Be Crystal Clear on Your Vision

What do you really care about? What really makes you happy? What are your real goals? When do you feel most satisfied with how your life is going? When do you feel you're making some kind of difference? When you start to think about these things and answer these questions, you see yourself at your most genuine. But anything your boss asks you to do is a task, not a goal. Only you can set a goal. And then, only you can forget about that goal. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by a huge physical task and broken it down into small parts, you know it works. Maybe you were hiking and realized you had three miles to go before you reached the summit, and you decided to just focus on making it to the next turn on the trail, and then the next, and then the next. In essence, you forgot about the goal and broke it down into smaller steps. Or maybe you were painting your house and realized you had seven rooms to go, and you decided to just focus on painting this wall, then the next wall . Or maybe you had to create a seventy-article sales proposal and decided to just focus on completing one section at a time and then work on the next section. In each case the distance from here to there seemed so great that you decided to forget about the end goal and just focus on the process. It worked. My job was to answer the complaints, those legal filings that start a civil lawsuit. Spending all of that time surrounded by complaints took its toll. My perspective had changed and I had stopped singing and started complaining. But I found the more I complained, the more I found to complain about.

Soon, though, I discovered that complaints weren't fatal. They were just the beginning, the first step in the resolution of a lawsuit. In my cases the complaint had to be dealt with, and that meant something had to move. A complaint had to be followed by discovery, questions, exploration. If I stopped with the complaint, nothing happened. Nothing changed, and there was no opportunity to see things from another perspective. I am grateful for the loving relationship I cultivated with my dad in the last decade or so of his life. As I write this, I can feel the gratitude filling me up. What are you grateful for? Feel it, own it, celebrate it. Now you have raised your vibration, and the sky is the limit for manifesting or merely having a great day. Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will. Catherine Cates has helped thousands go from doubt to making their dreams come true. Primarily business-minded women find direction, focus, and success with her unique blend of intuition and twenty-five-plus years in the business world. As an intuitive visionary with her feet on the ground, Catherine gives you easy strategies on which low-hanging fruit to pick first, getting results faster, building confidence, and inspiring you to achieve even bigger successes. Transform your mindset. And once you see that person, you'll begin to see what you were created to be. Another thing to do is to think about your pain. I realize that thinking about the stuff that has hurt you the most isn't a fun exercise, but it's an important one, so let's play this out. Remember that your purpose comes in your service to others.

Well, if you hadn't gone through the things you've gone through, you wouldn't be qualified to help others when they go through something similar. That's certainly how it was for me. I know what it's like to feel that you've lost your everything. I also know what it's like to overcome that, so I can confidently tell others that they can overcome what they're going through. Those are the kinds of people you want in your life, and that's the kind of person you'll be if you're living your purpose. A lot of people try to give you a map without hiking the trail. And it will work again. What should you do? Set a huge goal. Commit to your huge goal. Create a process that ensures you can reach your goal. Then forget about your huge goal and work your process instead. Make this your mantra where goals are concerned: I will set it . Take my example of the marathon, a goal that appears on thousands of bucket lists. To actually run a marathon, you will someday need to run a little over twenty-six miles--but if you're just starting out, you don't need to run that far today. Once you set your goal, create a process that will help you reach that goal. But once I started moving, new ideas showed themselves and I could see the complaints in a different way. Movement changes perspective. The same is true for you. If you surround yourself with complaints, complaints are all you can see.

You need to move to see past them. Sometimes that means leaving your seat and stepping outside to take a walk and look at the complaint in a new way. Other times, it means leaving a relationship that is no longer supporting your growth. It can also mean something as simple as picking up the vacuum rather than complaining about the dirty floor. Movement changes things. I often think back to that moment in the bathroom. Turn your life and business from ordinary to extraordinary! My world has changed, and so have I. I have learned to choose, and I have learned to say goodbye. D changes, shedding layer upon layer of old versions of myself that no longer suit me. I learned a concept many years ago suggesting that when we are born, our souls map out the life we wish to lead, and make agreements and contracts with other souls, such as our parents, siblings, coworkers, and random people, to help us learn the lessons we choose to experience in our waking lives. Then--poof--we are born, forgetting all we have mapped out. We then spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out which lessons we asked to learn. To this, I add the concept of reincarnation, which maintains that after we pass away, our soul returns to earth in another body. But I also postulate that we should live without regret, so when our soul returns to earth time and time again until it fully comprehends the lessons it chose to learn in previous lives, we may pass through without regret. There was a time when I felt lost--no hope, no love, and no future. They'll give you advice for fixing a problem, but they've never experienced the problem themselves. Your purpose comes out of the trails you've actually hiked and the problems you've encountered. That's when you can really help others. When I offer advice, sometimes people say to me, Trent, that's easy for you to say.

And I say, Yes, it is--because I've been through what you're going through. I've been through the struggle, so I can talk to you with confidence. So, explore your pain. Explore the struggles you've overcome. Even if you're struggling hard now, I'm sure you can remember a time when you got past a big roadblock. Your experience with that might point you toward your purpose. Say you aren't in particularly good shape, so your process calls for you to run one mile on the first day. While today you can't run a marathon, you can run one mile. And because running that mile today is all you need to accomplish, you automatically feel good about yourself. You did exactly what you set out to do--and that motivates you to run again tomorrow. At some point your process might require you to run 1. Will running farther be more difficult? Sure, but you can do it. Plus, compared with where you started, you've already improved--and improvement feels awesome too. But who cares? You don't have to get to there. What did I have to be so happy about? Nothing, I guess. But I was the type of child who chose to be happy, and that in itself is something to celebrate. I saw songs where I could have seen complaints, and made the decision to sing.