What’s your big dream, your big why, your greener grass on the other side of the fence? Are you living it now?

Most of us have a good idea about what that represents, and we cherish a mental picture of it to draw upon when we feel empty and caught up in the cogwheels of life. Yet this mental image can be both the destination of our voyage and the very obstacle keeping us from getting there. It all depends on how you look at it.  If you pull it up to remind yourself of what your target is, all the while working towards achieving it, the picture will serve as a beacon pulling you along the path to success. If you pull it up as a daydream, using it as a smoke-screen to simply mask an unsatisfying present moment, you just subconsciously turn it into something unreal, a dream that by definition will vanish when you wake up.

I’ll assume you are all action takers and fall in the first category. But I’ll admit to having fallen squarely into the second one for longer than I care to admit (did anyone say years?) . I would mention ‘my project’ on occasion, always at a loss for words to paint the real picture succinctly, and then always felt disempowered as the message failed to convey how awesome and important an idea it was. People, because they cared, would obligingly say ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’ or some other polite phrase the undertext of which would be ‘Nice dream, now let’s get real, what are you really doing’. And oddly, that’s pretty much the same reflection I myself would have after any such conversation. As I had subconsciously relegated my mental picture to dream status, I couldn’t present it as a bona fide project to others. Nor could I see how it could possibly materialize.

Then, enter a workshop that I signed up for on somewhat of a whim. I just got a postcard from the organizers and signed up for it right away. Only after did  I think about it and wondered what in the world went through my head, it was neither a pertinent topic right then and there, nor a good time to take days off work, nor be away from my family… there were just many reasons why not. So why did I do it? Before I had had the time to rationalize it away, I recognized that it could well be the one thing that would turn the daydream picture into an actual goal with a path leading up to it. And that’s exactly what it turned out to be.

For some reason, that day I took the fabled first step. And I learned something important : The difference between daydream and goal is not that there is a plan and a path leading up to the goal, it’s that one day you set one foot forward which then CREATES the path. I had been looking for something that did not yet exist, of course I wasn’t finding it. Those few days at the workshop, ideas were pouring out and the whole ‘road ahead’ just materialized.

Purpose in life is a predictor of length and quality of life. And you can immediately spot the people living on purpose.  They know where they are going and, through successes and failures alike, they steadfastly move towards their goal. The others seem to merely exist. And they are majority. Could it be that all they need to understand is that the path does not exist until they actually step onto it?

This is one topic I will cover in ‘my project’, teaching others how to take control of their health. There’s so much noise out there on the topic, very good information mixed in with all sorts of fads, mainly focusing on diet and exercise, sometimes mentioning stress reduction. But since I have yet to find a structured educational program that covers the breadth of mind-body-soul aspects of health as more than an absence of disease, I set out to build it. That is ‘my project’, my mental picture that is no longer a daydream. I am running a pilot this June and planning for the real deal in September.

Will you join me?