It’s my birthday, and this is the day each year I set new goals and envision what I want my future to look like. Our brains are so powerful, and we can have what we envision! That goes both ways, however. So, it’s important to be careful to focus on the positive things you want to see happen in your life and not the negative ones.
I’ve been listening a lot lately to Billie Eilish’s song My Future. The lyrics remind me of myself a few years ago when I started my transformation process, “Cause I, I’m in love with my future. Can’t wait to meet her. Cause I, I’m in love, but not with anybody else. Just want to get to know myself. I know supposedly I’m lonely now. Know I’m supposed to be unhappy without someone. But aren’t I someone? I’d like to be your answer cause you’re so handsome … But I, I’m in love with my future, and you don’t know her. And I, I’m in love, but not with anybody here. I’ll see you in a couple years.”
As I wrote about in The Princess Guide to Loving Yourself First, you don’t have to wait until New Year’s Day or even your birthday to start setting goals and achieving your dreams. I believe that every day should be New Year’s Day, and we can decide each morning to improve our lives. The way I see it, we are all in the process of becoming something. While I hope we’re all moving in a positive direction, we must be careful because we can be doing little things every day to subconsciously sabotage our positive progress.
In a blog post to entrepreneurs, Vishen Lakhiani, founder and CEO of Mindvalley wrote, “We’ve been trained to see ourselves and the world in three simple forms — the past, the present and the future. As a result, entrepreneurs often envision the future as that place where goals and desires are stored — from the amount of revenue and the kind of office we want to earn and have, to the dream home and great car we want to own. While it’s great to be ambitious and bold, it’s also dysfunctional to postpone your happiness.” So, how can we tap into that happiness and achieve the positive goals we’ve set for ourselves? Lakhiani said the key to success is not postponing the celebration until you achieve a future goal. He said to wake up every day and remember where you were two years ago, and celebrate how far you’ve come. I absolutely agree and do this quite often.
I told this story in The Princess Guide to Gratitude … When I was in first grade, I took home a note from my teacher in which she communicated that I was a good student and very smart, but I spent too much time daydreaming. I was bored. I already knew the material she was teaching and wanted to be chasing butterflies in a field of flowers. Kids who daydream a lot are labeled slackers and lazy, but some studies have shown that impression isn’t correct.
A 2012 study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds found daydreaming is actually good for your working memory. Working memory allows the brain to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously. The more working memory a person has, the more daydreaming they can do without forgetting the task at hand.
Scott Barry Kaufman, NYU psychology professor and author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined argues that daydreaming can play an important role in personal adaptation. In a 2013 Scientific American blog, Kaufman explained that daydreaming can offer positive personal rewards including self-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal-driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences while simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning and reflective compassion. That sounds more like working to me than it does laziness.
So, how can you begin to focus on your fabulous future? In his book How to Survive a Betrayal, Rev. Mark T. Barclay offers these tips:
- Picture what you want in your mind and focus on it.
- Use faith — confession — actions to believe in it.
- Find scripture verses [or motivational quotes] that motivate you and bring you hope.
- See yourself enjoying it. Think about it. Be consumed with it.
- Praise God [or just begin practicing gratitude out loud] more and more for it.
- Know it is coming. Read the verses [or motivational quotes] until you are assured of it.
- Let no one steal it from you. Listen to God, His word and your spirit — not other people.
Our imaginations are powerful. They can help us manifest our dreams by not only giving us the end result, but it can also help show us the way there.
Now, more than ever (we’re still surviving a pandemic, after all), do the words of Dr. Wayne Dyer come to life for me and have greater meaning than ever before. “Never — and I mean never — allow anyone else’s ideas of who you can or can’t become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a keep out sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination,” he wrote.
Here’s to another day, another year and yours (and my) fabulous future!
Senée Seale is a book author, mental health professional and life guide passionate about helping people create positive changes in their lives and relationships. Are you ready to start attracting positive things into your life through practicing daily affirmations? Get your free copy of The Princes Guide to Gratitude Affirmations.
