4 Steps to Getting What You Want

While we entertain the idea of success requiring long and elaborate schemes and strategies to achieve, in reality, it only requires four basic steps. If you do these four steps, you can achieve anything you set out to achieve.

4 steps to success:

1) Know what you want

4) Do it

Sounds simple right? What usually happens in a situation is a person really doesn’t even know for sure what they want, and instead hold a vague and obscured idea of what they want, while focusing almost exclusively on what they don’t want or fear is going to happen instead, while conjuring up manipulative schemes on how to change what they don’t want. Then, even when they realize what they want and what they must do to create it, they’re not willing to do it, and so attempt to create it with whatever behavior they’re comfortable with, even while knowing it won’t produce the outcome they’re trying to produce. Instead, they continue doing what they’ve been doing and are comfortable with, while doing it more intensity or in a more pronounced way, while hoping it’ll produce a new result.

What’s the definition of insanity?
Doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome.

So once you realize what you want and what it’ll take to produce it, and are willing to do it, you then have to discipline yourself to actually do it. It’s the actual practice that produces the equivalent physical results. You’ll only get out of it exactly what you put into it. Yet discipline doesn’t have to come by forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to, but rather by learning how to use your mind in new and creative ways that are actually enjoyable and empowering.

Creation and transformation are not something you bring about simply by thinking about it, but rather by actually doing something. You have to first form a clear idea in your imagination of yourself doing it, and then actually go through the motions of doing it. You have to gear all of your behaviors to align with the desired outcome. You have to eliminate any behavior that acts to contradict it. When going into a situation where there are a lot of uncertainties and unknowns, you need to hold the desired outcome in mind and use it like a navigation system to direct and streamline all your behaviors. Pay attention to your own thought processes to insure that you don’t fall back into old tendencies that’ll sabotage your current creation by reenacting old behaviors.

If you’re not sure what you need to do to create the outcome you desire, then find somebody you know that has done what you want to do. Find someone who has created a similar idea to yours, and then study them to find their strategy. What was their mind-set, their attitude, and how did they actually go about it as a process? Once you elicit their strategy, you can use it to form your strategy in a similar manner, while adapting it to your unique differences and circumstances. You can model their behaviors and practice adopting the same mental attitude and outlook.

Once we know what we want to create and have a strategic process for creating it as an ultimate outcome, we need to simultaneously realize that in order to achieve it we need to lead others psychologically to form a state of cooperation. The best way to do this is by communicating with them in a way that forms in their mind the idea that we want them to participate in co-creating. We then communicate it through an emotional expression that makes it compelling and desirable. We engage them emotionally in a way that produces the natural behaviors necessary to act out and thereby create the desired experience as a process with a specific outcome. As we go along and the creative process is in motion, we monitor feedback in a consistent manner, and interject whatever form of communications we need to make the adjustments we need to make to keep the situation moving in the direction we want it to go, producing what we intended to produce as a variation.

So always start any creative process with a clear and specific idea of what you want as an outcome or experience. Train your mind to focus repeatedly on what you want and what needs to be done. Then form your communication out of that outcome as if it’s already true, forming it as a reality for yourself and others. Communicate with positive emotions in a way that forms in your mind and everyone else’s involved, the idea you want them to cooperate in creating and with the emotions you want them to act out of as a means of creating it. Our willingness to do something comes largely by how we form it as an idea in our mind, what emotions we associate to it, and what we tell ourselves about it that forms either an eagerness for it, or an apprehension around it.

Communication begins with how we talk to ourselves as imagined thought-processes that form an inner experience of the desired outer experience. When we realize that we’re apprehensive about doing what we need to do to create what we want to create, we have to look closely at how we’re presenting the idea to ourselves and what we’re telling ourselves about it that makes it apprehensive. Examine it for the emotional quality motivating it and the belief involved in how we’re presenting it to ourselves, then work directly on ourselves to learn how to tell a new story about the behaviors necessary to perform it in an intentional and deliberate manner. We have to present the idea to ourselves in a way that makes it compelling and enjoyable to do. We have to reform it so it creates a feeling of enthusiasm at the thought of it, knowing what we’re going to make happen by way of performing it.

Allow yourself to always notice that the creative force in any idea is the feeling that compels it into existence through us. When we get an idea that’s inspiring and causes us to aspire towards it, then realize that in order to do it we have encounter our fears and step outside our comfort zone in order to “act it out†and thereby producing it, we can have a tendency to create a feeling of pain and suffering “around†doing what we need to do. This internal experience affects every aspect of how we self-express, and comes across in how we communicate it through our actions and the very nature of our communication. This is the most basic form of self-sabotage. We have to realize that the idea as a vision for reality and the process for creating it are unified by the “feeling†we embody and “act out of†as the means of creating it.

How we experience the process will determine how we experience the outcome it produces. If we struggle and suffer to do something, we’ll only act to create more of the reality of suffering and struggling. The feeling “is†the experience of both the process and the outcome, which is only maintained through continuing the process that created it. Whatever feeling we attach to an idea that produces our emotional state in producing that idea as an expression, only acts to give us more of the same feeling once it becomes a reality. The outer reality is the equivalent to the inner reality, united by the feeling that animates the idea as a pattern or design for creating. Whatever emotion we attach to an idea determines how we use that idea to tell a story as an expression of the emotion, which simultaneously produces natural behaviors as a direct reflection or expression of our inner state. This is a cosmic law, and is always true. Something created in misery, only produces more misery. Something created with enthusiasm, amplifies the feeling of enthusiasm in it’s creation.

So when you form a clear idea in your imagination of what you want to create in your life, then you come to the part of “how†to actually do it, what it’ll require on your part to produce, notice your own response, and what it creates as an inner feeling around the behavior or actions necessary to do it. If it’s fearful, apprehensive, or conflicts with your values in some way, work first on transforming your own attitude necessary to perform it in a way that makes it enjoyable, exciting, passionate, or serving a higher purpose. See it for the good it’ll produce, how it’ll benefit others, and what it’ll contribute to the betterment of humanity. Form all the behaviors and actions necessary to produce it out of very positive feelings. Recognize the fear and limited beliefs involved, and find somebody else who’s successfully done what you desire to do, and elicit their style and strategy for doing it. Then practice imitating it by modeling it taking on the same mind-set and cultivating it internally. Cater your approach to the same type of approach, and run the behaviors through your mind as a mental rehearsal. See and feel yourself doing them with a sense of playfulness and enjoyment, or in a way that’s passionate and charismatic. Change the meaning of what you’re doing so that it supports your values instead of undermining or contradicting them. Form your behaviors as a performance in your mind until you get it just like you want it. Then repeat it several times until it starts to come naturally. Then dedicate yourself to practice, modifying whatever you to until you get it just right. Until it starts consistently producing the outcome and type of experience you desire.

Dr. Linda Gadbois
Personal Development Consultant and Transformational Coach