When you decide to embrace a profound life change, it’s scary, because change is scary. But the only way to successfully deal with change is to master it, and once you do, launching your life forward will eventually come easily and naturally.
Related: 5 Things You Need for a Successful Mindset
You can start with these seven mindset shifts:
1. Take time to define your vision and your passion.
There is no vision without seeing. So step out of your comfort zone. Experience, feel and taste what you are passionate about. Get out there and discover yourself, what you stand for and what you stand against. Then ask yourself what you want in life and why it’s important to you. Find what gets you fired up.
Your vision is about you and your desires, and it has to be complete, clear and brutally honest.
2. Become clear and very precise about what you want.
People are usually vague; they have only a pale vision of what they want. Try stopping and taking a break from the day-to-day race. Take a notebook, choose a quiet place and time, and write down what you specifically want to achieve and how you’ll know when you’ve achieved it.
Write down everything. Your brain will do what you want, but in order to get there, you need to be very specific about your mission. So start writing your dreams in full detail.
3. Continually reinforce your motivation.
Often you know precisely what you want, but after surfing the “go get it” wave for some time, you can start to lose momentum. That’s when you slow down and enter a slump. Sometimes you need to reach outside of yourself to pull the best out. Ask yourself: Who is impacted by my dream? Who stands to benefit from it?
Think of all your loved ones. How would they be influenced one year down the road after your dream is fulfilled? What about two years? You’re getting stronger, the benefits to your loved ones are growing and the impact on the community around you expands. Visualize how it all accumulates after five years. Ten years. Focus on that vision and feel the energy.
Return to this visualization exercise each time your motivation needs a boost.
Related: 31 Things That Happen When You Finally Decide to Live Your Dreams
4. Make a plan for achieving your dream and set a start date.
How will you get to your dream? What is the complete skills set you need? What new knowledge do you need to acquire? One of the simplest ways to create a roadmap for your journey toward your dream is to model the actions of the people who already succeeded what you wish to achieve.
Find those people. Interview them. Read about their journeys. Replicate their steps. Learn. When you start, you’ll hit the ground running.
5. Work on your beliefs.
Our beliefs are external (what we say aloud) and internal (what we feel deep in our hearts). The internal beliefs are the ones calling the shots about what you really feel about yourself, who you are and what you are capable of. Saying you’ll run a marathon when you don’t believe you’ll even be breathing after five miles is not a winning situation.
The good news is that beliefs can be rewritten through diligent internal work: meditations, daily affirmations, journaling, creative visualizations. Use whatever works for you.
Remember that beliefs drive perceptions, perceptions drive habits, and habits drive actions and success. You are who you think you are.
6. Embrace discipline.
If you want to master something, you have to work consistently and with discipline. That includes 1) consciously setting and following the daily habits we need to reach our goals, and 2) being keenly aware of distractions.
The habits you have right now are specifically geared to help you achieve everything you’ve already achieved. If you want something new, you have to change your habits. So what new habits can you set for yourself in the pursuit of your dream?
Discipline also means developing a distraction alarm. You need to be consistent not only in maintaining habits, but also in the conscious decision to achieve the right things and stay away from the unproductive ones. Multitasking is just a modern myth. The truth is that the most successful people are focused.
7. Decide each day to take three small steps toward your dream life.
By consistently making seemingly small actions, you plant seeds of achievement into your conscience. You start feeling the progress you’re making, and in time, these feelings grow into a belief and then into an attitude.
Before you know it, you’ll be flying toward your dream life.
