2022 May 3 Envision Your Dreams

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. Thanks for joining me tonight as we take a look again at how our attitude can affect our outlook and provide us a rudder to guide us as we go through life. 

So, let’s get started. First, the regular reminder: I’m not a medical professional. I’ll be talking about things that I personally find useful in life. If you find yourself feeling totally hopeless or just feeling really depressed, please seek professional medical help immediately. (800) 273-8255 / (988)

The longer broadcasts are fun to make, because you get to dive a little more deeply into a particular topic, but I do recognize that it’s asking a lot of my listeners to devote that much time in one sitting. This is going to be a brief beignet into controlling your own perception and creating your own future.

This past week, I was reading, in the Wall Street Journal, two quite complimentary articles. They were written from completely different points of view. One was written by a conservative person. The second one is from a liberal. What I found so interesting was that they both said essentially the same thing but from opposite perspectives. They both felt, for themselves and for people like them, that they had been completely abandoned by their respective political parties. One author professed to be a lifelong Democrat, and the other one was a lifelong Republican. 

It was interesting that both authors were self-motivated enough to write publicly for this well-known newspaper, and they weren’t resigned to just giving up or just being mad. Both of them were talking about how to take back control of their respective political parties from the extremists, about how having goals and envisioning that to the life you want empowers you to define your desired future and helps you to achieve it.

Recall that we talked about how taking actions, even small actions, reduces the stress in your life by allowing you to move closer to your desired way of living, to your goals, to the outcome that you had envisioned. Back to my two authors in the Wall Street Journal - both of them could have felt defeated. They could have been depressed or blamed the other political party, or the leaders of their own party, but they both did exactly the opposite thing. They both decided to call out the issues,  face them head on, and then take action to affect their own futures. They could’ve just wandered with the tide and felt helpless, but instead they knew where they wanted to go, and so they did something to make that happen By doing that, not only did they immediately improve their own attitudes, but it had the additive effect of getting other people to act and support their cause. That made their cause even more attainable, which further reduces their stress. 

So, it had a lot of positive things and the only thing they did was, instead of just sitting around and being upset about it, they envisioned what they wanted to see, and they took action to move towards their own goals. I thought this was a particularly nice example because it came from both ends of the political spectrum, that pretty much everyone, regardless of the current political or social situation, has a good amount of power to influence their immediate situation. That’s not to say we can always attain all our goals, and certainly not right away, but we can usually set ourselves up to have the best chance of making progress towards our goals. At the same time, we can bring some peace into our lives by removing the stress caused by inactivity and worrying about things that seem beyond our control. 

So your homework is simple. If there’s anything, big or little, that is bothering you, whether you don’t like how your political party is acting, the war in Ukraine, you don’t like how your house looks, you never finished that book you started a couple weeks ago, whatever it is that’s bothering you - face it head on. Say it out loud, write it down, both what it is and how you’d like to change it. Then write down one more thing. Anything. It can be a big thing, but if you don’t feel you can do a big thing, even just a little tiny thing that moves you even one step closer, is living your life how you want to want to actually live it. 

Even though this challenge you write down is kind of holding you back in some ways, just write down one thing that you want to do that moves you closer to your goals, and the life that you envision. Don’t forget to celebrate that win, even if it’s a partial win. When you take that little step towards living the life that you dream of, it’s super important to recognize that you’re making progress. 

We need to believe in ourselves and envision the outcome that we want, and that will guide us toward making decisions that create the life that we desire. Good luck on your journey to start rewriting your own future. Choose to succeed. See all the good that surrounds you and in yourself. Remember to celebrate all the little victories. 

A reminder that if you want to contact your senators: 7em.link/Congress

This link takes you to the Congressional Office, where you can look up your senators and your representative and write them a note about whatever is on your mind. Whether it’s something political, something in the country, something international, whatever it is. Take that one little step. Give them your opinion. It does make a difference. There’s a lot of things that seem to be driven by really large forces that we have no input to, but in reality, all the politicians listen to what their constituents say, and if there’s a real drift moving one direction or the other, they do pay attention. It does make a difference. 

Then our other super important link:  ukr7.com  That’s the link to the donation page where we have links to all sorts of places you can donate for the war in Ukraine. Remember that it’s still going on. It’s as bad, or worse, than before. Putin is still purposely targeting civilian areas, hospitals, and non-military targets. Super super important if you’re interested. Go there. You can donate money and you can pick what kind of place you donate to, whether it’s just humanitarian aid, it’s non-confrontational military like helmets, bulletproof vests and body armor, or whether it’s actual real true military aid. There are also links to a lot of other places that do humanitarian aid. If you can’t donate right now, that’s fine. Just talk to people about it. You can always point them to this page. It’s really just a bunch of links. So, if somebody doesn’t know where to go, that’s another place you can send them, and if they’re interested in donating or just getting people interested, do whatever you can to help end that war. That’s horrible. 

So, as always, be true to yourself. Live the life that aligns with your true goals and feelings, and that’s it for the week! Thanks so much for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. If you didn’t, please drop me a line about what you’d like to hear. Have a great week. Thanks for stopping by, and remember to live the life that you dreamed of, because that’s the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everybody. See you next week at 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com