“The great secret of getting what you want from life is to know what you want and believe you can have it.” – Norman Vincent Peale
Success is a journey, not a destination, and the journey towards achieving your true potential in life begins with your decision to succeed. Continuing your journey then takes commitment and dedicated effort, both of which require motivation.
Success may have costs attached and you may have to make sacrifices, but it’s always going to be easier to do something you want to do, rather than something you have to do or feel you should do. A Texan oil billionaire once said: “There are three secrets to success. First, individuals have to decide exactly what it is they want from a certain situation – not roughly or vaguely, but specifically. Then they have to work out what costs or sacrifices would be needed to get these things. Finally, they have to be prepared to pay those costs and make those sacrifices.”
Of course, you don’t need to be a billionaire to be a success, and you don’t need to be motivated by money, but you do need to know what success means to you in your life.
Just saying the word want adds power to any statement you make about your future success. Want is a word that means business. When you know what you want, you’re already taking a mental step towards getting what you want – your journey is underway. For example, “I want to get my pilot’s licence” is much more powerful than, “I think I might look into getting my pilot’s licence one day.” Whether or not you actually achieve that particular want is immaterial, things change, but the fact remains that you’re moving. To get anywhere in life, you need to move.
“Not getting what you want either means you don’t want it enough, or you have been dealing too long with the price you have to pay.” – Rudyard Kipling
Many of us grow up wanting to be just like our parents or other family members we admire, and we may even dream of living the life of a storybook character. As we get a little older, aspirations may switch to bigger things as we begin to discover a whole new world of possibilities beyond childhood experiences, but the same “nothing is impossible” attitude remains. As youngsters, we just imagine ourselves being whoever we want to be living whatever life we want – we don’t get bogged down with trivial thoughts of practicalities or even reality. Allow yourself to revisit that childhood mindset and ask yourself, who do you really want to be and what life do you really want to live? Once you know what you want, you know what you need to do to get it.
“Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.” – Jules Renard
Don MacNaughton is a High-Performance Coach and has worked tirelessly to help clients achieve success in the world of sport and business over the past 15 years. The next, highly popular, NLP Diploma and Life Coaching Certificate course starts in April 2019. Click here for more information or to sign up.