by Jill MacGregor

So often we tuck our ambitions and dreams in a safe, little compartment, hidden from view. Such a safe place to keep our hopes and dreams—no one ever has the opportunity to squash them. I know I’ve done this–its one reason why I didn’t show anyone my writing for years.

It wasn’t because I thought I was a bad writer. I worshipped the words I wrote on a regular basis. But I was very shy about sharing my writing with anyone—even my closest friends and family. Very few people even knew I wrote. Writing was vital to me—why wouldn’t I share something so important with those who were closest to me?

The truth of it was I feared that people wouldn’t see any value in my writing. If those closest to me thought my writing was bad, that would affect how I viewed my writing—I would start to see it through their eyes as flawed—and eventually, something that was so significant to me would wither. So I just kept it to myself.

So unnecessary.

Sometimes, I think we don’t give ourselves permission to follow the important things that speak to us. We think they aren’t practical. Really? I bet I could make a long list of things we all do that are ridiculously impractical/detrimental—that hasn’t seemed to stop any of us from doing them yet. Maybe we feel we’d have to defend our practice of it. Or worse, we fear we may not receive the praise and reinforcement we’d hoped for. It would be similar to when someone asks “Did you get your hair cut?” and you respond, “Why, yes I did.” PAUSE CRICKETS PAUSE Get it? Because they have nothing nice to say about you gettin’ yer hairs did.

I allowed other’s imagined opinions to carry more weight than mine. I was cultivating a lot of fear around what others might think of my writing. It takes just as much effort to cultivate fear as it does openness—but its all about your focus.

I wrote about the difference between dreams and goals in Lucid Dreaming and I started to feel like there was more to this topic. What makes us flip the switch on our dreams and put them into motion?

One day I decided to put on my red cape, created a blog and wrote. People said nice things. They encouraged me. And with every post I began to enjoy writing and sharing it.

Here are some of the things I did that helped me get to the cape stage.

Embrace Your Ambition

Be compelled—Do a gut check. When you think about that dream of yours does your gut scream *DO IT!!* We all have moments in our life when we discover things we MUST do. I discovered this with painting and writing. If I go for awhile without painting or writing, I feel off balance. There is nothing else in my life that affects me in this way. It’s a component of who I am—the need is embedded.

Harness the Energy—is there an intense vibration that moves through your core when you think about your ambition coming to be? Use this rare commodity. Its the boost up when you can’t quite reach the next step.

Develop Your Ambition

Find a mentor—there is someone out there who is doing what you want to do and I bet they’re not hiding—find them! Read their books, their articles and blogs, reach out to them via their blog comment, twitter, email. We live in a world where it’s never been easier to have a conversation with practically anyone. Try!

Learn how others did what you want to do—you have an endless resource on the internet and there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. Learn from others mistakes as well as gleaning from their most successful moments. Take that information and let it spark new ideas.

Blog about it—blogs are all about people’s passions, whether they be niche or broad. People like to read about the thing that makes you tick in a way that may surprise and fuel you. This is a great way to share what makes you special on a larger scale.

Find a path to it—do you need some additional education to move forward? Take a class, whether it be non credit adult education or signing up for a certificate/degree course work. Do you need to get a map to begin or just find the door? It’s up to you to blaze that path.

Launch Your Ambition

Step over the threshold—there’s a thin line between talking and doing. How can you put things into motion? Maybe it involves putting your energies toward a non-profit that supports your ambition. It might involve changing jobs or going into business for yourself so that your new dream surrounds you thoroughly every day. Maybe you need to write and distribute and e-book. It may mean establishing additional contacts who have found ways to incorporate their dreams into their everyday.

Set goals and make yourself accountable—you are in charge of making this work. Set some goals that have dates attached to them to keep you honest. And here’s the kicker, tell people about your next steps because they will also help keep you honest. Do you know why? They are excited about what you’re doing. They believe in you and want to see your end product. People believe in you. Make sure you are one of them. I mean, come one…

Maintain momentum—Wow, you’ve accomplished several goals, which is fantastic—and makes this a horrible time to start coasting. My friend, this is a *rinse and repeat* scenario. Ideas beget ideas. (It’s in the Bible…) The new goal is to keep things moving forward. Why not make a list of 50 things you would like to accomplish as you put wheels on this dream of yours. Keep that document open—you’ll be surprised how it grows and how new ideas become what you are all about.

You are officially bravER—what else can you accomplish? I found that when I stopped being afraid of other’s judgements about my writing, I felt a lot freer to work on other things that had previously seemed out of my reach. Overcoming a big hurdle is empowering—use that momentum to accomplish other things!

by Jill MacGregor


We all have defunct mental treasures that we hold close, whether they are outdated or never ever served us at all. But we clutch tightly because they’re OURS, and we’ve made them such an extension of who are that we forget that they’ve ceased to function for us, if they ever did at all. Why do we cling to the useless?

Let’s burn the fields.

I wrote about *knowing when to say when* in a previous post, 10 Life Changing Lessons I Learned From Painting. I wrote, “Everything has a natural stopping point. Jobs, paintings, hobbies, relationships, our lives, the extent of our feelings, patience, energy—everything has a natural stopping point. And, that is not the same thing as giving up. It’s about observing something in a particular state.”

What ideas or beliefs have you been clinging to that have stopped serving you? A lot of times these worn out beliefs stem from a situation when we felt mistreated, unappreciated, ignored. We allow ourselves to become imprinted by these feelings and drag them through the future as if these feelings no applied to every situation. Simply because they applied to one in the past.

Rube.

Think of one of the stories you’ve created– we usually have more than one. Think of how you’ve allowed the story to leech into situations and color your perception of how you are being treated or will be treated—think of how it’s even kept you from trying.

What if, starting today, you could throw away that old, useless burden—because if it’s no longer functioning, it is simply a burden. What if today you could stop dragging around that rotting corpse–stop forcing people in your life to pay for the sins of others? What if today you could stop assigning value to the useless ideas that no longer serve you?

I believe you can. I know you are clinging to these stories as if they were important. I do it, too. When was the last time it served you—instead of you serving it? It’s like cleaning out your closet—if you can’t think of one situation when these negative thoughts ever did you some good, get rid of them because you need the space for new ideas.

Today I’m going to clean out my emotional junk drawer. I’m going to be merciless about what I get rid of. I’m going to throw away the stories that sit on my shoulder like an evil monkey and whisper, “Its not going to work” or “I can’t believe you said that” or “You will always be alone”. Drama monkey. I’m going to make room for more “I can do that” and “Just try again” and “Other people get to be right, too”. I feel like having more of those plot lines building my stories will create this endless loop of kindness and patience—some for me, some for you, some for me, some for you.

Write down 5 of your useless, go nowhere plot lines that you’ve allowed to negatively color your life. Just jot them down–they don’t need to have a lot of detail. You know them all by their nicknames.

I’ll wait.

Ask yourself, when was the last time each of them did you a service—and the last time they screwed everything up. If your old useless stories were employees, you would fire them. Create some new awareness around these stories during the next couple of weeks—what’s going on when they appear? Why do the old, tired themes become your fallback even if you realize they accomplish nothing? Just bad habits, I think, so give yourself the opportunity to establish some new patterns to take their place. Take things apart and put them back together without these stories. It will feel awkward at first. Something will feel like its missing. It will just be the crap you’ve let go of.

I believe you can do it.

Just try.

Everything you do today is the right thing.

by Jill MacGregor

I’ve been thinking a lot about goals lately, what they mean, how we reach them and how they change us.

I have to tell you this post started out differently from what you are reading. It originally was all “Do you love that goal? You better love it! Because it’s going to be really hard to accomplish and just when you think you’ve caught the golden ring, you’ll realize you’ve only just begun the long, hard voyage to reaching your goals.” Drop and give me ten.

My.

I realized the problem. I started to understand that I was seeing goal achievement as this fully manufactured trail of tears we put ourselves on to get to a place we feel we should be. Wow, fun. And another thing , whooshpttttt—that was the crack of my whip.

Oh my. Goals. Dreams. Dreams. Goals. They are different.

Should they be? Is there a need to differentiate?

Here’s my take on it. Goals have measurements attached. There’s a logical progression to their achievement.

STRIVING TO REACH HER GOAL. There’s really only one use for the word *striving*—and it’s in relation to accomplishing a hard fought and hard won achievement. Struggle implied. The path to reaching a goal can be a long one because there’s usually a process, a series of steep steps you have to take to finally reach that goal. As you encounter obstacles and find a clever way to outsmart them, you think about that goal. You’re almost there. You can smell it, like cookies in the oven, and every step puts you closer to the kitchen.

But, dreams, well, dreams live in a tender box next to our hearts. We often feel shy about our dreams as if we are undeserving— even though we would happily work 10x harder to realize our dreams than to accomplish our goals. We recognize them as fragile and translucent winged and we feel fortunate when they light on our shoulders. Dreams are fueled by want and must and I don’t know why, I just have to.

LIVING HER DREAM. It doesn’t reflect struggle—more of a choice. But I do sense an adjustment, things being left behind and others taking their place. Shedding of skin, a metamorphosis.

How many times have you reached your dream only to realize it’s not quite what you thought it would be. You spend years honing a craft, carefully bringing it into the light for public consumption and sometimes you find that the business of your dream can pinch the magic out of it.

Let’s bring our dreams out into the open and talk about them as practically as if they were goals. Achievable. Reachable. Nothing to be shy about.

We all have something that we’re striving for, big or small. Whatever it is, I bet you think about it a lot. You think about the steps required to reach it, the length of time needed, obstacles that may impede you —and if you will succeed.

So ask yourself this—do you love that thing that you think you want so badly? Whether you’re focusing on dreams, goals or a mélange of the two—you better love it. It better be the thing that makes your bomb tick because you are spending a huge amount of time, effort and energy to ensnare it. Only to see where it takes you next…

The finish line is never the end of the race.

It’s just the beginning of a new one.