What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up
By Julie McDonald
“What do you want to be when you grow up”?
Monday 5 February 2006 From the desk of Julie McDonald
Can you remember your parents, relatives or their friends asking you: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
You then probably cringed with this question. You looked up and saw they were waiting for your reply. You could have been thinking “Here we go again…..” or “I don’t know”, but you said “an astronaut, or a doctor or a scientist or a millionaire” Just to impress and watch them laugh and then they usually give you a pat on the head and sent you off to play!!!
Sound familiar?
For me, I said I wanted to be a Nurse! So before I left school, my mum sent me off to do what was called Candy Striping at our local hospital – which was voluntary work assisting the nurses. Well, the best part was the hot lunch at the canteen at the end of my shift. It definitely wasn’t the work – I just fainted at the sight of a needle or blood!!! Certainly not what is required of an aspiring Nurse. I looked like a piece of Candy in my uniform as well! A cool look for a 16 year old.
At school my passion was not in the subjects we were taught, it was in understanding what make people think and ‘tick’ and to understand why they said the things they said in the way they said them. I never stopped asking ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘what’. I used to ask people ‘why do we have to believe what is told to us, why can’t we experience it to just learn ourselves?’. Even though this was a dream of knowing these answers about human behaviour, I allowed myself to be led into a career of Commerce! My goodness, for a creative soul, this was terrible.
I did find how to live up to my dreams, and I will share this with you along with a tool and a strategy to use to live your dreams, later in this article.
Then at the age of 36, I gained entry to the beginning of my Life! Tertiary Education. I felt like I was Julie Walters in Educating Rita. I found my passion and followed my dreams to do exactly what I wanted. This has been my path ever since. With even further study, I now have a practice and work as a Therapist and Life Coach.
I consider what I am doing is giving and guiding people to where they want to go, what they want to achieve and create the life of their dreams.
My clients can easily tell me what is ‘wrong’ or what they don’t have, but when I ask them “What do you want”, they usually look at me with a blank expression, then pause, because they now have to find the positive words of what they want or try to remember what their dreams are.
It is easy to be always denying our ‘good’ strengths and concentrate on what we believe we are not or need in order to have that ‘perfect’ life and achieve true happiness! Most of the time we believe true happiness is outside of ourselves that we have to go out and find it, for example in another person or another job, when in actual fact, we have everything we need, it is a matter of just tapping into it.
I picked up a book recently by the Dalai Lama, opened it and read the following: Human happiness and human satisfaction must ultimately come from within oneself. It is wrong to expect some final satisfaction to come from money or from a computer.
Well, I believe we can all feel, at some stage in our life, that we really aren’t doing or achieving what we want whether it is in work, sport, relationships or financial. It can be easy to accept what we have, loose our motivation for achievement and never reach those goals and dreams which we had as a child. We often can feel ‘trapped’ by the responsibilities we put ourselves in – house, family, lifestyle and money.
So, what happened after we ‘grew up”?? Remember back to the last year of school, we believed the world was at our feet. We saw all the opportunities and heard people telling us ‘the world is your oyster, go and get it’. For a while after school we just enjoyed the sleeping in or in my case, hanging out at the beach. Then reality seems to hit ‘we need money’. This statement which I believe most young teenagers say to themselves remind me of one of my favourite quotes by Mahatma Gandhi:- “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world….as in being able to remake ourselves.”
I see my role with my clients is to assist them in finding their path (Life Coaching) or assist them in healing the past hurt and anger that is holding them back from achieving what they want (Therapy). Many seek a ‘magic wand’ which I am sure they think I have stashed away in my bottom desk drawer. Wouldn’t that be amazing if I did? What I can offer them, is to teach them some tools to use as well as assist them through techniques and set them up with strategies to cope when they need it. Even though one of my tools is Hypnotherapy, there certainly is no magic involved.
You see, we all truly have this type of magic within ourselves. We just lose sight of our goals and dreams and become pushed down in our life and world.
Not that long ago, I moved from a small township to the big city of Sydney - Australia. My daughter was accepted into a gifted and talented high school for drama – so our journey now is amongst very busy people and most of them live like they are on a ‘roller coaster’. The life style of meeting needs of city living, pressure from work, pressure to make money to live in a standard they set themselves. My clients are now people who have truly lost sight of their dreams and believe they don’t know how to get off the roller coaster ride of city living. They suffer, addictions – food, nicotine, drugs, gambling, depression and so on.
I teach them many skills and strategies. They see me as their ‘teacher’ but people like me have just walked their walk and talk their talk.
Strategy One strategy I would like to pass on to you now, is the strategy of modeling someone who inspires you and has achieved what you want to achieve.
If you can, spend some time watching them, asking them questions or read their biographies and find out what makes them ‘tick’.
Study their values, their beliefs, even watch their physiology and adopt into your life what you believe will assist you in achieving what you want.
Tool Another tool I will give you is the power of positive thinking. Create what you want by ALWAYS focusing on exactly what you want. See it, hear it and feel it. The words we think and the words we say will create who we are and the life we are in. We live by our beliefs and values. Only listen and speak words to what you desire and want. Don’t use words of what you don’t want.
To lose weight: - the negative statement would be “I look fat and will never lose weight”. The positive statement would be “I now am focusing on eating healthy food’ or ‘I look great now that I am losing weight’.
To quit smoking:- the negative statement would be “It is so hard to give up smoking”. The positive statement could be “I now am working towards a healthy body” or “I am now a non smoker” .
And most importantly, never, never, never give up!!!!
“Whether you think you will succeed or not, you are right” Henry Ford
All the best in achieving your dreams and goals. Please feel free to contact me and tell me what you think of this article.
Julie Web: www.juliemcdonaldsolutions.com Email: julie@juliemcdonaldsolutions.com
Julie uses a ‘tool box’ of skills and strategies which makes her outstanding in her field. She is also a vibrant communicator, a compassionate therapist, inspirational life coach and dynamic facilitator/trainer. Her life has been dedicated to the study and learning of human behaviour, language and communication. She is especially talented in taking a learned skill and reducing it into easy understanding in a teaching or therapy situation. She is particularly popular in her private practice as a Clinical Hypnotherapist and Master Practitioner in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming).
web: www.juliemcdonaldsolutions.com
email: julie@juliemcdonaldsolutions.com
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