Dream for Better
We all have plans and dreams for a better, more ___1___ life. Yet only a small percentage of people actually achieve their ___2___ .A good question is: why?
Recently, I was working with a young man who was ___3___ get on his feet. He had written out his goals, and he had powerful reasons why he wanted to achieve these goals. But after weeks of trying, he was still not much further along.
So we took some time to try to understand what was holding him ___4___ .As we examined his average day, it became apparent to me that he was much too ___5__ .He was spending lots of time doing lots of different things. I ___6___ that most of what he was doing was not very important in the greater scheme of things.
We did some exercises to ___7___ which activities were important, which ones were urgent and which ones was filling (or killing) time. As it turned out, most of the things he was doing throughout the day were filling time. He wasn't comfortable ___8___ he was very busy, so he created things that needed to be done. He was always working on something—yet at the end of the day, he had rarely accomplished any tasks to move him closer to the life he wanted.
This behavior is fairly easy for an outside observer to spot but extremely difficult to self-diagnose. The ___9___ is to slow down and get comfortable with being still, with contemplating what we really want and whether our actions are suitable for our goals. Many of our activities are avoidance activities: we do things to fill up the time and thus avoid having to do more difficult tasks. It wasn't easy, but once the young man finally accepted that he needed to do less overall but more of the important things, his life took a dramatic ___10___ for the better.