365 Ways to Live Happy (19 page)

A dream needs a powerful push to move into manifestation. You give it that power by making your dream as clear as possible in your mind, turning it into a specific goal or goals, putting the goals into a time line, and knowing what the culmination of that dream looks like. For example, you wish you could leave your indoor office job and find some kind of work in nature, possibly landscaping, or overseeing the care and security of a park. Get more specific. Working at a wildlife rescue center is quite different than that of caring for the horses at an equine therapy center. Clipping spent flowers from rose bushes at a community garden is different from enforcing the rules governing the use of a local park. St. Augustine, in the fifth century, offered the following sage advice, “Pray as if everything depended upon God and act as if everything depended upon you.” Ignatius Loyola changed the word “act” to “work.” The point is that belief, actions, and work are all necessary to push forth a dream from the idea realm into manifestation.

A sheet of poster paper or foam board will serve as a board on which you can paste images, inspirational words, goals, and dates for accomplishing goals as well as ideas of new directions to take your dream. Maybe you want to find a way to help your children's school establish a theatrical group or an arts program. Perhaps you are an artist and can guide children in making masks, costumes, stage sets, and the like. Cut pictures of those images from magazines and put them on your board. Do you know other parents or artist friends and teachers who could help you launch such a program? Write their names on your board. Check them off as you call and make your pitch. You'll soon learn that a dream doesn't have to be a solo dream; it can come about through a team working together on a commonly held vision.

Think of five factors that are absolutely vital to the success of your dream. Write them on sticky paper or note cards and place them where you can see and think about them. For example, having a dream of owning your own business might mean knowing everything you can possibly know about your product or service and the demographic of your ideal customer, having a business plan, finding enough capital, and establishing the proper price point for your product. Determining the optimum business location or having a great website will also be important. You want to start a business that succeeds. Knowing what is vital to that success will help you get those things before you launch your company.

A terrific exercise for seeing if you have figured out all the potential obstacles in your way to having your dream come true is to figure out exactly what the end result is and then plotting events backward to the beginning and the first step. Perhaps your dream is to win the lottery. Start with winning it and work backward listing the events. You play every day, spending a dollar on the Quick Pick. Even before the day you place your first bet, you choose your favorite numbers. Every day for two weeks, you walk to the convenience store in your neighborhood to play. You play at 7:00
P.M.
Then, on the fourteenth day, your numbers come up.

You have dreams and so do your friends. Choose six friends and ask them if they would be interested in having a team to support them in pursuing their dreams. Then call a meeting of everyone and have a discussion of how each of you could best serve each other as all of you deliberately go after your dreams. Will you call each other every day to talk about progress and concrete issues? Will you meet on Saturdays for bagels and coffee to discuss overcoming any obstacles that some or all of you have faced during the week? Knowing you have a close-knit network of individuals committed to help you realize your heart's desire can help you stay motivated and on course.

Maybe you have always wanted to have lots of money, not for merely having it but rather for the purpose of being able to exchange it for other things important to you. Consider purchasing a talisman or charm for wealth, abundance, and success. A talisman is simply an object intended to ward off evil and bring good luck. If you choose to make your money talisman, do so during the waxing phase of the moon. When you are ready to charge it, hold the talisman in your right hand (which you place facing up in your left hand) and charge it with your prayers, deep breathing, visualization of its purpose, and infusion of your life force energy. When not in use, keep your talisman in a silk bag near where you work or on your desk to remind you to pursue your dream.

You finally made your dream a reality. How will you celebrate to mark the occasion? Will you buy yourself that expensive piece of jewelry you've been wanting? Or, will you escape to Monte Carlo for a long weekend? Perhaps you want to do something physical like climb a mountain. Make celebration an important activity in the process of realizing your dream. You are marking a milestone and getting ready for the next part of your great adventure because a dream has a way of spawning others.

Draw your children into your conversation about your dream. Share with them your ideas about how to you plan to achieve your dream. Seek their input as well. Their ideas may strike you as silly, crazy, imaginative, inventive, or solid — you'll never know unless you chat with them about it. When you involve your children in creative brainstorming, you are teaching them how to formulate and work on their own dreams. Children's minds are ever-evolving. As they grow, their minds develop. They begin to differentiate between rational thinking and emotional thinking. By including them in your dream sharing, you help them develop healthy minds than can adapt, solve problems, and evolve further.

You love your spouse and want his dreams to be fulfilled, too. Think of several ways you could help him realize his deepest desires. Perhaps he always wanted to see a baseball game in all the National League stadiums west of the Rockies. You could suggest that next year he take a summer vacation with his best buddy and go on a baseball junket, visiting his favorite stadiums to see a game. Help him plan his junket with maps, time lines, and cost estimates. Provided your relationship is firmly rooted in trust, vacations apart can be fun and healthy. Spell out other ways you can envision supporting his dreams. Then, of course, you can talk about yours.