Mike Monaghan, Director of Auto Motivate, a motivational consultancy for the automotive industry, discusses how we see a new year as an opportunity to reflect and plan ahead, but to reach our goals, we should consider the journey we take rather than its destination.
There is always something special about the end of each year and the beginning of a new one. We naturally use this time to reflect and to use our powers of imagination to get excited and make our plans for the year ahead.
This is where too many make a fundamental mistake! The mind is a wonderfully powerful tool, capable of many things. However, it can play cruel tricks on us if we do not fully understand its power and use it wisely.
I see this often in my mindset classes or in my coaching sessions with clients. Our ability to dream big is a great thing, it provides the optimism, energy and focus to achieve great things.
Yet often, we see those dreams come crashing down, leaving us with the worst of feelings. Inadequacy, intolerance, disappointment, and many more are often the consequences of finding ourselves having to cope and accept the shrinkage or disappearance of those dreams and goals.
The main reason for this is that our imagination is a powerful gift, and it can quickly visualise our dreams and ambitions. It can, with little effort, place us at a point whereby we can imagine the feeling of having already achieved it.
This is the critical point where a fundamental mistake is made. The world we live in every day does not always move in the same direction as our dreams or goals. The daily workplace and our home life moves at a slower speed than our imagination. The gravitational pull of our normal routines and having to complete these in order just to survive slowly draws our focus back to managing life’s daily challenges. Then we return to acceptance, with our dreams turning to hopes and wishes.
We see this in many forms, one of the most common is in the new year’s resolution of joining a gym and getting fit. Gym memberships for years always see a sales spike in January, but by March, the attendance and membership cancellations reach over 90 percent of the recruitment. Our imagination sees the results, the picture of the new you, it often does not see the journey and effort required to reach that destination.
So, the real skill in achieving our dreams and goals in life or in business is to learn to get excited about the journey, not the destination.
We must accept life as it is, how we will manage it, and at the same time, we had last week, last month and the whole of last year, to set out with a clear purpose and mission to reach our dream destination but making every small step a success. We must learn to celebrate every mile marker on our new journey.
This is critical to the mind and how it works because we are creatures who are historically wired to see the negative as a fear-driven animal. Many entrepreneurs have the capacity to overcome these natural fears and get more excited about the journey and have the tenacity to drive change, but not all people are entrepreneurs. Yet to achieve even their dreams, this often requires a team of people who need to be inspired and motivated to join that journey and to visualise their journey within that of the entrepreneurs, or many more complex areas of the mind are revealed.
Change does not come easy to most people! The gravitational pull of our daily lives and survival is part of our evolutionary mindset. The fight, flight and freeze modes in our brain are conditioned to keep us safe. This oddly keeps us in our comfort zone, knowing that we can cope with familiarity, despite its challenges, even with our dreams and ambitions for better things.
So, when we set out on our new journey of 2023, remember the real key is to dream big, but even more critical is to make the journey even more exciting than the destination. Make the journey and each milestone a measure of success. Celebrate it massively, this allows the mind to change and step outside its known comfort zones into its new performance zones.
Achieving success or realising our dreams is rarely about skill, talent, or money. It helps to have those, but the winning starts in the mind.
So, to move anything or anyone forward, the real key to achieving dreams whilst in motion is to do it slow, small and often.
Please visit www.auto-motivate.com
You can email Mike at mike@auto-motivate.com or call him on 07496 543555.
