Adventures from the book “Wishcraft,” by Barbara Sher

A Goal, Barbara says is the “basic unit of life design.”  I like that.  I like the way she talks, too, about shaping your life.  When she speaks of daydreaming, she calls it, “your genius itching to get its hands on some of that big-time space-time clay and start making worlds.”  Wow!

Dreaming is easy, she notes, “making it come true means choosing a piece to do first.”  Well, that’s a practical bit of information.  You have to get started somewhere.

She calls a goal, “a concrete action or event.”  It’s essential to name your goal.  How else are you going to know you’ve reached it?  It also makes it a whole lot easier to find.  I want to go to Cincinnati will give you a much better set of directions than I want to go somewhere West of here.  We are not, as Barbara says, “Building a bridge to a cloud.” We want to get somewhere.

The way to get through procrastination and frustration is to set a target date.  This anchors your goal in reality and makes Time something to be worked with. 

Barbara explains what she calls, “Touchstones.”  That’s the emotional, juicy center of what you want.  What you really want from it.  The essence.  I’ve found that when you can name the essence of what you want, you open up a huge realm of possibilities.  If I want a shiny new Aston Martin, is it because I want dependable transportation or because I want to feel like a million bucks driving it?  Knowing which one can help me find lots of other ways to have what I want.

Barbara makes a good suggestion. She says you should put your goal to a test: imagine living your goal.  You may say you want to be President of the United States, but when you actually think about doing it . . . well, you might have a different take on it.  You need to be certain this is something you really want, in reality.  Not something someone else thinks you should. 

There aren’t many exercises in this chapter.  But she does tell us how to use all the information we collected in the last chapter to choose our goal.  How to turn your touchstone into a goal.  What to do when your goal feels millions of miles away.    I liked the one about looking at your Ideal Day to see what’s missing.  Using that as your goal.  I’m so close to my Ideal Day, it isn’t hard to see what’s missing.  Barbara also talks about what to do with the “Impossible Dream.”  I love the way she thinks!  Reminding us that there are some physical limitations to having all of what we dream, but most of the limitations are in our minds.  Barbara shows us how to break down those big dreams into smaller targets along the way.  She keeps saying that the more you can experience aspects of your dream, the more energy you will have to keep going.

There are instructions for using the “Private Eye Game” and the “20 Things you Like to Do” to find your target.  She gives lots of real-life examples of how people have carved their dreams one piece at a time.  “Reminding yourself that the time ahead of you is yours to create in your own image, however that image may change.”

She even talks about having too many goals.  The exercise here asks what if you had 5 lives?  “What if you could have five chances to explore a different talent, interest or lifestyle to its fullest?”  Wow!  That was fun. I chose: architect, musician, novelist, writer in Italy, activist. 

Barbara doesn’t just leave you hanging with five major life goals either.  She offers ways they can be realized in one lifetime.  Sequential Goals – changing your life mid-stream.  Simultaneous Goals like moonlighting.   Alternating Goals which means scheduling on again and off again goals, like teachers doing something different over the summer months.  And, Multimedia goals, which is doing similar things in different arenas.  Like writing a book about something you love.

Using her ideas, there are a lot of ways I can get my five lives into this lifetime.  I can design and build my own home, I can learn to play an instrument and maybe play with a community band, or open my home to musicians.  I certainly plan on publishing a book someday, and maybe get back to my fiction.  If I can’t be a writer living in Italy, maybe I can create my own “retreat” at my custom-built home, or take other writer’s retreats.  Being an activist is most definitely something I can work into my life. “Nothing you love,” she says, “should ever be left sitting on the shelf.”

Next week we get a lesson in “Hard Times, or the Power of Negative Thinking.”  Intriguing!