When you are working toward an important goal, you usually want to achieve it sooner rather than later. The idea that it could take months, or even years to realize a desired outcome feels intolerable. Like most other people do, you may have tried to hurry the process along by working harder on it or searching for shortcuts that would get you there faster.

The problem is, the harder you try to rush the fulfillment of any achievement, time seems to slow down to a crawl. The more powerful your desire to move quickly, the more likely you are to attract all kinds of obstacles and delays that will only add to your frustration. And the truth is, direction is so much more important than speed. Many people are going nowhere fast.

Ironically, when you deliberately decide to slow down and enjoy the journey, and you stop worrying about how long it will take to get there, time seems to speed up. Obstacles and delays often dissolve on their own, or you will receive inspired ideas about how to clear them. You start attracting the right people, resources, and opportunities that end up making your journey smoother, easier, and more enjoyable.

Whether your journey is rocky or smooth usually depends on your state of mind, more than anything else. Thinking thoughts of impatience or frustration will only attract more situations that slow you down and amplify your frustration. Thinking thoughts of enjoyment, fun, and ease will call forth everything you need to swiftly attain your goals and dreams.

Letting go of frustration and impatience is as simple as shifting your attention away from thoughts that trigger your dissatisfaction. For example, when you think thoughts like this: “This is taking too long. I’m never going to get where I want to be.” You will immediately trigger feelings of frustration, impatience, and disappointment. Those feelings are a signal that you are focusing on the lack of something you want, rather than having the thing you want, which means that you cannot receive that wonderful outcome.

When you catch yourself focusing more on the lack of something you want, turn it around quickly by thinking and speaking about how wonderful it will be to finally have the outcome you want. For example, if you were trying to attract a fulfilling new job, you could say to yourself: “It’s going to be so much fun collaborating with like-minded people on fun projects. I’m looking forward to finding a great company that aligns with my passions. I’m going to love doing work that emphasizes my strengths and challenges me to become even better at what I do…”

Deliberately speak more about what you want, rather than the things you don’t want, or the things that seem to not be working in your favor at the moment. This will ensure that you keep moving in the direction you want to go.

When you dedicate yourself to always looking towards the light rather than bemoaning the shadows, you can’t help but move swiftly in very pleasing directions. And if you find yourself stuck and worried about the obstacles you are facing, remember that difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations.

As much as you might wish sometimes that you could avoid challenges and obstacles and have your path through life be consistently smooth and easy, it’s helpful to recognize that challenges actually serve a useful purpose, in a few different ways.

The first big benefit of challenges is that they cause you to focus more clearly on what you want, that wonderful end result that you are trying to attain. When you look at a challenge that is standing in your way, whether it’s a difficult situation or a frightening possibility looming over your life, you immediately feel a negative emotional reaction to it.

This provides an opening for you to ask yourself, “What do I really want in this situation?” Asking that question and beginning to focus on your desires with more clarity will start shifting your energy to allow the solutions needed to move past those obstacles.

Challenges also provide a wonderful opportunity to strengthen your self-confidence, resiliency, and belief that you can achieve anything you want in life. When you first begin working toward a goal, you likely have some level of belief already, or you wouldn’t have attempted to achieve the goal in the first place.

However, when you are challenged to dig a little deeper to tap into your inner strength, you develop a greater appreciation for your true capabilities. After you have overcome some difficult challenges, you can look back with a sense of pride and accomplishment, and your belief in yourself grows exponentially.

Challenges and obstacles are also useful in helping you to better hone your skills and become even better at what you do. Whether you’re training for a marathon, starting a new business, or pursuing a degree or certification, you likely would not apply as much effort and attention if the whole process was smooth and easy.

When you have to rely on your wits and determination to get to the finish line, you strengthen your knowledge, develop your skills, and even learn new skills along the way. With continued focus and practice, you get better and better at what you do, which will only serve you in the long run.

The next time you find yourself feeling frustrated about any obstacles that have appeared in your path, try to view the situation as a welcome opportunity to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to overcome the immediate obstacle. You can also use them as stepping stones to develop a better, stronger, and more empowered you.

Say to yourself, “Not only am I going to get past these obstacles and overcome any challenges that come my way, I’m going to channel my inner strength and determination into creating an even better outcome than the one I initially hoped for.”

This kind of mentality immediately puts you back in charge and reminds you that no obstacle or challenge has power over you unless you believe it does. If you refuse to be intimidated and instead start to relish the challenge of climbing over and around the rocks upon your path, you will experience a sense of exhilaration that you never could have achieved by strolling along a perfectly smooth, unexciting path.

We are all works in progress and constantly evolving. As adults, this can be hard for us to see. But for the butterfly, the change is more obvious.

Butterflies are not born as baby butterflies. They hatch from their eggs as caterpillars. As larva, the caterpillar will consume plenty of leaves and grow to be quite large. One day, he stops consuming leaves and begins spinning his cocoon. This cocoon keeps his body safe as he undergoes major changes through metamorphosis. Then he emerges from his cocoon as a butterfly.

What is Trusting the Process?

As humans, it is hard for us to just “trust the process”. We are wired to want to see immediate results. But what trusting the process means is that despite setbacks and challenges, you remain committed to what you’re doing. When you don’t feel motivated enough, you keep going anyway. You remain disciplined and loyal to the path that is going to ultimately get you to where you want to be. Remember, it is the difficult roads that lead to beautiful destinations.

How Do I Trust the Process?

When you find yourself struggling with trusting the process, remember these three things:

1. Focus only on what you can control. There are very few things in life we have complete control over. Determine what you truly have control over and pour all your energy into it. In many cases, what you have control over may just be your attitude and response.

For example, you can follow your diet and work out plan to a T and still have a couple of weeks when the scale doesn’t budge. Don’t be discouraged! Focus on showing up and sticking to the plan. If you continue to not see the results you expect, troubleshoot what might be causing a lack of progress or reassess to see if your expectations are too high. Speaking from experience, sometimes you can do everything right and your body just takes a while to respond. By trusting the process and continuing when many would just give up, you will see the progress in weight loss. You just have to stick to it.

2. Know that failure is invaluable experience. For many of us, we want to avoid failing at all costs. But what we need to do is change how we look at failure. All failure is, is experience. By failing, we learned how something won’t work or new things we can try to try to make something work. This is good information to have. It’s more data than people who refuse to try or fail once and give up.

I have written extensively about people who have failed hundreds of times. Had they not pushed forward when faced with failure after failure, the world as we know it wouldn’t exist. You can check out my list of people who succeeded by failing here.

The truth is failure is an ally. It helps us learn from our mistakes and it propels us forward closer to our goals.

3. Enjoy the process. If you’re like me, when you set goals for yourself, you are focused on the final destination, not the journey. While it’s important to keep your eyes on the finish line, when you are overly focused on it, you miss out on all that you gain along your journey.

Real growth and personal development happens by going through all the obstacles along the way. It doesn’t magically happen once you reach your goal. So enjoy the process and your state of “becoming”.

It’s also important to point out that when we are overly focused attaining the goal itself, we can set ourselves up for an unhealthy mentality when it comes to thinking about our goals. We may begin to believe that we will only be happy once we reach the goal. Andrew Huberman talks about why doing the work is the reward we should be chasing. You can check him out here:

At times it’s easy to feel like you don’t matter much, and there is no real purpose for your life. You may think of yourself as just one of the billions of people occupying the planet, and you might even believe that there’s nothing really special about you. Especially if you haven’t yet achieved anything that would be considered newsworthy or impressive by most people’s standards, you probably see yourself as just an “average” person who really doesn’t have much of an impact on the world around you. But the truth is, you have much more of an impact than you may realize.

In the classic movie from 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life, the angel Clarence says, “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” He says this to the story’s protagonist, George Bailey when George is contemplating ending his life.

This is such a powerful reminder that no matter how ordinary or average you think you are, everything you do and say affects the world around you in powerful ways. Every time you have encouraged someone or uplifted them in some way, every helping hand that you have offered, and every kind word that you have ever spoken has contributed something positive to the world. And when we feel like we don’t matter, or what we have to offer isn’t significant, we truly forget all the positive impacts we have made.

More importantly, those small acts of kindness create an echo as they inspire other people to then pass on the goodness to more and more people. Even very small acts of kindness can be far-reaching and make a much bigger impact than you may realize at the time.

If you have been in the habit of seeing yourself as ordinary, average, or ineffectual in any way, decide right now that you are going to be a person who leaves a lasting positive mark on the world that will still be here long after you are gone. If that sounds overwhelming, keep in mind that your achievements do not need to be big and flashy by societal standards, they only need to be meaningful to the people who are most affected by them.

Look for small ways to serve, help, uplift, and inspire the people around you. Think about ways that you can improve the world with the skills, talents, and resources that you have available to you right now. Connect with other people who also want to make a positive difference, and join forces to create something that will solve a problem or benefit the world in some way, big or small.

Even beyond your words and actions, allow your energy to be a force for good in the world. Hold yourself in a state of love and compassion as much as possible. Send good thoughts and blessings to the people around you. Celebrate and praise the success of others. Your positive emotional energy will radiate out and contribute positive energy to the world just as much as your actions will.

No matter how you choose to do it, strive to be a person who, when future generations hear your name, they will say, “Wow. That was a person who did a lot of good in the world.”

Life is full of leaps of faith as everything in life comes with risk. Certainly, some leaps of faith are riskier than others, but every step you take has some risk attached. We often find ourselves too scared to leap, too scared to take a chance that is presented to us. Why do we hold ourselves back from reaching our full potential?

Taking a risk isn’t always as risky as we may initially believe. Leaps of faith tend to come with a safety net to catch us if things don’t work out quite the way we planned.

What Good Is Waiting?

One of the big reasons we neglect to take a leap of faith is that we always think we can leap at a later time. We tell ourselves, “Not yet, but eventually”, and then eventually never comes. Here are a few reasons why waiting isn’t helping you:

You’ll Never Feel Ready

Many people wait to take a leap of faith because they don’t feel like they are ready to leap. However, it is likely that you will never feel ready. In fact, the longer you wait, the less ready you will feel. Like Lemony Snicket said, “If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives.”

You Have the Power to Do Something

Another reason you shouldn’t wait is that you have the power to do something, but you are choosing to remain exactly where you are. Now, this isn’t always a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with being content with your current life, but if you never take a leap, you’ll never know what else could be waiting for you.

You’re More Likely to Never Do It

Waiting is also problematic because it decreases the likelihood that you will ever take that leap of faith. This can cause you to miss out on incredible opportunities and experiences that could change your life for the better.

Safety Nets

As mentioned above, leaps of faith are always scary, but what if you knew there was a safety net to catch you if you fall?

Most decisions you make have a “safety net”, or some way to get out of the situation if things don’t go as planned. For example, say that you leave your job to work at a new company. If you end up disliking your new job, you can always find another company to work for. You aren’t stuck in that position forever.

Safety Nets Aren’t Always Needed

Another thing to keep in mind is that safety nets aren’t always needed. We tend to focus on the worst most of the time, but things tend to work out in our favor. While the thought of a safety net is nice, remember that there is a good chance you won’t need it.

Whatever You Do, Do Something

Imagine an opportunity just presented itself to you. What do you do? I encourage you to remember this philosophy: Whatever you do, do something.

Take a Baby Step

This may sound vague but jumping in head-first can seem a little overwhelming; if you can’t make yourself jump in all the way, try taking a baby step at first to test the waters. Get comfortable with the decision before fully committing to it.

Count to Three and Jump

If you feel that you tend to avoid leaps of faith regardless of testing the waters, try forcing yourself to take one small leap of faith a week. Count to three out loud or in your head, and then act on it. This gives your brain a deadline for action and ensures that you don’t allow yourself to wait. Allow yourself to take a leap of faith, and experience what you are meant to experience in life.

Have you ever missed out on an opportunity because you waited too long to decide that you wanted that opportunity? Unfortunately, this happens to people all the time, and the main culprit is procrastination.

Today’s quote speaks to this phenomenon and reminds us that no opportunity is available forever. We need to stop procrastinating and take opportunities when they present themselves.

Dangers of Procrastination

We have all been there: we put off doing things that we should be doing until the last minute or until we don’t end up doing those things at all.

Procrastination is a common problem, and it seems to be becoming a more normalized occurrence in society. However, procrastination can be dangerous for several reasons. Let’s take a look at a few of them:

Missed Opportunities

Procrastinating in the decision-making process can lead us to miss out on important and life-changing opportunities.

As an example, consider the following scenario: An employer reaches out to you and is interested in bringing you in for an interview, but you don’t respond to them for two weeks because you procrastinate. To the employer, you appear disinterested in the position, and they move on to another candidate. Outcome: you lost a great job opportunity.

Lack of Advancement

Stemming from the previous danger, procrastination can cause you to remain at a standstill in life. When you put things off rather than tackling them right away, you prevent yourself from making any progress. This can affect your relationships, work performance, and personal growth.

Decreased Well-Being

Most importantly, procrastination can be detrimental to your overall well-being. Procrastination causes unnecessary added stress to your life which decreases happiness, damages your immune system, worsens your mental health, and prevents you from getting help to fix it.

How to Avoid Procrastinating and Accept Opportunities

Luckily, there are several ways you can go about avoiding procrastination and opening yourself up to new opportunities. Here are four tips you can use to start advancing your life today:

Break Up Tasks into Smaller Tasks

Sometimes we procrastinate because a task or a decision seems too big and too time-consuming. You can help yourself out by breaking overwhelming tasks up into multiple smaller tasks and focusing on completing one small task at a time.

Give Yourself a Shorter Decision Timeline

Our brains are interesting; when given a deadline, we tend to put things off until close to the deadline. So, if we are given a deadline that is two weeks from now, we tend to do no work for the first week and a half. Weird, right?

The great news is that you can trick your brain by setting earlier deadlines for yourself. For example, if you have a paper that is due in a month, set earlier deadlines for each portion of the paper. Aim to have the introduction written in the first week, then aim for two body paragraphs the week after.

These smaller deadlines will keep you on a better track to a larger goal.

Focus on Your Goals

Having goals in life is extremely important as goals drive you to be better. Focusing on your goals can help you avoid procrastination because you know what you need to do in order to reach those goals.

Allow Yourself to Make Mistakes

Finally, be willing to make mistakes. Perfectionism is another leading cause of procrastination because the fear of failure gets in the way of even trying in the first place. Give yourself permission to fail and go for it. You’ll be happy that you did.

Whenever you find yourself procrastinating, remember that “Time and tide wait for none.” Life is happening now. Go after what you want in life while you still have the opportunity to do so.

Do you have a big goal or a desire that lights up your heart?

Without something to work towards or hope for, life would be dreary! As children, we are bright-eyed and full of dreams, believing anything is possible. But as we grow older, we get caught up in the fears of the world and let some of our desires die. We stop believing that anything is possible like we did when we were kids.

So, how can you combat fear and live your dreams?

5 Ways to Nurture Your Dreams and Keep Fear Away

Get Clear on Your Desire and Dreams

What do you desire? What is your dream? Many people make the mistake of not getting clear on their goals. For example, they will say “I want to be rich”. Okay, but what does rich mean? Getting an extra $1,000 per month? Winning the lottery? Or making $1 million a year?

Get Clear On your Why

Understand why you want to achieve your dream. Why do you want this? What will it bring you? How will you feel? Get specific.

For example, if you want an extra $10,000 per month, what will you do with it? Will you travel the world? Will you buy a fancy house? Will you invest it in stocks? 

Why do you want this $10,000 per month?

Own Your Motivation

Your motivation is a crucial element in the journey of bringing your goals into reality. Our dreams require work and can often ask us to get out of our comfort zones, be uncomfortable, and do things we don’t feel like doing. In those moments where you have to give up immediate pleasure and satisfaction for a long-term gain, the only way you will succeed is if you know for sure WHAT you want (step 1) and WHY you want it (step 2).

Keep these two answers in front of you, where you can easily see them multiple times a day, to stay reminded of your dreams.

Fight Procrastination

As we work towards our goals and build momentum, we feel more encouraged and motivated.

However, when we procrastinate, waiting for the right time (which never comes, by the way!), we end up not taking any action. This emptiness causes us to become complacent, washing out our desires. If you never take action towards achieving your goals, you will never taste success or feel motivated. Over time, you will forget why you even wanted your goal in the first place.

Procrastination extinguishes the spark of desire we once felt for our goals. So, stop waiting for one day, for the right time, or the perfect situation, and take action! Start with the small tasks, build momentum, and get the ball rolling.

Face Your Fears

When your desire dies, fear is born. However, fears can also kill desires. Some common fears are the fear of failure, fear of being judged, or the fear of the unknown.

So how does our fear hold us back? It depends how we respond.

One of the responses to fear is the freeze response. This is when we don’t do anything. This might look like sitting down to work, but ending up staring at the laptop screen, doing nothing.

Another response to fear is the flight response. In this response, we run away from the ‘danger’. Have you ever avoided your to-do list and ended up watching hours of YouTube videos, deep cleaning your home, or shopping online? That’s an example of a ‘flight’ response.

So instead of running away or freezing up, face your fears. Ask “what if”. Show yourself compassion. And then get to work on your goals and desires. Your dreams and desires make you unique and make life meaningful. So, pursue your desires and achieve your goals! With these tips, you can stay focused and committed to bring all your dreams into reality.

In the movie The Matrix, Neo is advised not to try to bend the spoon, but to instead try realize the truth: There is no spoon. He is then told that it isn’t the spoon that bends, it is only himself.

Neo cannot manipulate reality and bend the spoon, he can only change his own thinking. By confronting his preconceived ideas of how the world works, he can change his thinking, and as a result, his reality.

This encounter with the spoon is actually a pivotal point in the story. The Matrix has all these “rules”, like gravity and time. They are lies the Matrix tells his brain. Once Neo realizes this, he can do what he needs to do in the story as “The One.” He gains more confidence and power.

Neo can fly and do all sorts of “matrix-like” things because he realizes what he was taught about gravity is a false construct.

By realizing that there is no spoon, you can challenge all that you have learned that may or may not be true. It can open you up to new opportunities and ways of achieving your dreams.

On a larger scale and fundamental level, as children we are programmed to believe certain things that may or may not be accurate. Think about things you grew up believing that have been proven wrong as you’ve gotten older and gotten more life experience.

I’ll give you can example of my thinking, which is rather embarrassing, but here goes. When I was a child, I didn’t believe I would be able to get married in a church because I didn’t have a relationship with my father. How could I be walked down the aisle by my father if he wasn’t around? My godfather wouldn’t be able to do it because he had been murdered. Who did I have?

The limited information that I had about getting married was based in fear of judgment and came from a place of lack. I was very young, so that is to be expected, too. I also grew up Catholic during a period of time when divorce was frowned upon. And I was uncomfortable asking the question of who would be able to walk me down the aisle. As a result, I assumed if I did actually get married, it would have been in Vegas after a series of some bad decisions!

But seriously, can you imagine if what I believed about the process of getting married wasn’t ever challenged? That would have been sad. It never dawned on me that my uncle, who ended up being a father figure to me, would be a great person to walk me down the aisle. Or that I could do any kind of ceremony I wanted to do. It didn’t have to conform to the rules I had formulated in my own mind. There were options, Carlyle. (Yep, that’s from Twilight when Edward tells Carlyle he needs options.)

The lesson here is that once you can break yourself free from previous conditioning and beliefs, a whole new world of possibilities opens up for you. And it is waiting for you. All you have to do is free your mind.