You Need a Strategy

Swiss adventurer, psychiatrist, and author, Bertrand Piccard, makes a very interesting observation about how most people approach life. He says, “To construct our life, we’re going to need to learn some strategies, but in reality, what we learn instead are visions of the world.”

He claims that most of us don’t figure out the strategies we need to achieve our dreams, but we do figure out how we see the world. That’s quite sad when you think about it. Most people start out with dreams about what they’ll do when they grow up, but at some point, they decide it’s never going to happen. Life is too unfair, misfortune steps in to upset their plans, they never find the time to make their dreams happen, or they decide their childhood goals were naïve and unrealistic.

Just Lucky?

We know that this is not the case for some people. They do manage to live the dream life, to overcome the odds and succeed. Maybe they were just lucky. Or maybe they learnt some strategies and constructed a view of the world in which they could achieve their dreams.

The Power

None of us has complete control over the circumstances or events of our lives. In fact, we have very little control over much of it. But we do have some control over our minds, our will, and how we choose to behave. We do have the power to think about strategies – the small, deliberate steps taken one day at a time that take us towards our goals. We do have the power to read a positive book rather than escaping from reality in the TV or the bottle. Those small, deliberate steps taken one day at a time is the way dreams are turned into reality.

That might not sound sexy, but it’s nonetheless true. Growing dreams is like growing fruit. You must put in a lot of hard work before you get your first harvest. You have to do a lot of things you don’t want to do; you have to stick with it and trust your strategy is a good one. And if you discover it isn’t, you’ve got to improve it.

Vision of the World

But having a good strategy isn’t enough. Piccard tells us to check out our vision of the world. People usually imagine that their perception of how the world works is a vision of reality – maybe even the only reality that could exist. For example, you walk into a shopping mall and see the rows of shops selling all kinds of goods. Shoppers walk in and out of stores or cluster around coffee vendors. Music is piped unobtrusively though hidden speakers. This is reality.

But even this hard, tangible, observable reality is only a set of ideas that have been turned into reality. Shopping malls don’t exist in nature. They didn’t exist for most of human history. Then the idea of the shopping mall entered the imagination of some people who decided to turn that idea into a physical reality. We experience that reality to be every bit as real as the full moon in the night sky.

Ideas into Reality

Just as the shopping mall was an idea that people turned into a reality, each of us turns ideas into reality all the time. Many of these are not physical, tangible realities, but we allow them to have control over us. What kind of realities am I talking about?

Go back to those dreams you had when you were young. Do you think they are unrealistic? Unachievable? Too hard? Or do you have a workable strategy you’re executing right now to turn those ideas into reality?

Many people give up on their dreams because they believe they are too ambitious and unrealistic. And because they believe that, they don’t have any strategy to make them happen. They have a vision of the world that doesn’t allow them to succeed, and they don’t have any strategy to achieve their goals. What they have is broken dreams.

What Do You Want?

Like I said, we don’t have complete control, and anything could happen that takes away our power to create the life we want to live. But most people don’t suffer a disaster that robs them of their power of choice. The question is this – do you want to hang on to those dreams and do something to make them become real? If so, you need a good strategy.

Maintaining an optimistic stance towards the future, having meaningful goals and dreams, and sticking with a well-designed strategy are all part of what it means to be a change-fit person. You have the power to become a very change-fit person. Do you believe that?

If you want those dreams, and you’re prepared to develop a strategy, change fitness coaching will help you on this journey. Talk to us today about how we can help you.

Written by Dr Steve Barlow