can you be financially free?

Can you remember when you were a kid and you played make-believe? I remember playing doctors and nurses, cowboys and Indians, schoolteacher, champion horse-rider, airplane pilot, expert car driver, potter, chef, hitch-hiker, ambulance driver, and the list goes on. Anything that I wanted to be was always possible. In fact, anything that I wanted to have, and anything that I wanted to do was also possible, even "when I grow up".

And then, I really did start to grow up and I began to think like "the adults"... now things weren’t quite so easy and there were all kinds of reasons why I couldn’t do what I would really love to do. Obstacles were easy to identify, but not so the path to take me to my dream. I became an excellent student at school, picking up knowledge came easily to me, and regurgitating what I had learnt in just the right way to achieve outstanding results at school, but I forgot how to think outside of the box and I forgot how to think creatively and I forgot how to appreciate and welcome uncertainty and risk-taking.

So when I took the decision to leave the comfort and security of full-time permanent employment to pursue my life-long dream of working for myself and running my own business, I had to unlearn old ways of thinking and re-learn how to think like children do, where nothing is ever impossible and there is always a way if you want it badly enough.

I had to learn new ways to dream... at first it was difficult; I was so hemmed in by my own thoughts of what could or could not be achieved that I couldn’t come up with much in my dream (yet, ask a six-year old what they want and they write umpteen pages!). I had to find a vision of my future that is so compelling and exciting that it would take me through the challenges that I face because I know that my dream is achievable and that I can make it come true. Yet, I also had to learn how to be detached.

I had to learn to look at risk-taking as an adventure, to appreciate the fun there can be in the learning-curve, and to not take myself so seriously all the time. I had to learn that life is fun and to ditch those beliefs that were holding me back, and to realise that no-one was stopping me from my dream except for ... me, myself, I.

Piece by piece, the jigsaw of my dream has been coming together and elements which were once a dream or a vision are now reality. There is yet more to go, and I can see it all happening in time. And for the first time in my life, I have also learned to truly relax and enjoy the journey.

I want for you to be able to dream and for you to make your dream come true. Will you decide to start remembering how to "play" make-believe? So you can know what it is that you want. And then, when will you decide to start making your dream come true?

Action Points

1. Start collecting data and information on how you would like your life to be. What don’t you want? And what do you want?

2. Keep playing with those ideas, honing them and refining them to make them fully yours.

3. Identify why you may think that you can’t have (elements of) your dream be reality.

4. Decide how you can change your thinking around those seeming obstacles.

5. Are there any steps you could take to get yourself one step closer to your dream and have fun with it? Then just do it!

6. Get a copy of my book, "ABC's For Grown-Ups" from Amazon, and learn how to be happier and more successful by being more child-like.

Quote

"Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is Nought. " - George Eliot [Note. Sidereal time: Measured or determined by means of the apparent daily motion of the stars]

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. " - Henry David Thoreau

"I have heard it said that the first ingredient of success - the earliest spark in the dreaming youth - is this: dream a great dream." - John Alan Appleman

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