Are you in awe of people who start their own business, look after orphan elephants in India, or cycle around China? These people are no different in many ways from you or me. What they have learnt to is to manage their anxiety, be willing to learn and make mistakes, and be able to ground themselves to deal with the present.
Dreaming big is great but staying in the present is the only way to get there.
As I have travelled through the journey of writing and publishing my book, I have had to use grounding techniques many times to manage the stress of a huge learning curve. Self help is a vital skill for anyone wanting to embark on making their dream idea into a reality.
There have been many points in my trip when I felt the tasks would never get done. I had to engage in my own self help many times when stressful hurdles made the end seem impossible. Ironically, I had to test drive my own book’s ideas in order to get my book to the point where it is now in print and ebook versions.
One of the features of big dreams is that they have ebbs and flows and trying to rush often leads to making mistakes. There are many times I could have made better decisions but got too focused on finishing a specific task rather than savouring the journey. Becoming a self published author means learning a lot of information and gaining skills I didn’t know I would need. It is important to celebrate small achievements if the dream is complex. If I focused constantly on what I still had to get done, anxiety and self doubt could easily take over.
We humans are all the same in essence. We all have the capacity, energy, power and creativity to imagine big things. We also each have a mind that can plant seeds of self-doubt and make us shrink our world to reduce stress and avoid risk. But some anxiety and stress is inevitable if you want to achieve something beyond your current comfort zone. Everyone has their self-limiting thoughts and fears of failure. When we try something new it is natural to be anxious. This anxiety can create nervous energy and pull you forward or hold you back from having a go.
Being able to use self help strategies like grounding has allowed me to actually get to a place I never would have thought possible. Managing yourself and taking rest, as well as rewarding yourself for small successes, is vital to making a dream come true. It really is not magic. It is persistence and managing yourself in daily life that gets results.
In case you thought I was feeling smug, let me tell you that I have not even really begun to turn my book into a viable business. That is the next challenge and will require a whole new skill set and more anxious times that I will need to manage in order to bring the dream to its full potential.
DREAM, PLAN & DO – DISCOVER YOUR POTENTIAL TO SURPRISE YOURSELF!
A sight of Mt Everest to inspire you to think large
