A quick message from Tony Shepherd...
Here's a freaky question for you:
Think the goals that you currently have, the goals that you're working towards or even the goals that you have achieved...
Are they actually YOUR goals?
Yes, it sounds crazy but think about it for a moment:
While you might dream of taking a year off work to travel the world, renovate a derelict windmill to live in or start an interior design business...
...Are those things really about you?
...Are they REALLY what you want to do?
...Will they genuinely make you happy?
Or are they 'borrowed' dreams that you've read about in a lifestyle magazine or seen someone else achieve?
Take swimming with dolphins as an example...
That particular goal appears on a lot of 'bucket lists' purely because it's touted as 'something everyone should do' yet for most people it's purely herd behaviour that they take part in because everyone else does.
Let me tell you the first time I saw dolphins in the wild I was on a small boat and these huge ten-foot long, powerful creatures scared the crap out of me. The last place I wanted to be was in the water with them, regardless of how magical people said the experience was.
And it's the same with life goals.
They come in trends.
I'll be totally honest here - ten years ago we almost sold up and moved to France. Lots of Brits were doing it at that time, to the point where specialist magazines and real estate agents had sprung up purely to cater for British people who were jumping on the fad.
Luckily a few personal things happened and we realised we really didn't want to make the move at all, but it was a wake-up call about how easy it was to create goals that are influenced by other people and current trends.
I know people who have spent ten or twenty years following what they believed was their dream only to find themselves unhappy and unfulfilled when they finally achieved them, because they weren't actually following their OWN dreams!
And that's not a great place to be because we only have a limited amount of lifetime to find out what we REALLY want to do