Do you ever feel you will never change your life in a big way? In this episode, Jimmy shares four actions to designing and reaching your dreams in life. Hold onto your hat! These actions are powerful, yet simple. The key is to put one foot in front of the other and start working toward the dreams you desire.
You will gain insight into:
- Why it is critical for you to design your dreams in the most vivid terms so that you are drawn to them daily and inspired to achieve them.
- How thinking positive will change everything about your life!
- How Jimmy spends time with people who are inspiring and avoids the naysayers and Negative Nicks in the world.
- When to capture opportunities that will change your outlook and desire in life for growth.
- Who you must surround yourself with to truly reach your dreams!
Podcast Transcription
Good morning, another beautiful day as we get spring fully underway here in the great United States. Hey, this is Jimmy Williams with Live a Life By Design. My fabulous co-host Lori Few is unable to join us this morning, but we will miss her terribly, but have her back in the recording studio next week. I tell you it’s hard to fill those shoes when you have a co-host with such talent, but at the end of the day, I’m gonna do my best to give you and impart to you some wisdom. This week for a special audience of this podcast, I’m gonna be talking to the Gen Z and the millennials primarily, but this can be applied to anyone’s life, no matter their stage of career or age on the continuum of life. Thanks for joining me. One of the things I want to ask though before we start our podcast today is would you do us a favor and go to Facebook and just join our Live a Life By Design community page?
We are getting some excellent commentary as well as questions from people that want to understand how they can make life bigger, better, and bolder for themselves. And isn’t that really what life’s about? I’m gonna give you a quick story. I’ve lost several good friends over the last five weeks to leaving this life. I’ve attended more funerals in the last four to five weeks than I really care to attend, but it is an honor to go and pay a tribute as well as reach out and support these wonderful families that have lost loved ones in the last few weeks. So it’s just part of life and as we age, guess what? Uh, I got the feeling I’m gonna go to more and more of these and you know, I’ve always said I’m gonna live to be 124 my friends. So, uh, I’m gonna probably go to a lot more of these since I’m in my very, very middle fifties.
As you know, I have a saying I, I share with everyone that says we have no choice but to get aged, in other words, to age in life. But we sure have a choice to act old and I don’t ever want to be accused of that. Hey, listen, today I got some exciting tips I wanna share with the Gen Z millennials, and as I said, anyone in their career that wants to see their full potential to be realized. Today, I’m gonna share with you four actions that each one must take to have a successful career. Whether you own your own business or whether you’re working in some kind of structure that you’re contributing in other ways as an employer or team member. These four actions are equally applicable either way. So let’s just get started. The first one is you have to establish your dreams.
Now, too many people say, well, I just don’t know what I want in life, and I’ve gotta be honest with you. I’ve got two daughters, one graduating from a major university here in Oklahoma here in just a week that is still kind of deciding what does she want to do with this career that she has spent four years building the knowledge and how does she want to go out in the marketplace and utilize this knowledge, uh, for her passions? And then, you know, it’s just one of those things I’m trying to guide her, but she must learn first in her own self to establish what dreams that she may have. Now, I do have dreams for my children. I’m sure you have dreams for your children. Those dreams though, that we have for our children are not ours to vocalize to them, but rather they must buy into defining their own dreams.
And I didn’t say simply your goals. I’m not talking about goals here. I want to see that vivid dream. You can take a piece of paper, write down how you want this dream to look, feel, smell, taste, whatever sense you want to use. But what you want to do is write down and define and establish those dreams and the reason why you need to write them with such great adjectives and descriptions that you really get on fire as it motivates you. And these dreams pull you toward them being realized in life. That’s what keeps us on that track to reach ultimate success as we each define it. Now, don’t count on success being purely one thing. Now, this is gonna sound a little crazy, but success to me isn’t about just accumulating great wealth. That may be part of it, but look at the impact we all want to make on our community for mankind. For example, we don’t simply want to exist in our communities and accumulate tons of wealth and assets. We want to put those, those resources and place ’em in our community for those in need so we can help grow the population of everyone to have a bigger, better, and bolder lifestyle.
So how many dreams can you truly have? Well, you’re gonna laugh. I think you can have personal dream in the big picture. You can have a career professional dream. But in any event, these two dreams need to be in somewhat compatibility. The reason I say that is, is if we are a personal dream is I want to spend six months a year hiking Europe and I’m in my twenties. And then the professional dream is I want a great career with a lot of opportunity to move upward. Those will not be compatible. And so we wanna make sure the dreams are compatible. So maybe we put a timeline on them, correct? So we say, I want to hike Europe for the first six months after my college graduation so that I start my career in say, January. If you graduate in May of January of the next year, and I start my career, Hey, that’s good.
I got a time definite line on that. I’ve got a a definitive, uh, you what I wish to realize out of that as a goal. And then also I’ve got my career starting. So I look now at my professional dream and then it may say, I wanna move through the ranks from entry level to the C-suite in 15 years, you know, whatever that may be. But you alone must establish your dreams. The best way to do that is simply put aside from your mind all limited thoughts, don’t have any limiting resources. You write down as if this were a perfect world with unlimited, uh, money, time, effort, creativity, whatever. You write those dreams down. The second action you must take is you must think positive. Now, I know I tell you this a lot on the podcast, but I am positive that I’ve said that’s a pun this probably at least a hundred times you can get more done and accomplish greater results from the positive mindset than you ever will from a negative thought.
It is true. I do not wish to surround myself with stinking thinking. Those people that sit around and wonder just how empty the cup is versus it being full are who’s gonna do ’em wrong today? They wake up expecting this negative attitude to control their entire day. And folks that will get you nowhere in life. As a matter of fact, I will tell you we have had discussions with some people in the world that are so negative, we simply don’t want a relationship with ’em anymore. Now, I will treat them friendly, but I don’t want to go to dinner with ’em and subject myself to two hours of listening to why the world won’t work in any form or fashion no matter what we do. As a matter of fact, I ran into a gentleman last week that I promise you he told me everything within that 30 to 45 minute time slot that was wrong in our country, what was wrong in our community, and how in the world could we let our country get in the state it is?
And I just sat there looking at him and I finally just made a comment. I said, are you done? And he said, what? And I said, are you through with your negative sport? You know, language, you’re talking about our country, the one I dearly love and our community that I cherish and enjoy, the people that I’m friends with here and and the leadership of our small community. He said, well, I guess I am. And I said, great. I said, name another country on the planet that gives you the responsibility, but yet the rights to achieve greatness on the the terms you want to define. And the opportunities are so abundant than the United States of America. There are many people, hundreds of thousands coming to this country, risking their lives, leaving their homeland to get here because they see the dream that America can realize for them. And then our communities.
You know what? When you sit there and you think negative about your local community, you’re really thinking negative about that person in the mirror. That’s right. You’re thinking negative about yourself. Why? Because you’re the community. You’re the person that’s there in that population helping to bring that community to the place that it deserves to be a beacon on the hill. For those that wish to live within the confines of that small community’s boundaries, you must think positive in my opinion. If you wanna realize those big, hairy, audacious dreams and goals, the third thing you must do is you must balance expectations and reality. Now, I’m gonna be honest with you today as I am with every episode, I struggle a little bit with setting realistic expectations. I always think if I can do it in x plus one, then I should be able to make it in X only.
In other words, I should be faster, I should be stronger, I should be better, more efficient. I believe in continual improvement, not just in my workouts from exercise, but also in all aspects of life. I have this thought process. If I can improve in some facet of my life, 1% improvement per day, that’s 365% improvement in a year, that is a big time change of life. Think about if you could increase your income simply by 1% per day in the year. If that’s the case, you will have tripled your income plus in a given year if you would mindset and focus on how to use your creativity to generate 1% improvement of your income per day.
This balance is never easy. Sometimes I liken it to when you were a child on the playground back in the first or second grade. Now, when you sat on the teeter-totter, and you know what I’m talking about, one of you sat on one end of this flat board, another person sat on the other end and in the center of this board you had a fulcrum or you had a a pipe stand that stood up to allow you to go up and down as you sat there. And what we would do, if you’ll remember back those days in childhood, we would be a little heavier on one end perhaps than the child is on the other. And what would you do? You would do a couple of things. Well, first of all, you’d take control of the weight situation and you might just hold your legs up and set that board down on the ground lifting the other child on the other end in the air.
They’re kicking their feet. You know, keep in mind these are smaller kids, right? And they’re kicking their feet saying, Hey, you know, I want to get down, let me down, and so forth. Well, the problem there is, is that there is an expectation that they could get their feet back on the ground, but the reality was you outweighed them by 15, 20 pounds and they’re not getting off that that teeter totter that easily. But we need to balance these expectations with reality while continuing to strive for our dreams. So let me give you one expectation. Starting in January of this year, 2023, I initiated a weight management goal. Now, I did not say a weight loss goal. I didn’t say a diet program. I do not like negative words. But if I had a weight management program that simply explains and in a positive term, I’m trying to reduce my overall body mass and I’ve got a one year timeline to do so.
Now, I will tell you this isn’t one of those lose weight quick things that you just gained right back in six months. I have simply curtailed certain things about my eating habits and my exercise regimen and my sleep. And what I have done so far is lost 12 pounds since January one. Now my goal is only 36 pounds, so I am well on point at the end of four months to hopefully continue at this trend. I’ll have 36 pounds off at December 31. Now, I will tell you there are some expectations I’ve made, but the reality is I’m going to probably eat some of that homemade pie at Thanksgiving. I’m going to celebrate my parents’ birthdays. They are in their upper eighties and I’m going to celebrate them with a small ya mean small piece of cake. The key to everything is, is set your expectations for what you wish to accomplish, but live in reality on the implementation phase.
So balance expectations and reality in your planning. Now the last thing, so if you’re going to establish your dreams, you’re gonna think positive and you’re gonna balance expectations in reality. This last one is the real key to the whole process, and that is capture opportunities. You know, I do not understand people that sit at home waiting for the phone to ring and offer them a job that is their ideal position. Folks, it just doesn’t work in that manner. I believe the opportunities are there. If you get up, put one foot in front of the other and pursue them. I’ll never forget the statement. Milton Burrow, the great comedian through the sixties and seventies, had a great statement. You know what? If there’s not a door opened to you for opportunity, build a door. In other words, go to those opportunities. Take a very proactive stance, knock on that door, open it up and see what can be seen and talk with whom you must to gain that opportunity.
By capturing the opportunities before you, you will find that you are growing as a person, as a professional, and you will move forward now at a faster pace toward your dream than you ever realized before. These four steps only work if you do. These, these don’t occur by you lying on the couch watching those TV shows that are what I call the boob tube and expecting to get ahead in this life. It just doesn’t work that way. There’s these statements, I hear a lot about people that can’t run very fast and then they’re being chased by a carnivore such as a line for ex, for example. And as they’re running the main thing, they always say to themselves, I do not have to be the fastest person being chased. I merely have to be faster than the slowest. The point there is, is that the line’s gonna be busy eating the person that’s the slowest and I’ll be out of danger.
So do me the favor today. Think about this week how you can establish your dreams. Write them down. If they’re not written, written down, they’re not dreams, they’re not goals to be frank with you. They’re just wishes and wishes don’t always come true goals will. If we work hard enough and dedicate ourselves to reaching them, we will be successful. The next thing I want you to do is think positive. If you find you’re around people that are not helping you, be positive of mindset, it may be time to reduce the amount of time you spend with those people. Now, I will tell you, as I’ve said on this podcast many times there are some people I could sit and listen to for weeks at a time and never have any kind of tiring. I just love to learn from these people. They’re so positive, they fill your mind up with things of I cans instead of I can’ts.
And those are the kind of people I like to spend time with. However, there’s also certain people I don’t wanna spend, but a few minutes because of the negative self-defeating language, the attitude that I’ve been defeated. So I might as well live this life I’ve been dealt. Oh my goodness, that is not the attitude we want. The third thing is if you would balance expectations with reality that is critical for you achieving success on your terms. And lastly, get up, go out and capture the opportunities that fall in line for you. Many times you think, oh, I’ve never tackled something so large. Guess what? This opportunity may be the one that breaks you out of the, of the hold of being in mediocrity till you’ve reached out excellence and greatness because it’s pushed you further and further than you thought you’d ever go in your talents, your time, and your mindset.
It’s truly a pleasure to come to you every Monday morning with an opportunity to share something that I hope inspires you and get you to that next part of your dream that you wish to achieve. And we’re trying to do this for you every Monday morning, straight from the heart. It’s the only thing we know to do to help this world become better, bigger, and bolder because you are in it. Thank you for joining us here today on Live a Life By Design. Take these four action steps, put ’em into work this week and hopefully, and I do mean this. Hopefully we’ll see you here next week when Lori and I bring you something powerfully positive to help you in life.
