Are you romancing your dream or making it happen?

“If there’s one thing my life has shown me, it is that dreams do come true, but first you have to find your dream and believe in it completely. That’s when you and your dream become one and cannot be separated by anything or anyone.”- Sachin Tendulkar in his autobiography, Chase your Dreams. Beautiful isn’t it. All magical and musical to the ears.

In his autobiography Wings of Fire, Dr Abdul Kalam Azad says – Each individual creature on this beautiful planet is created by God to fulfil a particular role. Whatever I have achieved in life is through His divine help and an expression of His will.

In today’s world, we are overloaded by gyaan. It’s everywhere. Even your parents post inspirational quotes about pursuing dreams. You wonder are they the same parents who made you drop music and take computer science. The HR organizes motivational talks. However, neither your parents or the HR expects you to drop everything and pursue dreams.

Sometimes, you do get inspired. In the restricted environment you have what do you do? Buy an SUV and take a road trip in the hills. Spend on laptop and some fancy software to become a writer. All in the name of chasing an elusive dream.

You are romanticizing a dream. Romance is good. But love is eternal and not romance. It’s always the true love that creates the most enticing stories. The pure absolute feeling of love, that’s what makes it ecstatic and immortal. This love could be for an individual or an idea or a sport or a skill. You can be in love with anything under the sun or beyond the sun.

A soldier crazily in love with his nation becomes a hero of the war. He creates the most moving story of courage and valiance.

A young 11-year-old boy madly in love with his cricket bat grows up to become the ‘God of Cricket.’

Henry Ford’s love for automobiles and the crazy idea that car should be an affordable commodity for the common man and not rich man’s toy made him a pioneer of mass production in the automobile industry.

Be it Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln or Henry Ford or Sachin Tendulkar or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, to me they are no different than Romeo and Juliet or Liala-Majhnu.

Look closely these are all great love stories, stories of passion, action and follow through until either the desired outcome is achieved, or death do us apart.

We love reading about them, discussing and watching these awakening stories in books, movies and want to change our lives and live a significant one.

Anthony Robbins, in his book Awaken the Giant Within, says- “We all have dreams… We all want to believe deep down in our souls that we have a special gift, that we can make a difference, that we can touch others in a special way, and that we can make the world a better place.”

At one time in our lives, we all had a vision for the quality of life that we desire and deserve. Yet, for many of us, those dreams have become so shrouded in the frustrations and routines of daily life that we no longer even make an effort to accomplish them. For far too many, the dream has dissipated—and with it, so has the will to shape our destinies. Many have lost that sense of certainty that creates the winner’s edge.”

In fact you have romanticised the idea of living that life so much that now living it has become the dream. You keep thinking to yourself: How do I get there? Your desire to expand has brought you to this course. It is the invisible hand that guided you. I know that no matter where you are in your life, you want more! No matter how well you’re already doing or how challenged you now may be, deep inside of you there lies a belief that your experience of life can and will be much greater than it already is. You are destined for your own unique form of greatness, whether it is as an outstanding professional, teacher, businessperson, mother, or father. Let me congratulate you that rather than complaining about lack of resources, government restrictions and policies, inadequate education, lack of support for job creation, market mismatch, or good old corruption, you are here taking your destiny by its horns and ready to steer it where you want it to go.

Buckle up!!

  1. Defining Point A in Life

“OMG! It’s 8:30 AM. Again!!! Kumar jumped out of the bed, took a 2-minute shower, hurriedly brushed his teeth and was shouting out at Divya and searching for his socks. He was cursing between his teeth, ‘Shit shit.’ He gathered his keys, valet, spectacles, bag, laptop, phone, wires and planner and was about to rush out of the door which his wife blocked with a big stare holding his breakfast plate in her one hand and lunch box in the other. Kumar – ‘Oh! No I don’t have time for breakfast. I am late’

Divya – Don’t you dare skip your breakfast and BP medicine again.

He rolled and gulped his praantha while she tucked all his gear inside his bag. He snatched his bag and yelled back, ‘I don’t need to carry lunch today as we have a presentation and the lunch is at the venue. Sorry forgot to tell you.’

Someone had parked their car just behind his, blocking his car completely. Fuming at the car he called out the security guard. It took him another 6 minutes to finally get rolling on the road. He was cursing himself for getting carried away with the Facebook videos the previous night. One after the other good interesting videos kept popping up and he could not resist. After all they were all by Goalcast and were very inspiring and motivating, totally related to increasing efficiency at work.

Today the roads seemed to jammed with traffic and he kept honking horn on the road and cussing at every passer-by. Got stared at for entering the conference room last. His boss was already at the dais showing the slides from the presentation made by Kumar. Since he was late, his boss took over. The rest of the day Kumar spent trying to catch up and clear his image, and sulk, deciding never to repeat this. He took this decision almost every day.

Earlier the same day at home, at 7:00 am Ananya, Kumar’s daughter, was shouting and in the verge of crying. “Mom, I am gonna be late again today.” She took a rushed shower and was about to slip out of the house with books and bag and comb in hand. She was thinking to self – I haven’t finished my maths homework and I’ll be kicked out of the class. Divya stopped her midway to the gate and shoved down breakfast her throat and sneaked a tiffin in her bag. Ananya ran out of the gate and got on her bicycle and rushed to school. Got kicked out of the class for not finishing the homework. She was saying to self – it’s not that I didn’t want to, I just got carried away the previous day- watching web series- social media.

It’s not just school or office, ever since Kumar grew up, he was always behind schedule. Late at professional and social commitments. Lots of pending work, running behind the deadlines, late at filing returns and procrastination for no reason. Always busy but nothing really gets done. Fake smiles on social media, no real friends to talk to. Career doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Like Kumar do you feel you make too much effort but don’t get enough results. Never have enough money.

Hi guys….. after all that talk about the legends and big dreams this was quiet a reality check. Sorry if the video was too harsh or straightforward. Well, you may or may not relate to Kumar or Ananya or Divya.

What we discussed in the beginning was the destination – the end point where you want to reach and this animation as an endeavor to define the current place in life. What you are about to embark is a journey.

This journey is akin to any physical journey. Before booking a flight or train ticket you have to clearly state your ‘From and To’ city/ station. If you only know the destination but do not define the start point, you cannot book a ticket. The distance decides the fare and duration. The distance also decides the mode of transportation. For a distance of up to 5 km you may choose to walk, for up to 10 km you may cycle, within 100-300 km you can drive a car, but if the distance is huge then train or plane are a better choice.

Furthermore, what matters is the urgency to reach the destination. How soon you want decides which vehicle to board. Let’s say you want to go from Chandigarh to Delhi. The distance is only 250 km. All modes of transport ply between the two cities. If you want going for vacations, then you will prefer to drive the car and stop at all the popular places on the way, however, if you are a student going for an examination train is a better option. You can study on the way. If you are going for a job interview or an important business deal flight would be the ideal option.

Likewise, this too is a journey that has a point A – your current position in life (from where you board) and point B – where you want to be. Point B is also relative to the time span, it could be defined as 2 years from today, 5 years down the road, a decade later and how I would like to retire.

Whatever you do today, wherever you are in life with respect to your education, profession, finances, career, relationship or spiritual aspects of life is a resultant of a multiple factors. The country you were born in, your parents, community, school, college, teachers, environment, exposure, friends, association conscious and unconscious choices and experiences of the world have contributed and shaped ‘YOU’. You are a sum total of your prejudices, likes, dislikes, preferences, fears and phobias, choices and orientation, attitude and behavior.

Then there is Point B, the person you want to become, the lifestyle, social status, bank balance you want to achieve. Your goals, aspirations, desires.

This course cannot change or transform you. Nobody can, least of all any motivational talk. If that was possible, then you would not be here, the change would have happened thanks to all the exposure we have to social media and transformational challenges. There are a lot of 21 days transformation challenges floating on the social media. I have worked with various individuals in the last one decade: top management guys, mid management, behind the desk, salespeople, students, housewives, professionals and students and many more. My observation is 21 days cannot transform what has taken years to develop.

Conversely, what you will definitely get from this course is a clear understanding of what needs to be done to reach the final destination. This course will give you a road map and by the end you will identify the right areas that you need to work on. Everything does not need to change, but somethings do. Here we will give you simple techniques and activities that will help you.

A book unread will not help you, similarly techniques not applied will not work. You have taken this course but without applying the techniques this course will be just an inspirational movie.

Define you point B in life. Sit by yourself and think and feel what do you really want in life. What truly matters to you? Define each aspect of your life clearly- in as many words as possible. This is the actual investment that you will do in yourself. Till day you have spent days trying to be a good son/ daughter, a good student, a good sibling, a good employ, friend, spouse, citizen, father/ mother. You have been true to every relation in your life so far. Now is the time to be true to one’s own self. What do you want? What is it that you truly want? Now there are 2 ways to do this activity. One is give a top of the mind answer that is fascinating you for a long time or the other is to go deep within and seek the real answers. Is your current life any way close to the animated video we saw?

Is this flowchart your dreams and goals of life? There is nothing wrong with this. If you see, the above named idols: Sachin Tendulkar, Henry Ford, Richard Branson were doing the same, just the time lines were different and so were the magnitude of results.

When was the last time you looked into the mirror and asked yourself what do I really want?

Last one decade has passed and many of you have been dreaming big and aspiring, now is the time to take the first step by clearly defining what you genuinely want to achieve? Starts by knowing and being aware of where are you headed.

Activity 1:

Pick up your journal and delineate the five pillars of your life:

  1. Career: What do you want to achieve professionally? Am I looking at vertical growth or lateral long term security? What do I want? Career is the growth you make professionally in terms of designations and CTC if you an employee. For self-employed or businessman professional growth would mean the revenue, the net – profit, number of branches, work force and all.
  2. Finances: how much corpus do I want to create? My aspiration bank balance-(put a number). The assets you want to create. List everything here. Finances are the investments or holdings that you have that may create passive income and give you financial security and financial freedom.
  3. Family: your relationship with spouse, kids, parents, siblings, friends. The lifestyle you want to have, institutes you want to send to your kids to, vacations and travel plans. All that you want to do for your family list it here.
  4. Physical Fitness and health: what kind of fitness levels you want to achieve. List all the health and fitness plans here. This often is the most neglected aspect, but one that has an impact on the rest. Physical health means stamina and sharpness.
  5. Spiritual or community goals: We all want to give back and contribute to the society. This is not only in terms of the financial contribution. Spending time and adding value personally is essential. What are your goals in this regard. List them here.

For all the things that you have listed, ask yourself

  • Why do you want this?
  • Is it really important?
  • What happens when you achieve this?
  • How does it impact and change your current life?
  • What happens when you do not achieve this? Imagine if Sachin Tendulkar or Bill Gates or any of your role model had not achieved, what they did, what kind of life would they be leading today? What kind of people would they be?
  • What difference will it make in your existing life if you do not achieve this?
  • What does not happen when you achieve these dreams?
  • What does not happen when you do not achieve these dreams?

As you think deeply and dwell over these questions you will have profound realisations. The definite answers will evolve over time, but it is important to get started. You may create a ‘Find your Flame’ journal or make a folder on your laptop and start writing.

Defining and writing your aspirations is the simplest thing you can do on the path to realise your Big Life Goals. If this seems difficult then trust me taking action making required changes will be herculean for you.

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