to be prepared to bounce back and be resilient when we face defeat. As Paulo says "The secret of life is to fall 7 times and get up 8 times.” In fact, overcoming defeats builds confidence and is greatly satisfying. A journey with obstacles makes the reward so much more satisfying. Also obstacles can serve as a test for us – do we really want to achieve this life goal?
- Fear of success. The 4th obstacle is the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought our whole lives. "The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt.” We compare ourselves to others and since they failed at their dreams we think it is unfair to fulfill ours. We forget about all the blood, sweat and tears we endured; all the hurdles we had to jump in order to get to this place. A lot of people who are within inches of their personal calling – where they can practically touch it, taste it, and feel it – then make a number of foolish mistakes and never reach their goal. This can be the most seductive obstacle because it has a martyr like quality – renouncing joy and the need for success.
Marianne Williamson captures this fear of success with conviction, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous talented and fabulous? Actually who are you not to be?”
Exercise: Moving Forward with the End Result as Your Inspiration
Step into your own magnificence by living in this moment as if you already reached your dream. Imagine you are at your end goal.
- Be your success! Do a freewrite every day for a week describing what it is like to have manifested your dream. Describe in detail your life now, how it feels, the joys and triumphs. Keep the success of having reached the end point in your being as you go through each day. Enjoy the success!
- Create your list of action steps. What did it take for you to get there? Write those answers down. They are now your action steps. The action steps can be big and small.
- Take daily actions. Do one action from your above list daily towards realizing this goal. Live from this vision and your certainty that you will manifest it.
- Succeed with experienced support. Hire Jeanine as your coach to create an action plan and be held accountable in completing that plan and manifesting your dream.