Your Vision

 It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default. – JK Rowling

To attain success, both financial and personal, and to live a satisfying life and fulfilling life, you first need to decide what you want in life, where you want to be, what you want to be doing, and who you want to be doing it with.

These can be some of the most difficult decisions you’re ever going to be faced with.

But you have to make them with courage, clarity and determination.

When you know what you want, have a plan to get it, and are fully committed to getting it, you’re truly standing in your power, your Sovereign energy. You’re showing the world the King or Queen within you. You’re the leader of your life. And that’s a powerful place to be. The world makes way for people like this because their energy is instantly recognisable and they know where they are heading.

Unfortunately, many people don’t know what they want in life. They have no vision of their life as they would like it to be. This is usually because they simply don’t know what they want to have, be, or do in life.

Brian Tracy on Clarity

Are You Uncertain About What You Want?

All through your childhood, from the moment you were born, your parents, your siblings, your friends, your teachers, and all the other influential adults in your life were trying, one way or another, to make you conform to what they wanted.

Any of these sound familiar?

• “Don’t touch that.”
• “Don’t do that.”
• “Leave it alone.”
• “That’s not for you.”
• “We don’t like it when you do that.”
• “Big boys don’t cry.”
• “We don’t like you when you shout.”
• “You can’t do that.”
• “Girls shouldn’t get angry.”
• “There’s no dessert unless you eat everything on your plate.”
• “You don’t need that.”
• “You don’t really want that.”
• “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
• “That was really naughty.”
• “Stop doing that and come here now!”
• “Don’t be so selfish.”
• “Always put others before yourself.”
• “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
• “Work hard, pray hard, and play hard.”
• “You have to go to Church.”
• “Our family has produced so many successful doctors / lawyers / artists / military men” (or whatever).
• And so on, and on, and on…..

These adults, hopefully for the best possible reasons, were telling you what you could and couldn’t do and what you should and shouldn’t feel. they controlled, to some degree, what you ought to do and be, where to go and what to do. This is programming that could have put your natural, confident self into shadow.

And each time you heard this kind of thing, you were taken a little further away from who you were always designed to be. And a little further away from your instinctual knowing of what you really wanted for yourself.

All these parental injunctions had a powerful effect on you. Like all kids, you saw the grown-ups around you as all-powerful, and you did what kids do – simply absorbed the information and knowledge they passed on to you about the way the world works.

All these instructions and injunctions stick with you throughout your life. That’s how we’re biologically programmed. That’s how you learned to know how you should feel, what you should do, what you should want, and what you should be. (And of course all the things you shouldn’t be or have or do…. like prosperity. Like self-belief.) 

And so, these behaviour patterns and habits, these beliefs about the world around you, will always feel like they belong to you. Truth is, though, you simply absorbed many of them from the people who raised you.

Video – parenting styles

And so, over time, you may have lost sight of what you wanted. You started to think that what mom and dad and other people around you wanted for you was what you wanted for yourself. Including, perhaps, not really wanting anything very much. And all the time you don’t know why you feel miserable, or powerless, or inadequate.

It’s because you never dug those injunctions out of shadow and reprogrammed your brain for success.

Of course, staying the same is a great way for a kid to stay safe in the world: to conform to what other people want and expect is a road to  safety. Very few children would choose their own independence and fulfilment over their family’s approval and acceptance.

This is why so many people are numb to their own hopes and desires, their own feelings, their own wishes, and their own motivations. 

I see adult life as very much a process of finding out who we were always meant to be. It’s like being in recovery from all those “shoulds”, all those “ought-tos”, all those “be-what-we-wants” and all those “you musts”.  And how do you do this? With something called shadow work.

Right now, the question is, if you had no fear, no inhibitions, and you’d not been programmed by other people, what would you truly want for yourself? Where would you want to be? What would you be doing there? And who would you be with?

At the moment, you might be in the habit of giving way to other people’s desires and wishes. You might not even know that you have your own needs, wishes and desires. You may simply not know what you want in any particular situation.

If so, the best way to begin to change this is to start thinking, feeling, believing, and behaving as if you really do know what you want.

So, for example, whenever that familiar sense of “I don’t know what I want” comes up, try asking yourself “If I did know, what would I want right now?” You’ll be surprised how liberating this simple technique is.

You can also try the well-proven technique of acting “as if”. If you don’t know what you want, behave as if you did. Make a decision and see what happens.

(You may want to try this out on the smaller things first! There’s no point trying out a decision to leave your job just to see how it feels if the result is that you end up broke and starving. Would that have been what you really wanted?)

But what you  will benefit most from is some good shadow work with a good shadow work coach. For some people this is scary: the idea of reclaiming the essential essence of who they are is challenging. Even so, to enjoy success and achievement in your own right, you must begin to take control of your life from this day forward. You must engage with the work on your shadow beliefs which WILL transform your life. You must research shadow work, shadow healing, shadow coaching, healing the shadow.