Are You Ready to Get Exactly What You Want?

Are you ready to get exactly what you want? Like so many I’ve asked before you, I hear you emphatically responding, “Yes!”

Great! It’s yours! But…what is it, exactly? And if you actually got it, what price would you have to pay?

You don’t have to pay any price. Your dreams are ready and waiting for you to bring them to life. But shifting gears to focus on the creation of our dreams sometimes feels like a lot of work, and much of it not destined to produce results. It often seems that if we would only work harder on the current realities before us, we would get what we want through sheer focus of will.

We’re so determined, in fact, to keep our nose to the grindstone that we often don’t define in detail what it is that we want instead. We don’t allow ourselves to get crystal clear about our desires because it makes us feel selfish, or it seems pie in the sky, and who has time to daydream when there’s so much to do?

First, you might consider the value of daydreaming in creating new and different results in your life. A more technical term for daydreaming is visualization, and visualization is a mind preparation tool that athletes, artists and other professionals use to create the future results they want. When we continually focus on that which is versus that which might be, we should not be surprised that our options seem limited, that there’s no hope for change, and we lumber along the well-worn path of each day from beginning to end like a cart horse with blinders on.

One good reason for giving yourself permission to spend time visualizing your desired future is that its an excellent antidote to what I call Fuzzy Future Syndrome, or FFS. Here are some ways you can tell if you’re suffering from this dream-stealing malady.

The core symptom of FFS is that you’re not really sure what you want. You might be able to specify some generalities, such as more wealth, or more time for yourself, or being in a love relationship, but the details escape you. When you view your future in this limited way, it’s like looking through a pair of binoculars without adjusting the focus.

Allowing ourselves to stay in this quasi-state of knowing/not knowing what we want creates a sense of yearning and frustration because we’re not where we intend to be, and yet lets us off the hook because we’re also not quite sure where we intend to be.

When we get crystal clear on what we want to create in our lives, when we craft a detailed vision of our dreamed of future, we set a concrete destination that we can then begin to move toward. We find that our vision begins to impress itself on the “real” world around us. New opportunities that we hadn’t seen before will arise from the ether as if by magic. Possibilities we hadn’t thought of suddenly occur to us. This newfound focus allows our brains to sort the world in a different way, and the steps to bringing the vision to life appear before us. We get tuned in and aligned with our vision.

And yet, we still avoid getting clear. That’s because achieving clarity about what we want causes a problem: tension. Once we’ve established a clear destination we can easily identify the potentially vast differences between where we are now and where we intend to be, and it feels uncomfortable. It might even bring up feelings of failure.

Those feelings activate the critical voice within each of us. It reminds us that if we were, in fact, capable of bringing this vision to life, wouldn’t we have done it already? And if we don’t achieve our dreams, what does that say about us? These are conclusions that we don’t want to make about ourselves. For some, the feelings are more about fear of success. We’re afraid of the hard work that success will bring, or the obligations, never realizing that we are already working hard and are already obligated right now to some things that we no longer want in our lives. Taking the risk of giving up the known for the not-yet-known is scary, no matter how appealing it might be.

When we begin the journey toward our dreams, we draw charts and plans, load supplies, and set sail, determined to reach our destination by nightfall. Days later, exhausted, we realize that we’ve forgotten to draw up the anchor of our fears, and it’s dragging along the bottom of the ocean, impeding us.

Here’s where being ready to get what you want comes in. Here are some pointers:

• Get crystal clear about what you want, in as much detail as you can. Write your vision down, and modify it as often as necessary to make it even more compelling.
• Take some time every day to visualize one or more aspects of your dream in as much detail as you can. Even five minutes is valuable.
• Tell others about what you intend to create. The more people that know about your dream, the more support you will receive in bringing your dream to life.
• Recognize that the feelings of discomfort that strike you when you start to get clear about what you want mean that you are on the threshold of a new universe, one you will create. Embrace those feelings.
• Practice the emotions now that you would like to have in your dreamed of future, such as happiness. Then, when you get what you want, you’ll be ready to be happy about it.

Try out some of these tips. Allow yourself to intimately know what you want, and then watch it come true in the world.

Based on the book The Science of Making Things Happen. Copyright  2010 by Kim Marcille Romaner. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. http://www.newworldlibrary.com or 800/972-6657 ext. 52.