How to Live Your Dream Life
Transforming your dreams into reality is not an impossible task. With the right strategic future shaping framework in place and the dedicated commitment to taking action you can make progress each and every day toward living the life of your dreams.
Take Charge and Shape Your Future
A Bit of History: Rising From Failure – A Strategic Framework Takes Shape
As I explained in my story, I almost gave up on all of my dreams and actively shaping by envisioned future because of the serial failures I had experienced over several years.
Failure haunts you long after it has occurred. It erodes your confidence. It is demoralizing. It is a motivation killer. It hurts and comes with strong emotions: frustration, disappointment and loss – all there to discourage you from trying again. If allowed to grow stronger than your will to achieve and succeed it will devour your dreams and force you back into your shell to become a passive passenger instead of the driver in charge of your life and future.
Fearful of failing yet again, I had lost all motivation and passion to continue the planning and working that were crucial to transforming my envisioned future into reality.
Thankfully, the future vision I had created was so strong, it pulled me back and gave me the courage to fight on.
Successfully achieving my defined goals and making progress toward my dream life was important to me. Equally, it had become apparent that what I was doing wasn’t working to get me where I wanted to be and if I wanted to achieve all I had set out to do, I had to seriously evaluate the framework I was using.
Goal setting and planning were not new endeavors for me. For nearly two decades I had used one system or another to guide me in goal achievement, but what had worked in the past no longer was serving my needs.
To move forward toward the future I wanted to live, I needed to look back and examine why I was failing in endeavors that were so important to me. I delved into discovery, posing questions such as:
- What internal and external factors contributed to my successes and failures?
- What parts of the system I’d been using for nearly 20 years was working? What part was not working?
- What other planning frameworks existed out there that could benefit me?
That self-assessment coupled with extensive research on the topics of future shaping including: purpose, vision, planning, strategy, motivational psychology and time management provided valuable insight.
I also looked inward. As a former software engineer and project manager, I had extensive experience on planning, work break down structures, critical path, resource allocation, setting realistic delivery deadlines, documenting and leveraging lessons learned, and other important components that are key for successful project completions
Armed with new insights and a different strategic planning framework, I decided to test it over a two year period and tweak the framework as needed.
I was committed to taking charge of my future once again. With the new strategic framework to guide me, I felt equipped to transform my dreams into reality. I had a new strategy, a detailed plan with built in accountability, tracking and a feedback loop, a stronger, authentic sense of purpose, and better behavioral processes to keep me motivated during the rough patches.
Lessons Learned & Sharing Success
I’ve been using this strategic framework for several years to help me focus on what matters most as aligned with my vision and strategic plan, and to best optimize my time so the odds of my achieving my dream life goals increases. In 2014, I decided I wanted to share my processes with others, so they too could increase the odds of living their best life. And that’s how 52Weeks.Me was born.
I approach the the planning from a high-level five year plan then focus on the one-year plan which is broken into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily actionable tasks derived from the higher level goals and projects.
A basic overview of the strategic framework is explained below, and will be covered in depth on this site. I also developed a productive life planner that follows the framework so you can have a tool to reference to ensure you are on course for success. That planner will be available for free download on this site and will come with usage instructions.
Dream Life Strategic Framework
Defining your purpose, creating a strong, clear picture of the life you envision, developing a thorough agile strategy, taking goal-oriented action every day and reflecting on the outcomes in relation to the plan are crucial in successfully moving you from where you are to where you want to be in life.
Below I outline the five key principles that are required for shaping the future you want to live. Each of these will be discussed in detail by section.
- Understand who you authentically are – because your dream life starts with you.
- Create a vivid vision of your dream life.
- Develop a strategy to get you from here you are to where you want to be.
- Take goal-oriented action every day.
- Reflect on progress and use that feedback to improve or adjust, as needed