Goals for the New Year: A Strategy to Succeed Pt. 1

Here we are in another new year, 2016. The start of a new year is often seen as an opportunity to make some important changes or to somehow find motivation to work towards our important personal goals. Each one of us is different in so many ways and we  are not all motivated by the same factors, nor are we all working towards the same direction. But as human beings we are also very much the same, and we all (most of us anyways) struggle with different aspects of our behavior and as Alan Watts said, “We all object to ourselves in various ways.” Whether your goal is to lose weight or to stop smoking or to meditate or practice yoga, or any of the other major changes that people seek to make, it becomes so much more realistic and achievable if we have a well-defined and concrete strategy. So often, we are our own worst enemy when it comes to reaching our goals. The unobserved mind can run rampant and interfere with our efforts, even though we aren’t always aware of our own tendencies to self-sabotage and hold ourselves back. Defining a personal strategy and staying true to that strategy can often be the key to success.

There is an ancient saying from the far East that says, “Between heaven and earth lies man and woman”. Let me explain this a bit. The first important point is that the unknown author of this quote did not mean heaven in a religious sense. In this case the term heaven is just used to imply all the intangible aspects of existence, mainly our thoughts and goals. These things are very real, but they are what we call “unmanifested”. All of our thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams, they are all just floating around in our minds, or in space, or as the author chose to call it “the heavens”. In the same sense, “earth” in this quote means all the tangible and manifested aspects of our existence. So to say that “Between heaven and earth lies man and woman” is a way of saying that humans are  a bridge between thoughts and reality. We as humans have an amazing and unlimited ability to take our thoughts and our goals and transform them into something real. We have the almost magical potential to grasp something from deep inside and bring it forth onto the earth. We all have this innate potential, not just some of us, and not just those of us who somehow make it look easy. We all have the power to manifest our goals, we just have to find ways to stop defeating ourselves and interfering with our own success. In the next few weekly articles we will discuss some specific keys to creating a personal strategy for you to reach your goals and to make 2016 a year of success that you can continue to build on throughout your lifetime.

 

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