Live Your Dreams

Our dreams begin from a young age and evolve with age. Somewhere along the way, some of us lose sight of our dreams. We crush our dreams with own hands because we feel foolish into believing we could actually achieve them. We have so many other things to deal with—bills, children, lack of money, and lack of time—that we put our dreams on the backburner, leaving them there for so long that they start to burn.

However, dreams are magical. They have a way of coming back, but they need your help to become whole again. When you find someone else living your dream, you begin to wish you never had given up in the first place. Do you reignite your dream?
No, you sit there, wondering the “what if” question forever. Do you know how that other person you envy got there? And no, it wasn’t all luck. They met their share of obstacles, barriers, fears, and excuses, but they took the necessary steps to push them aside and continue chasing their dream.

Something, you can still do, but only if you want to. I do not want you to trap your dream in your head, but I want you relive it. I want your dream to be your reality. So, I offer five steps to make that happen:

1. Recognize Your Dream

If you have a vision or a desire in life, make note of them and write them down to remind you what you want to achieve. You can visualize your life’s dream by creating a vision board and brainstorm how your vision looks from your eyes.

2. Establish Goals

Once you have a vision in mind, you need to write down a couple of goals you need to achieve to make your vision your reality. Will your dream help others? If you have children, yes, it will help them. You will be able to put your child through college and give them the basic necessities needed to live a good and poverty-free life. Come up with objectives as well.

3. Develop an Action Plan

Look at the goals you have written down and use them to create a viable action plan. You want to create an action plan for each goal you have listed down. Next to each goal, write down the steps you need to take to achieve them. The small and doable tasks that you create will also need a deadline.

4. Take Action

You have mapped out your vision and now is the time to take action. Do not falter now because you have come too far to get cold feet. If one of your actions does not work in your favor, ask experienced people around you who can help you out and use their advice to modify your action plan.

5. Keep Moving Forward

The journey to live your dream is going to be riddled with obstacles and barriers. They will stop you and try to deter you so you step back. Do not admit defeat, but make it your aim to conquer them. You just need to remain dedicated and committed and keep looking ahead. Keep your vision in sight and your dream will be within your reach and in no time, you will find yourself living it.

Breaking through the Glass Ceiling of “Almost” (Part 2 of 2)

If you read part one of my two-part post, you’ll remember we discussed fear and uncertainty and self-sabotage that prevent you from completing your goals to achieve success. For part two, I will discuss two more obstacles that stand between us and success— external oppositions and self-doubt.

3. You External Oppositions Influence You

When you are fully committed and dedicated to completing a task, someone comes up to you, says a few negative things, walks away, and leaves you questioning your actions, ability, and strategy. Perhaps, an unexpected event occurs and completely derails us.

Suddenly, we are not so sure if we should complete the task. With our focused shifted, our tasks becomes forgotten and we remain unhappy and unsuccessful. You need to stronger than that. You do not need a naysayer or an event to influence you to stop working towards reaching your goals.

Here’s What I Want You to Do: Instead of focusing all your brain power to thinking about the problem, you need to focus your brain power on coming up with a solution to tackle the problem. If you keep focusing on the problem, you are exhausting yourself and depleting yourself off energy. Instead, focus all of your energy into resolving your problem. Decide what you want to achieve and then think of the solution that will help you achieve the result you seek.

4. You Burden Yourself with Self-doubt

At some point in our life, we have all have doubted our abilities to carry out a task successfully. When we plant that seed of self-doubt into our brain, we forgo doing that task. In a way, our uncertainty becomes our downfall.
When someone else is not poisoning your brain with thoughts of self-doubt, then you are doing that. Critiquing your every thought will never allow you to move forward in life. For once, it will wreak havoc on your self-confidence. Stop over analyzing your flaws and letting them influence you halt your progress and abort your goal.

Here’s What I Want You to Do: If you read part one, you will know the first two reasons that act as barriers to your success are fear and uncertainty and self-sabotage. When you doubt yourself, you open the door to let fear and uncertainty and self-sabotage in and take shelter inside your mind.

I want you to dismiss the negative thoughts and take small steps to achieving the intended actions needed to achieve your goals. With each step you take, the next step will become clearer and soon, you will find your footing. If you trip and fall, you need to learn where the false step was and move forward by taking a better next step. Always keep moving forward and never look backwards!

Remember, all of the four lessons taught to you in part one and two. If you want to defeat the curse of “almost,” you need to understand how to overcome fear and uncertainty, self-sabotage, external oppositions, and self-doubt.

Breaking through the Glass Ceiling of “Almost” (Part 1 of 2)

Throughout our life, there is one word that haunts us and that word is “almost.” We hate it, but we also can’t help saying it. The word “almost” has a habit of creeping up on us when one of our goals comes to a halt.
We are this close to achieving it, but something goes wrong, leaving us with the phrase “almost done.” Gradually another word sneaks its way into our vocabulary, “someday.” What is the reason behind your bad luck? Why does this keeping happening to you? Let me shed some light on this predicament you often find yourself in. Here are some reasons of why this happens and how you can overcome them:

1. You Are Afraid and Uncertain

You are on your way to making good progress to achieving goal. Everything is going fine, until you enter a territory you are not too familiar with. Fear begins to take over and to defeat fear, you take the easiest route—the “I almost done” route.
Here’s What I Want You to Do: Your cold feet and the bead sweat forming on your forehead is due to your mind coming up with unimaginable scenarios to scare and prevent you from leaving the “pause” phase of your goal. To defeat the negative thoughts, you need to drown them with positive thoughts. Get up, ask questions, and accomplish your goals.
If you know anyone who has been in a similar situation as yourself, ask for advice. Do everything, except sitting down and letting your negative thoughts invade your mind and keep you from accomplishing your task.

2. You Are Self-sabotaging Your Own Success

One thing we all have in common is that we are extremely good at coming with excuses and are experts at justifying our actions. Sometimes, excuses and justifications just pour out of us naturally without us even putting an effort to come up with them. STOP! What you do not realize is that you are self-sabotaging your efforts. Self-sabotaging has a lot to do with fear. Are we afraid of success? Are we afraid that if accomplish success, how we are going to sustain it? These questions lead us to exhibit conscious or unconscious self-sabotaging behavior.

Here’s What I Want You to Do: Do not let your fear take a hold of you because if you do, your self-sabotaging behavior will show up, ready to ruin your dream. Instead, be consistent with your actions and give yourself a pat on the back for standing out from the rest. You can recruit some help us well so you do not have the burden of doing everything on your shoulders. Delegate tasks and search for resources that can help you. If you are riding the wave of success, put your hands up! You deserve it!

This is part one of my two-part post. Stay tuned to for the next post where I will discuss self-doubt and external oppositions and tell you how you can overcome them.

5 Ways to Finish the Year Strong

Want advice, tips, and strategies? Yes! You have come to the right place. Here, single and young mothers and anyone in the need of a confidence boost will find what they need to turn a new leaf in their life. Keep checking back to see what Alicia has in store for you next.

5 Ways to Finish the Year Strong

With 2017 right around the corner, we have much to reflect on and be thankful for. Overall, we had a good year—a shaky start, a solid middle, and hopefully, a wonderful end. I said hopefully because towards of the year, most of us happen to become a little reckless. Why do you think people have a shaky start to begin with?

They ended their year on a bad note so they are going into the New Year on a bad note. This year, make it your ultimate goal to end the year and start the New Year on positive note. Here are some useful tips you can use to ensure the New Year starts with fireworks and a smile:

1. Create a Budget

The last month of the New Year is none other than December. Do you know what this means, right? Christmas shopping! When people go nuts with their Christmas shopping, which I say out of control Christmas shopping, it creates a dent in their bank account—a deep one at that.

Before you hit the stores, make a shopping list and list names of people who you want to buy a present for, this includes you. Come up with a budget by noting down how much you are planning to spend on each person’s gift. Just make sure you stick to the budget. Going into the New Year, you will at least know you are not hard for cash.

2. Control Your Portions

Is gaining weight during the holidays another nightmare you think will come true? You have control over the nightmare. You can make your nightmare into a pleasant dream by eating healthy and small portions at Christmas parties and festivities. One trick that always works for me is to drink a glass of water and eat a light meal before heading out. Since you will be partially full, you will eat less.

3. Network till You Drop!

Organizations and companies come out of hiding and enter the social circles towards the end of the year. They hold parties and events to celebrate the end of another year. If you have received some invitations, do not let them collect dust, but visit one or more. If you are looking to secure a job or a business opportunity and you have an invitation from a company, you have just hit the jackpot. With almost righty percent of jobs due to networking, you are bound to earn yourself a place in one of the companies. Networking is the key to unlock a fulfilling career. Do not let the opportunity slip through your hands.

4. Take Care of Your Remaining Tasks

Throughout the year, you have been good at completing one task after another. However, there is one task you may have side glanced and put aside several times. With the New Year approaching fast, you do not want to carry that task with you into 2017. Your goal is to start with clean slate, which putting aside your fears and taking on the challenging task you have been dreading since the day you put it on your to-do list.

5. Get a Head Start on the New Year

You need to start thinking about what you want to accomplish next year and for that, you need to switch your planning mode on. Note down all the goals you want to accomplish in 2017 along with the date you want to achieve them. To achieve the goals, you need to write down tasks that will help you accomplish them.