By Success Books Writer Denise Turney @ (www.chistell.com)

Funny how the mind creates the illusion that it’s Simple Simon easy to fulfill goals. You see the end before you start pursuing a goal. Within seconds, the beat of your heart picks up. Images of your success float with clarity across your mind. Joy, peace, and hope are constant emotions, remaining with you like faithful friends. Certainty is your friend. Then, you start working to fulfill your goal. Day after day, you’re forced to wait. Weeks and months pass – little change in your life. How do you keep going when faced with delayed success?

Facing Delayed Success

Do you give up, forfeit your goal? Although this choice could save you time, money, and disappointment, it won’t erase your goal. Deep within, the seed of your dream remains. Even if years pass, regret could jab you. So, you try again.

Perhaps you work a demanding job to gain access to funds to invest in your goal. At most, you’re rewarded with minimal success. Creatives aren’t the only people who experience this. Business owners, educators, inventors, scientists, healthcare professionals, ministers, and community leaders walk this path.

In a way, it’s as if the mind is playing a game, planting twists, turns, and setbacks on your path to see if you’ll figure out what’s really going on. At some point, you start to witness and accept the link between your hidden thoughts and what transpires in your life.

Get To Know Yourself When Success Is Delayed

And you start to get to know yourself better.

Keep going. The goal or dream is within you for a reason. Fulfilling it will show you a lot about yourself, more than you might discover any other way.

Yet, you can’t keep doing what you’ve already done. Following someone else’s path also may not yield the results you’re seeking. Instead, you must pivot.

Just don’t pivot too soon. The only guidance that will work comes from within you. So, you must listen to your true Self. Finally, you must connect with your true Self.

Should you have been on the path of pursuing your goal for decades absent good results, you could be stuck. In this case, you might not be willing to try a different strategy. Push. Demand. Push. Trying the same old approach again and again might have become so familiar that you dare not consider trying a new way.

Delayed Success and Getting Stuck

Signs that this has occurred and that you’re stuck include:

• Unwillingness to track the return on your efforts (if you hate looking at reports, analytics, and spreadsheets, you might not want to examine the results of your best efforts)
• Focusing your energy on fantasy (daydreaming and inventing night dreams of you achieving success even as you move further away from the fulfillment of your goal)
• Feeling angry when someone ask you if you’ve achieved success yet
• Telling yourself that your ability to fulfill your goal rests with a source that’s beyond you, outside your realm of responsibility (in this case, you’d have to “wait” for this external source to magically give you what you want)

Avoid Digging In Your Heels Against Success

Dig in your heels as it regards dream fulfillment, and you may be forced to face reality. As tempting as it might be to hide in fantasy, don’t turn to illusion. Face what’s happening and pivot.

To repeat an earlier statement, consider using analytics to “face” what’s happening. This is important because great effort doesn’t always yield great success. It took me years to accept this. Deep down, I knew this truth, but I wasn’t willing to face it.

Combined with the belief that putting more effort into my goal would get me what I wanted; I had the belief that the goal would be fulfilled at a specific time. Today it seems “silly” that I believed that. Once I became aware of what I was doing, I focused on stopping, de-escalating, and removing myself from that mind-habit.

Working Hard For Success and Waiting

Despite my efforts, I kept believing that hard work and “waiting” for a “special” day to arrive would fulfill my goal. Talk about a painful dance.

If you’ve done this, you know what that struggle feels like. Life becomes a dance of “harder work” and “waiting”. Back and forth you go.

Return to analytics. Are you scaling upward? Or are you spinning in circles? Evidence that you’re scaling upward include:

• Increased sales, engagement, improved tests results, more peaceful relationships, etc.
• Decreased time, energy, and financial investment to yield increased sales, engagement, etc.
• Improved mental state (more peace and appreciation)
• More positive energy
• Feeling of openness, a welcomed lightness

Building Success Confidence

Confidence that you can achieve your goal is real, not fantasy, when you’re scaling upward. Why? You have evidence that the goal is coming to pass. For example, if your goal is to earn $250,000 a year from the sale of soups, salads, and sandwiches at your downtown café, your confidence would build the first year you netted $220,000, especially if the most you had previously netted annually was $150,000.

Gaining these results isn’t magic. Considering the above example, to yield better results, it wouldn’t be a surprise if somewhere along the way, you pivoted. You faced results and realized that you must pivot to fulfill your goal.

Signs It’s Time To Pivot

Here are signs that you must pivot to fulfill your goal:

• You’re committed to fulfill your goal and refuse to quit
• Results prove that you’re stuck
• Analytics show that instead of moving closer to your goal, you’re drifting away from your goal
• Fear that you will fail has become a constant companion
• Distrust in your true Self as it relates to your goal and your broader life has grown

If you believe that something is innately wrong with you, and that’s why you haven’t fulfilled your goal, that’s another sign that it’s time to pivot. Don’t give up on your dream. There’s nothing innately wrong with you. You can do it!

How To Pivot Toward Success

Pivot. Try a different strategy. Ways to pivot include:

• Meditating, getting still, and entering silence – until you receive inner guidance as to what you should do
• Adding new products and services to your catalog
• Updating existing products and services
• Partnering with a different business, creative, educator, agent, minister, etc., someone who has already achieved what you are trying to achieve
• Utilizing different messaging or marketing tools and techniques (if your goal involves sales)
• Earning a different certification, license, or degree
• Ending an abusive relationship to give yourself space to heal
• Listening to deep meditation tapes at night while you sleep
• Eliminated financial debt
• Taking money management courses
• Journaling to encourage hidden parts of your thought system to surface to your consciousness
• Incorporating actions into your day that help you love yourself
• Working with a career or life coach and holding yourself responsible for improving your circumstances

Balance And Success Strategies

The above list is not exhaustive. Seek strategies and actions you can take to pivot, to start moving closer to your goal. To stay balanced and encouraged while you pivot and continue doing what it takes to achieve your goal:

• Sleep deeply at night
• Eat a healthy diet
• Drink plenty of fresh water
• Exercise
• Read empowering books
• Surround yourself with positive, empowered people
• Trust Source
• Search for good in each day
• Practice appreciation

Pivot Your Way To Success

Trust what created you. Trust the Creator. Continue to trust what planted the dream in you. Although you might not see it, someone is watching you. It’s as if someone has been planted to be the witness to what happens when you pivot, don’t quit, and fulfill your goal – a good goal.

Let that happen, and your life could impact hundreds, thousands, or more people. That’s what happens when a Source given goal is fulfilled. The fulfilled goal blesses many people. So, keep going. Pivot. Succeed.

By Success Books Writer Denise Turney @ (www.chistell.com)

New beginnings are disguised as challenges, setbacks, hardships and, surprisingly, boredom. Feeling bored with the routines in your life? You could be ready to make a change. Does life feel like one hardship, setback or challenge after another?

Somewhere within yourself there could be an ongoing request for you to make a life shift. Sounds great. If only it were easy. One way to make shifting into new beginnings easier is to do the work to get clear about what you truly want.

Do You Really Know What You Want?

Here are a few steps that could help you discover what you really want. Try taking these steps at the same time each day, as this could help you to spot consistency in your thinking. Taking these steps at the same time each day can also help to reveal when and how slight routine changes (i.e., getting out of bed earlier or later, working three extra hours in a single day, hiking for the first time in 10 years) impact your overall convictions, mood, insights and desires.

• Sit still for three to five minutes when you wake. Pay attention to the first thoughts that enter your awareness.
• Write your early thoughts in a journal. Another option is to type your early thoughts in a spreadsheet. This technique can make it easy to spot consistencies and shifts in thoughts that cross your mind.
• Talk with a licensed counselor or a trustworthy friend about areas of your life that concern you. After a month of conversation ask the counselor or friend to tell you about trends in your day-to-day life that they’ve noticed based on what you shared.
• Should you be experiencing an emotion predominantly (i.e., sadness, anger, excitement, fear, hope, peace), sit with a blank journal and ask yourself why this emotion keeps surfacing, sticking to you like glue. Don’t worry. It’s possible to work through any emotion. For now, find out why your mind is functioning the way that it is.
• Before you retire to bed, draw two pictures – one that describes your day and the other that describes how you feel about the day. At the end of the month, look at the pictures with an open mind. Again, see if you spot consistent patterns. Also, take note of changes in the pictures.

How to See Beneath the Surface to Enter New Beginnings

Meditating may prove effective when it comes to surfacing thoughts and beliefs buried in your subconscious. Regardless of the action you choose the biggest investment you will make is time. When it comes to discovering what you truly want, it’s a wise investment.

Give yourself a month. See what you find. As a tip, you might unbury core erroneous beliefs if you practice two or more steps a day.

Another tip is to seek professional support should you feel or think that you need it. Each person is different, and you might need deep subconscious work, the type of work that you need a professionally licensed and experienced therapist to work through.

After you discover what you’re focusing on daily, which emotions are currently dominant in your life and why these emotions keep showing up in your life, it’s time to consider exactly what you want now. Play, becoming a student who’s learning for the first time, and exploration can work wonders with this.

Steps to Shift into New Beginnings

For starters, give yourself 10 minutes a day to play. That’s right. Even adults can play. Pay attention to what you gravitate toward. These following explorative activities could also help you discover what you want:

• Look through different types of magazines (i.e., arts, music, home and garden, fishing, archeology, cooking, education). See if you can spot magazine articles or pictures that capture your attention. Set these pictures and articles aside with journal writings, pictures you drew in the daily practices, etc. Together they could provide strong clues to what you most want to do now.
• Search college course catalogs and see if you’re drawn to a specific course. No need to enroll in a course; for now, you’re simply exploring.
• Ask yourself what you would do if you could do anything that you wanted, considering that the goal is to find work that pays a good income and work that causes you to feel happiness.
• Attend several networking group events, asking attendees what they do and how they enjoy it. Something someone shares might give you insight into what you want to do now.

Stay Open – More New Beginnings are Coming

Throughout the process, keep an open mind. Be open to trying different things too. Keep exploring until you make your life’s new big discovery – surfacing what you most want to do now.

Believe it or not, exploration, asking questions, talking with other people, etc. is how you got to where you currently are. In other words, you’ve already done what you’re trying to do. Because of that, you know you can do it again.

Be patient with yourself. After all, you’re the best friend you have. Make sure you’re a real good friend to yourself. Care enough about yourself to get clear about what you want to do now, to discover how you want your life to change, move and flow.

It might not look like it, but what you’re going through is ongoing. Why? Life in this world is constant motion above and below the surface. Things are always changing in this world.

Ways to Stay Motivated as You Fulfill New Starts

Motivate yourself by celebrating each daily practice, each explorative step, and each action you take to step into new beginnings. Fortunately, there are many ways to celebrate stepping into new beginnings. For example, you could:

• Leave work an hour early, with your manager’s approval if you work for an employer, to celebrate a significant career move, starting a healthy exercise routine, leaving an abusive relationship or seeking help to end an addiction.
• Spend a Saturday simply relaxing, doing no chores – nothing you don’t want to do
• Sleep an hour later the day after you make a change
• Treat yourself to a bowl of fresh fruit or a delicious vegetable smoothie
• Take an out-of-town trip to a town you’ve wanted to visit for months, perhaps years

The list goes on. In fact, for fun – see how many additional ways to celebrate stepping into new beginnings you can add to the list.

Continue until you step all the way inside newness. Journal writings, spreadsheets and other documents you use to record your progress may prove profoundly helpful when you face your next life shift. So, consider keeping those documents. And treasure the change you’re moving through. Stay positive and expect the best.