Monday 29 January 2007

Goal Achievement and Learning How to Cut Straight

When I first posted my last blog I accidentally used an image of a pair of scissors although the post liked about spring-cleaning and re-organising your life. I was jumping ahead of myself, as should become clear with this entry.

When I was about 5 years old, a family friend, Auntie Pam, taught me how to cut fabric straight. It was a simple tip but one which I've always remembered. She said I should keep my eye on the point of the scissors. Auntie Pam was wheelchair bound yet had an indomitable spirit and we shared many special moments together yet that tip is what I remember most vividly. It's funny how, out of a treasure trove of events, we remember the most innocuous of things. Yet, for me, that particular memory serves as a metaphor for life and goal achievement.

When you want to achieve a goal you have to keep your eye firmly focused on your target if you want to achieve it and achieve it in the most efficient way possible. It's all too easy to get distracted and, if our faith is not strong enough, it's also easy for doubts to start creeping in. Instead of focusing on who we have to be and what we have to do in order to achieve our goals we spend an inordinate amount of time second guessing ourselves and the process by which our goals become manifest.

When it comes to large challenging goals we will not immediately have tangible evidence that what we are doing is working. For many this can be very frustrating; yet it can also be very exciting. Our vision is limited while that of the Universe is all-encompassing. Hence, the Universe can see the way to what we want, no matter how convoluted the path, even though we often cannot. We therefore have to learn how to let go, trust that things are unfolding as they should, trust our intuition and have the courage to act on it.

Those thoughts and ideas that spring into your mind suggesting that you do something that perhaps you hadn't previously considered are often the Universe's way of speaking to you and guiding you. True, you may not always get the results you wanted but the more you practice using your intuition the easier it will become to distinguish when it your intuition that is speaking to you as opposed to you having other random, distracting thoughts.

It is said that "Obstacles are what you see when you take your eye off the goal".

When you keep your eye firmly fixed on your goals then you see clearly how to overcome any obstacles that cross your path and, while it's great to have seemingly effortless achievements, it is the 'obstacles' that really strengthen us. So you should not only expect obstacles, you should also welcome them for it is in overcoming them that you grow - the bigger the goal the bigger the obstacles and the bigger our opportunities to learn and grow.

"Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."
Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915, Educator

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