When you start think­ing about what you want your life to become it should feel great. Sure no life is ever per­fect or with­out its down­sides, but it should excite you to think about what it will be like when you are liv­ing it. But some­times it doesn’t. Some­times you think about your dream life and while you get excit­ed there is also the echo of a heavy feel­ing in you stomach.

DON’T PANIC! This is nor­mal. For starters change freaks us out, we are human after all. (Well I am assum­ing that if you are read­ing this you are human. If not come show me the stars.) The sec­ond rea­son is that there may be hid­den con­cerns about what it will be like when we get our dream life that we don’t real­ly want to look at very close­ly. We tend to want to believe that if we just make the right choic­es or get the right life every­thing will be per­fect. Yeah right.
For me the first step was fig­ur­ing out what was both­er­ing me in the first place. So more ques­tions for our­selves. Yay what fun, (feel the sar­casm.) But I’ve made a Man­i­fes­ta­tion Blocks Work­sheet you can print out and use.

1) What chal­lenges will hav­ing this dream bring to my life? 

It’s like­ly you’ve already thought about how awe­some your dream life will be oth­er­wise why would you even want it. The tricky part comes when you start think­ing about the down­sides. The obvi­ous draw­backs will come pret­ty quick­ly, but her I want you to real­ly dig. For instance I want to live a nomadic life on a sail­boat. Cruis­ing around the Caribbean or just float­ing off Key West for a while. The list of pros is obvi­ous and numer­ous. Great weath­er, trav­el, incred­i­ble scenery, I could go on and on. The down­sides are also numer­ous. Tiny liv­ing space, a home that con­stant­ly moves even when the water is chop­py, a wet and like­ly leaky home. When you need to do repairs, which on a boat is often you are work­ing in a small space and can’t get away from the mess. Believe me I could go on and on. When I made this list I dug down for every sin­gle tiny con I could come up with, and it was a very long list.

For me just mak­ing the list helped, it caused me to look at what I want­ed and fig­ure out if I thought the free­dom would be worth the down­sides. Obvi­ous­ly I decid­ed “Yes, it is worth it.” If you know what the down­sides are you can pre­pare for them and (hope­ful­ly) not find your­self liv­ing your dream life say­ing “This isn’t what I thought it would be like.”  I have an aunt who is always say­ing that “The one thing I’ve learned is that noth­ing is ever like I pic­tured it.” That is always going to be true since we can’t know every aspect of a life we haven’t lived. But by stop­ping to real­ly think it through we can min­i­mize the surprises.

2) Who will be affect­ed by my decision? 

This is anoth­er one that seems easy at first, but is real­ly more involved that it seems. Lets say your dream is to run your own busi­ness. Your spouse and kids will be affect­ed because your day to day life will change as well as your finan­cial sit­u­a­tion. Your boss will have to replace you at your cur­rent place of employ­ment. The cowork­er you car­pool with, as well as your oth­er cowork­ers will also be affect­ed. They will be hap­py for you, jeal­ous that you are chang­ing your life, sad that they aren’t the ones mak­ing changes. The same goes for your friends, you may have less time to spend with them too.

This list sur­prised me. I had expect­ed the pre­vi­ous list to be long, because no life is with­out its flaws, but when I real­ly sat down and thought about all the peo­ple who would be affect­ed by my choic­es, (even in a tiny way,) I real­ized that our choic­es have a far wider reach than I first thought.
Again once you make the list it pulls the neg­a­tives out of the dark and brings them in to the light where you can accept them. Or find a way around the things you can’t accept. Hope­ful­ly this helps and you will be able to think about your dream life (warts and all,) with pos­i­tive emo­tions. Let me know if this exer­cise is as help­ful to you as it was for me.

3) What do I need to change in my life to make this happen?

Every­thing worth hav­ing takes work and sac­ri­fice. Think­ing about the changes we need to make in our life now to make some­thing hap­pen can be dif­fi­cult too. We (or at least I) can push back and ignore the next log­i­cal steps if it is some­thing that is going to com­pli­cate my life or make me uncom­fort­able. For instance I have put off doing extra work because it means that I would have less time to help with the wolves and that would lead to me hav­ing peo­ple com­ing at me from mul­ti­ple direc­tions telling me that I wan’t help­ing enough any­more. Or at least that is what I expect­ed. Now I would love to say that I toughed up and did it any­way, but we have more help mov­ing in to help with the wolves. That frees me up quite a bit.

It could be a mat­ter of get­ting up a cou­ple of hours ear­li­er, or stay­ing up a lit­tle lat­er to work. Or of get­ting a neigh­bor­hood teenag­er or your spouse to ride herd on the kids for a cou­ple of hours so you can get stuff done.  This is a place to think about the prac­ti­cal changes, big and small, that you can make. And find a way to work around your resistance.

4)What emo­tion­al needs are dri­ving this dream?

Okay this one is kind of a bum­mer and maybe not real­ly nec­es­sary. But we don’t actu­al­ly want things, we want things that make us feel a cer­tain way. There may be an eas­i­er way to get what we want. For me I know that a lot of my desires can be met while still liv­ing up here, and just find­ing a way to change my lifestyle. But while that is a pos­si­bil­i­ty it wasn’t one I real­ly want­ed to explore. Still I did and ulti­mate­ly decid­ed that while it may be an option I wish to explore in the future the big thing that I crave right now is free­dom. The free­dom to just pick up and go, and the abil­i­ty to trav­el with­out hav­ing to leave my ani­mals behind. That is the one thing that I couldn’t have while liv­ing up here.

I believe that fore­warned is fore­armed and that by being aware of our hid­den resis­tances we can bypass prob­lems that we might face on our jour­ney to our dream life. Of course that just means we will find oth­er prob­lems, but hey what is life with­out a few chal­lenges right.