---

For a long time I have encouraged readers and seminar participants to follow their bliss, be true to their dreams, and let passion empower their lives. And it is indeed rewarding to hear many inspiring accounts from individuals who have honored their hearts’ desires and subsequently found happiness and success.

What do you do, however, when you have a dream and you are not in a position to act on it? What if, due to financial circumstances or other obligations, your goal is relegated to a future time, and your current situation doesn’t look anything like your vision? What if, for example, you want to be an actor, but you have to wait tables to pay your rent? Or if you are in a job you have disliked for many years, and you hate it more than ever, but you are just a few years away from your retirement benefits? How do you live true to your passion when your current reality is flat?

You have several choices:

1. Quit, pull up stakes, take a leap of faith, and dive headlong into your ideal scenario. Some who do this succeed gloriously and consider their leap the best move of their life. Others do not ultimately live the vision they set out for, but create a lifestyle more rewarding than the one they left. Others return to a position similar to their original one. Yet no matter how their journey unfolds, all are richer for the faith and courage they mobilized to follow their spirit.

2. Act as if your vision is already real, no matter what current circumstances indicate. Rev. Frank Richelieu had a dream to start a church, but he had no building, congregants, or money―just inspiration. So he found a public phone booth and printed business cards listing that telephone number as the church office. Then he set office hours and conducted business and counseling from the phone booth. Eventually Dr. Richelieu built up a congregation, obtained a building, and established one of the largest and most successful churches of Religious Science in the nation. “Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible.”

3. Make changes in your current situation that bring it more into harmony with your vision. My friend Lou was bored and frustrated teaching high school English. So he developed a new course called “Humanities” in which he encouraged students to talk about their feelings, connect with each other from the heart, and take steps toward their dreams. The class became so popular that Lou ended up teaching the course full time, and the school hired another teacher to replicate it! Lou developed rewarding relationships with his students that bore blessings far beyond the classroom, and he fulfilled his true function as a teacher of life.

If you can’t change a thing about your job, you can bring desired qualities of your vision into your current situation. If you want to be a motivational speaker, you don’t need to stand on a stage to turn people on. One of the best motivators I ever met was a hotel concierge known as “Baltimore Buddy.” Buddy could make anyone feel good. I once watched Buddy bring cookies and glasses of wine to tired businesspeople waiting in the hotel check-in line; wow, did they light up at his personal touch! Buddy found creative ways to serve as he made the best use of his knack right where he was.

4. Do what you have to do in the meantime, but keep your vision so alive in your mind and heart that it sustains you spiritually. When you choose something to be important in your life, everything else you do exists in service to that goal. So, as an aspiring musician, you sell shoes for now, but you consider your shoe store job a vehicle to purchase your dream guitar. Then you think, feel, speak, and practice your music as much as you can when you are not selling shoes. To you, music is life and shoe sales is a detail. The quality of your life depends less on what you are doing with your body, and more on what you are doing with your spirit. Keep your soul nourished, and everything else will fall into place

To master your mission, pay more attention to where you are going than where you are or where you have been. As you sustain your vision, your vision will sustain you. As Eleanor Roosevelt noted, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

---

Alan Cohen is the author of many popular inspirational books, including the best-selling The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Mr. Everit’s Secret. In 2005, Alan is offering a Personal Mentorship Program for a small group of committed students. For information on this program or to receive Alan’s daily inspirational quote and monthly newsletter, email info@alancohen.com, phone 800 568-3079, visit www.alancohen.com, or write P.O. Box 835, Haiku, HI 96708.

---

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index

Go to the Home Page