What are you waiting for? How long will you wait to complete something on your bucket list? Will it take a diagnosis with a health issue, the death of a loved one or a bad rating at work for you to start looking at your life?
What if you decided to do what you love by taking that leap of faith and it resulted in everything you ever wanted? What if you took a chance on a job that paid you less but resulted in more energy for your family life? What if you chose to adopt a better attitude towards your current situation that led you to greater professional and personal relationships?
Taking a chance, any chance is hard. Have you ever created a bucket list? I am looking at my current one and realize I too keep putting off stuff saying “after this” or “one day,” but when is that ever going to happen? These are my suggestions on getting you to leap (if you are interested in taking that route):
- Make a list and prioritize. Write down all your dreams and things you want to do with your life. It doesn’t matter how crazy they sound, just write it down. Then prioritize what’s important to you. I always thought playing the French horn was important to me and it was my secret pipe dream to do it for a living. But once I started writing down my list, I realized right away that there were many more amazing goals I wanted to achieve.
- Focus. This all sounds exciting and if you are anything like me, you are probably thinking, “let’s do everything – everything on my list sounds amazing.” It’s important to understand that it’s better to focus on achieving one goal to motivate you to achieve your next goal rather than putting half effort into multiple things.
- Prepare. If quitting one thing to follow your dream sounds difficult, that’s okay – it’s supposed to be scary. So prepare as best you can. It’s so easy to make excuses for your own inaction when you hear about someone else following their dream – excuses like, “They’re just ‘lucky’ or they don’t have all the ‘obligations’ I do.”
Well, that’s probably not the case. What you will notice when you start preparing for your dream is that it is much less scary than it sounds. Trust me, it’s still going to be ridiculously scary but it’ll be less scary because you are somewhat prepared or have an idea before you jump.
- Live in the present. I wrote an article about this but, it is true. Stop thinking about the future and worrying about what could happen, and instead focus on how amazing “right now” is. How many people do you know have the courage to live their dream? Celebrate and be grateful for the now. You’re on the journey to something incredible.
- Build a network. Talk to people who have done what you want to do and build a network. Whatever journey you are about to embark on, you are going to need to be surrounded by people who are empathetic and will give you the motivation to keep going forward. Whenever you take a leap of faith, you are going to have the naysayers or the people who tell you how dumb that idea is. Well, it’s important to let them go and surround yourself with people who have done what you are doing and can help you keep the faith.
- Research. There is so much material on anything and everything out there. So if your goal is to start a knitting company or skydive or – like me, take a month to go to India and meditate in an ashram – get online or start learning more about what you need to do, how to prepare and who to reach out to.
Lekshmy Sankar is part of the GovLoop Featured Blogger program, where we feature blog posts by government voices from all across the country (and world!). To see more Featured Blogger posts, click here.
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