Free your mind of barriers to cherished goals and excel

Focus on your goals and take action to start living the life you want. FILE 

By Seraphine Ruligirwa-Kamara

In Summary

• Take decisive and productive steps to attract desired and fruitful results.

We are that time of year again when we reflect on our achievements and mentally list what more we could have done, how much more we could have achieved and how much greater we could have become.

If you can look back to January 2013 without any regrets about what more ‘shoulda coulda woulda’ been, kindly turn overleaf; this article is not for you.

Still here? Thank you for your company. Now I want you to lift your paper off the table. Rest your back properly on your chair and cross your legs at your knees, not at the ankles.

I want you confident and comfortable because I’m dissecting your mind and closing it up again in about six minutes. You already know that wanting something and getting it are as different as night from day. You also know that everybody wants yet not everybody gets.

We all set our goals, targets and resolutions every end of year. We start the year with good oomph, charged after all the festivities. But I suggest that is merely the holiday high still lingering in the air when we resume our various activities.

As the year wears on, we slide into a go-slow on our planned productive activities and progress to avoiding them. Before the second quarter is gone, we hardly remember setting exciting milestones, let alone what they were.

When we delay taking decisive productive action, we delay attracting our desired outcomes and the joyous triumph that comes with them; we just grow older without the respectable reward of wisdom.

By the time we start avoiding our goals, we usually have convinced ourselves that they were too ambitious to begin with. It begins to feel as if this is not the year for us.

And we have enough reasons why that it is — we blame the economy, the elections, the money market, negative media, ethnicity, gender, age, the government, floods...

Whenever we attempt to accomplish something beyond our paradigms, our minds immediately create reasons justifying why it is unachievable.

“Unachievable” and “impossible” then start energised drumbeats in our minds, their rhythm rising to a well-voiced staccato: “Im-po-ssi-ble!” And that’s when we ditch our dream-labelled ambitions altogether.

Our lives originate from our minds. When we believe something can be done, our minds automatically begin creating the ideas that pave the paths towards its accomplishment.

Our advancement, therefore, lies in the belief that we are capable. As long as we remain set in our thoughts that we cannot achieve an outcome, there is little we can do to change the undesired outcomes to desired ones.

Proper use of our mind and its various faculties will give us anything we choose. The emphasis here is on “proper use”. This requires study and focused consistent effort, with a generous sprinkle of a colourful imagination.

An image in our mind is the first stage of the creative process shaping our career progression, money, success, inner peace, relationships and so on.