Making wishes a reality

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Wishes get a bad rep sometimes. Wishing is seen as a dreamy-nonsensical foray into ‘la-la land” and not very practical. “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride,” as the saying goes. Dreamers don’t live in reality. They need to get their heads out of the clouds and snap out of it. Right? Wrong.

Wishes are where the seeds of possibility are sown. A life without wishes would be a colorless, dismal march through a series of mundane, rote tasks en route to a quiet, unassuming death. Without wishes, no expansion would happen, no exploration would occur beyond the Known and the Seen.

That being said, merely wishing doesn’t make anything so.

If wishes are the seeds, they also provide the fuel that propels actions.

“You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.” ~ Richard Bach

There is a significant step between wishing and action, without which you cannot hope to succeed: belief. You must believe that you are capable of attaining your wish. Most of the time, when we first have a wish, we have no way of making it come true immediately. Our wishes are usually outsized and unrealistic compared to our skills and resources we have initially. However, making your wish come true is a process. One of my takeaways from SOBCon11? Believe, then act.

By opening yourself up to possibility, you have changed the nature of your reality. Furthermore, through the combination of wishing and belief, you will have a source of energy that sustains you when your spirits flag and doubt creeps in. Believe, then act. Your options will increase in direct proportion to your actions.

Another central element of making your wishes come true is determining the motivations behind your wish.

“Are you fit company for the person you wish to become?” ~ Unknown

When I was a little kid, I would wish for the dishes to wash themselves. I would wish for a teleporter to materialize at the school so that I didn’t have to walk through the rain to get home. These are “tissue paper wishes” based on immaturity, the desire to escape and are ephemeral, silly exercises in futility.

As you mature, take note of the reasons behind your wishes. Are they selfish ones? Do you wish to better another’s life or experience? What do you ask for? Power? Money? Fame? Why? Having the answers to these questions helps you to make your wishes come true.

We cannot attract anything for which we do not have the capacity to receive.

When we wish for something, we must examine our thoughts and our actions. If they are out of alignment, our desires cannot be fulfilled. From this skewed perspective, we will not recognize the answer to our wish, even if it is wrapped in neon tape and standing before us, covered in blinking lights.

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

Anything that currently exists was once a wish. Take a moment today and jot down some of your wishes. See if there is a pattern. Have any come true? Which ones remain to be granted? What steps can you take today to help bring them to fruition?

——-

Molly Cantrell-Kraig is a woman with drive. Possessing an innate sense of purpose and a pragmatic, solution-based approach to empowering people, she fused these two traits in order to establish Women With Drive Foundation. Based upon its founder’s personal history, Women With Drive Foundation is a means through which Cantrell-Kraig may effect change on both a micro and macro level. By providing women with something as essential as personal transportation in order to transition them from poverty to prosperity, she, through Women With Drive Foundation, seeks to empower women to help them help themselves. Through this action, the individual applicant benefits, as does society as a whole. Follow Molly on twitter as @mckra1g or @WWDr1ve (Women With Drive Foundation) or “Like” them on facebook.

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Thanks to Week 305 SOBs

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They take the conversation to their readers,
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I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

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Thanks to Week 304 SOBs

Filed Under SOB Business, Successful Blog | 4 Comments

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Want to become an SOB?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Thanks to Week 303 SOBs

Filed Under SOB Business, Successful Blog | Leave a Comment

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Want to become an SOB?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Get Off the Bus and Head Toward True North With Burning Desire

Filed Under Business Life, Community, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 4 Comments

Leaders Live Up to Their Own Standards

It’s a story of politics at work …

Blindedsided by a Romulan Warbird

It was a Friday afternoon in a past life, as they say. I was working late when Dina stopped by. Dina managed a new editor, Marilyn, who also worked on one of my projects. We often conferred on Marilyn’s progress. I thought Dina had come in to add something to our discussion.

As a social person, Dina was part of a catty little clique that had opinions on everything. I avoided both the group and their opinions when I could.

Dina smiled sweetly as she came into my office, sat herself down, and offered some minor pleasantries — always her style. Then she dropped her cloaking device and hit me head-on like a Romulan Warbird.

“We’ve been talking about you, and we’ve decided that we don’t like you talking about people when they’re not in the room, . . . in particular, we don’t like you talking about Marilyn.” She proceeded to use a good twenty minutes describing everything that was wrong with me as a person, which included a sidebar on why no person on the planet could possibly stand to work with me. I should have seen it coming when I heard that lovely phrase, “It’s probably none of our business, but . . .”

I lived the word stunned.
As I sat facing rapid fire, I literally had to restart my brain to process the information. My thinking kept looping around the same question in amazement. Did she hear what she had just said? It was a full-out admission that she had been doing exactly what she was shooting me for. In my neighborhood that wasn’t fair. Add to that the fact that she was the only one with whom I had discussed Marilyn.

My brain was misfiring. The opening narration from The Outer Limits was being read by Rod Serling as Salvadore Dali painted the scene in my office somewhere in the far reaches of my mind.

This female sitting across from me was an editor and a manager. What had she done with the facts? The only plausible answer was: she had no use for the facts. Dina had been passive-aggressive since I’d arrived at the company. She thought that my job should have been hers. So I don’t suppose that she was predisposed to caring about the facts. I let her say her piece. It was brutal. I went home.

My natural response is to fix things. I looked for ways to resolve this. Every solution that presented itself had me giving up ground. I didn’t want her friendship, but I didn’t need to be bullied again either. It was a miserable weekend. It took self-respect to go to work that Monday.

Had I been wiser then, I wouldn’t have wasted a weekend trying to fix the un-fixable. I know now that even if I’d saved Warbird’s life, I’d be that awful person who’d somehow done a good thing. That’s how those things work.

Every now and then I hear about Warbird and occasionally bump into her at conferences. I always stop to talk. She always seems nervous. I like to think that I’ve changed. Maybe she will too. Then again, maybe she won’t. She’s still at the old company — in a job she got when I left.

Me? I’m long gone from there.

How did I get to be someone who worked with people like that?

I had changed myself to fit into the transportation that took me to the buildings where I worked in the jobs that I got because I mastered the right skill sets. Often I was bored and didn’t feel successful. I was managing not leading. I didn’t know it, but I was working for a paycheck or working just to work.

Some days I asked myself, “Am I good enough to be here?” and “What am I supposed to do next?” “Will I be on the bus that’s going from good to greatness?” I was on a path — the one laid out before me — but I had totally lost track of myself

Once I even said yes when the right answer was no.

Now I see that I’m not the only one who has done that…

Yet leaders don’t ride a bus to get from good to great. They walk their own path.

The more Ghandi, Oprah, Mandela, Catherine the Great, Bill Gates, Melissa Mayers, and Steve Jobs came to know themselves, the better leaders they became. They lived and lived up to their own standard of greatness.

True leaders do their own thinking –they know who they are and know that their true north comes from the inside. They own their values, skills, and experience. They are moved by a burning desire to build what they can’t build alone. That burning desire is what defines their path.

It’s not whether you’re an entrepreneur or working in a warehouse that makes you a leader. It’s whether we own our values and our path. Then we can contribute deeply and clearly to any business we choose to make part of our lives.

We become a leader the day we decide who we are, where we’re going, and how we’ll get ourselves there.
Who’d want to follow you if you haven’t done that?

What have you decided about yourself and your own true north?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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