Post Covid: What’s Your New Normal?
“What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated, —
Begin it, and the work will be completed!”
Goethe, “Faust”
As we move into a Post Covid World, post crisis at least, we all have the opportunity to decide what our new normal is. What we do and don't want in our lives. Who we want in our lives. How we want to spend our time, money and thus LIFE. We must do this consciously, deliberately and decisively. That doesn’t mean everything changes in an instant. It can, but it doesn’t have to.
What’s Your Vision of Your Ideal Life?
Before we have the remotest chance of pursing our ideal lives, our dreams, our purpose and passions we must clarify our vision of our ideal life. This was difficult for me for many years because everything in my upbringing taught me it was selfish to pursue my dreams. That my dreams were dumb and impractical. If you hear this enough long enough you start to say it to yourself and that is what I did for many years. Decades in fact. Even now as I pursue my dreams the words of John Lennon resonate with me from his song “Watching the Wheels” as people “give me all kinds of advice, to save me from ruin”, but like John, I’m happy watching the wheels go round and round.
In my book AfterLIFE, Waking up from My American Dream, I explained my journey to discovering or more accurately Rediscovering, my dreams. For too many years I pursued what I thought I was supposed to. The American Dream of materialism that consumed every ounce of my energy, all my time, and all my money to the point where the things I REALLY wanted to do were constantly on the one day, someday in the future list. It took a dark night of the soul to wake me up and help me get the help I needed to trust and love myself enough to live on purpose.
Around the same time I was going through this dark period, I took part in an entrepreneurial coaching program several years ago to help me with my financial planning practice. The program is called Strategic Coach. I learned many transformational lessons in that program and one of them that really stuck with me is something the founder Dan Sullivan said. I don’t remember the exact quote but the gist of it was that most people over estimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 5. The importance of having a big dream. A big vision of who we want to be and what we want our lives to look like is the first vital step.
One of the exercise we did was to pick the year and day we would live to. The we were asked to write down all the things we had done, achieved, and experienced by then. We then worked backwards to 10 years from now. 5 years from now. 3 years. 1 Year. 1 Quarter. 30 days. 7 days, today.
Creating this vision, then backing the steps down to achieving it all the way to today helped me create a laser focus on my actions that launched me into a decade of growth that has profoundly impacted my life. I’ve used those tools again during covid to define the direction of the next decade of my life. That along with the steps I took in my book that help me learn to trust myself and love myself enough to say yes to my dreams.
Take Goethe’s Advice, Be Bold, Dream it, Begin it! Whatever IT is to you!
What do You want in your life?
What do you want your New Normal to be?
How do you want to spend your time, money, and LIFE?
Get a notebook or open a new document and dedicate time to this vision every day. Keep writing, dreaming and clarifying want you want and then TAKE ACTION!
We we move in the direction of our dreams opportunities open that we couldn’t see before we said Yes to our dreams. In my book I told the story of how saying yes to taking my kid on a vacation to Germany and Austria took me to the edge of some Roman ruins, which took me to Italy, to learning Italian, and even becoming an Italian citizen! Visualize what you want, write it down and take action. Get every book you can on goal setting. Read about the lives of those who inspire you and take lesson from their lives. Talk to people who have done what you want to do and ask for suggestions. Find a support group of people who will help cheer you on. Don’t share your goals with negative people who will kill your dreams because they are afraid to pursue their own.
Life is short. We’re coming out of our Grand Timeout and we have the opportunity for a hard reset. Will you take it? I hope you do!
For tons of examples of people living on purpose, please check out my podcast It’s the Journey.
To learn about the steps I took to learn to trust myself enough to say yes to my dreams check out my book AfterLIFE, Waking up from my American Dream anywhere you can order books! I’m very proud to have just been awarded the 2021 best Personal Growth Book from The National Indie Excellence Awards!