Setting Goals

By now, you’ve locked on to your wish; you’re taking the appropriate action; you’re managing your progress; and you’re ready to persist in your efforts until you make your wish come true.

But there may yet be forces at work inside you that can make it difficult or even impossible for you to succeed. These are called wish destroyers because left unmanaged that is exactly what they will do.

Fear

The first wish killer is fear. Fear is a negative wish. The more you focus on what you fear, the more likely you are to make it happen.

The human mind does not distinguish between a mental picture of something you want and a mental picture of something you are trying to avoid. The more clearly you picture what you want, the harder your mind will work to give it to you. The more clearly you picture what you’re trying to avoid, the harder your mind will work to give you that instead. Whatever you consistently picture on the inside, your mind will do its best to reproduce on the outside. Unless you want to make your fears come true, think of something else.

When you’re afraid, the movie you’re running in your mind is likely to be a gut-wrenching feature presentation of what you fear. You react to that movie the same way you react to a good horror movie - with sweaty palms, a churning stomach, and a racing heart. Change the movie, and you change your reaction.

For example, what would you do if you found yourself watching an unpleasant show on TV? You would change the channel. Right? You can do exactly the same thing when you find yourself watching an unpleasant show in your mind: you can change the channel and watch something else.

When you’re afraid of something, you’re picturing what can go wrong. If you want to change the channel, picture what can go right. Instead of picturing the worst thing that can happen, picture the best thing that can happen. Instead of picturing the pain, picture the gain. Instead of picturing what you have to lose, picture what you have to win.

When you change the movie you’re watching in your mind, you change your emotional reaction to it. You turn your fear into excitement, your dread into anticipation, your avoidance into action. You can accomplish all of this simply by changing your mental pictures.

Thinking like a victim

Another wish killer is to think like a victim. As Webster’s defines it, a victim is “someone harmed by or suffering from some act, condition, or circumstance.”

Do you know anyone who doesn’t fit that description? We are all victimized by something - crime, poverty, discrimination, a handicap, a broken home, a lousy boss, or fly-away hair. But the only real victim is the person who thinks like one.

Life is like a self-service gas station. You can sit in your car and honk, or you can fill the tank yourself. No one honks longer, louder, or with less effect than a victim.

It’s easy to think like a victim. For one thing, it feels good. It lets you off the hook. When you’re not responsible for what happens to you, you can’t be expected to do anything about it. When the cards are stacked against you, you have no choice but to fold, so you never have to face the pressure of playing to win. And you never lack for something to do. You can fill every idle moment with the bittersweet memories of your misfortunes. And unfortunately, you can never fulfill a wish.

When you think like a victim, you turn yourself from a cause into an effect. Nothing will kill a wish faster than that. When you blame the world, you lose your power to change it. In the name of what you can’t fix, you sacrifice the things you can fix.

It’s not what happens to you that matters in life, it’s what you choose to do about it. We are all victims of forces beyond our control. The people who get what they want from life focus on the forces they can control. They choose to live as a cause instead of as an effect.

If you want to be a cause in your own life, don’t think like an effect. Instead of worrying about the cards you’ve been dealt, play them. Instead of asking, “Why me?” ask, What am I going to do about it? Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, refuse to settle for less than what you want.

The world owes you only what you are willing to collect. The best way to collect is to make your wishes come true and achieve your goals.