What sets your Soul on Fire?

 

Hello everyone, I hope all is well with you. It’s a blustery Wednesday and most of the state of Michigan has closed including the company I work for. So, I’ve been snuggled under my blanket in front of the fire working on my story. That’s when the inspiration hit for this blog post. So, here we go!

Photo credit: paul+photos=moody on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC

Women through out history have been given conflicting messages from society when it comes to their role in life. Dealing with this is exasperating and draining, so here’s my take on that.

Women should decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives.

Don’t ask your partner because most likely he or she will pick what they want, and that may or may not be what’s best for you. Now, this may be uncomfortable for you because we were raised to be nice and think of other people’s feelings first, but it’s okay to be self-focused about this. You have just as much right to pursue happiness as everyone else on the face of the earth. It’s written in the constitution.

Photo on Visualhunt.com

To do this, you have to prioritize your goals. Choose the ones that are most important to you. It may be you want to stay at home and be there for your kids. It may be you want a career because accomplishments are important to you. Whatever the case may be, decide what aspirations are important to you and pursue those goals.  Don’t listen to anybody else.

To find the goals that resonate with you, you must know yourself, know what sets your soul on fire. It takes time to do this and sometimes it might be a little uncomfortable, but it’s worth the discomfort. Trust me. Once you know what’s important to you, the setting and following goals part becomes much easier.

 

Photo credit: David Reber’s Hammer Photography on Visualhunt/ CC BY-SA

As you go through this process, you’ll see not everyone has the same dream and not everyone will understand your journey, and that’s okay. We all have our own paths to take and once we accept that, we’ll be able to allow everyone in our lives to walk their own path. It doesn’t mean we won’t feel pain or discouragement, but  maybe we won’t spend so much time wallowing in those painful emotions. We’ll learn our lesson and move on.

Once we do this, things will start to flow. Decisions will be easier to make because we’ll ask ourselves, does this align with my dreams? If the answer is yes, we know what to do, and if the answer is no, we know what to do.

So, take a few minutes, or a few hours, or a few days, months, or years and think about what sets your soul on fire and then go for it!

Photo on VisualHunt.com

Thanks for taking time to read my post. I hope it resonates with you! What are your dreams and aspirations? What steps are you taking to go after them? Leave a comment! I love hearing from you!

Dreams are important to Our Mental Health

Hello everyone, I hope all is well with you. I’m back today and I want to talk about focusing on your dreams. In my opinion, dreams are important to your mental health.

Why, because our goals and aspirations are what get us out of bed in the morning. Your goals can be small or big, but if you have a huge goal, you might want to break it up into a bunch of smaller goals to make it more manageable.

Achieving our dreams provides us that motivation we need to keep doing those small mundane tasks that are boring. However, if we have our goal in sight, we can grit our teeth and get through them.

This is an important part of the process, because every dream has those moments of perfecting our technique. For example, let us say you want to be a professional basketball player. Well, in order to do that you have to be good at making baskets. So what are you going to do? You’re going to perfect your shot. And not just one shot either, you’re going to perfect your jump shot, your layup, your hook, and your free throw shot, just to name a few.

I bet you know where I’m going with this, don’t you? You’re going to have to spend a lot of time in front of the basket, just shooting the ball. If you have your goal in sight, this isn’t going to be a problem for you. You’ll grit your teeth and get through it because it’s important to achieving your goal. You’ll look forward to it.

In addition, the thing you’ll have to remember is, even professional athletes still spend a lot of time practicing their plays and perfecting their shots even after they’ve reached professional status. Because once your there, you have to keep your edge.

Another thing about goals is this, when you’re going through a particular trying time in your life, for example, like me having to do chemo. I have to for my health. However, I’m able to focus on my writing, not as much as I did before, but enough that I feel I’m moving forward with it. So staying focused on my goals is actually helping me get through this period. It helps me to make sure I’m doing what the doctor says because I want to write. I don’t want to spend my time dealing with the side effects.

So if I manage my side effects, I get to work on my next book, or on editing the ones that are coming out soon. My writing goals help me to manage my side effects so that I can work on them. And that’s good for my mental health too. I won’t be slipping into a depression because my side effects have gotten the best of me.

So there you have it. Goals are important for our mental health.

On a side note, I’ve received some awesome news! My next book “Gideon Lee” will be releasing soon! Yay!

It’s the first book in the Starlight Chronicles and once I receive my galleys, it will be set up for preorder. So crossing my fingers that all goes well and I can tell you the release date very soon!

Thanks for stopping by my blog and if you’d like to leave a comment on why goals are important to you, please do. I’d love to hear from you!