Your Year to Be Bold

Everybody has dreams; they are born of childhood ambitions, the characters we admire, the stories we consume, and an instinct to live our lives to the full. Make your dream a reality, with advice from Julia Bickerstaff, director of Butterfly Coaching and author of How to Bake a Business (Allen & Unwin; $24.99)

1. Feel your dream

Write a letter to yourself from the future about how fantastic it feels to have achieved your dream. For example, if your goal is to buy a bike, write to yourself about how much you enjoy riding to work or about how great it is to take the kids for a Sunday ride. Turn your dream into a feeling, rather than just a pie-in-the-sky idea. The action of writing down what life looks like in the future gets the brain working subconsciously to achieve that reality. The emotional experience drives you forwards and gets you thinking about how good it will feel to run faster or to own your own house.

2. Be accountable

Sharing your goal with other people means you're more likely to hold yourself to it. Say, for example, that you're trying to get into running and have set yourself the challenge of finishing a marathon. Try keeping yourself accountable by logging on to Facebook and telling everyone how many kilometres you do each day. People can write back and cheer you on, which will make you feel great and keep you going. If you're not on Facebook, find five friends and email them every day or once a week. This method is just as effective for starting a business as it is for losing weight.

3. Make it happen

Often people have a goal but don't know how they're going to reach it. Maybe your goal is to afford a certain sort of house in two years, but you don't know how you'll finance it. Focus on one step at a time. You don't necessarily have to know what all your steps are going to be; just make a small movement in the right direction every day. Weight loss is a good example: you may not make any significant inroads on any one day, but you might have done something small—such as had a herbal tea when you wanted a hot chocolate. This is still a positive step. Even something as small as brainstorming a name for your project is a great move forward, and it's very motivating.

4. Designate a cheer squad

Find somebody who can help keep your enthusiasm up. This could be a mentor or a coach or, more informally, a spouse or friend. It's very common to set goals, start, and then fall to pieces in the middle, because it is really hard to maintain new habits. If you have somebody interested enough in what you want to achieve, that goes a long way! It keeps you fighting and gives you someone to share the achievement with when you realise your success.

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