Get Ready – Create A Space For Success

You have already travelled quite far from where you started. Your hard work has given you clarity about your Vision, Mission and Goals. Based on these, you entered into an agreement with the Universe, committing to give your 100% to achieving your vision, mission and goals.

The next stage of your journey is readiness. It is probably the most powerful part of your journey for it will fuel all that follows. Think of the marathon runner — before he gets the signal to “Go!!” he will hear two other phrases — “On your marks!” and “Get set!” By following the detailed steps in this chapter, you will prepare your mind, body and environment for your Goals.

You will be in readiness.

Readiness means ‘living as if’ you have already achieved your goals and are living in abundance with all your dreams coming true. Studies show that acting as if you’re already successful seems to attract more success. Readiness closes the gap between reality and your Goals by optimizing your environment and unshackling your heart’s innermost intuitions and impulses to guide you to make space in your life for your 11 Goals. Readiness induces inner calm and stillness.

Getting ready must be done thoughtfully goal by goal. Here are some examples.

Health

Everyone wants to be healthier and live a long life but for many it remains a mere wish because they don’t actually start doing something about it. Immediate actions create immediate momentum. The first step is getting ready for better health by envisioning your current health and the kind of healthy, long life you want to live.

For example, you could start by throwing or giving away the unhealthy junk foods from your kitchen and refrigerator. Next, you could re-organize the kitchen, making it more beautiful and hygienic. Restock the kitchen with healthy foods, perhaps creating a health corner for natural and ayurvedic products. You could buy fruits and a fruit juicer.

Such actions optimize your kitchen and create momentum towards better health. The next morning you will wake to a cheerful, optimistic kitchen filled with healthy and hygienic foods.

Going further, you might consider adding daily pranayama, yoga, morning walks or other such habits to your daily routine. Remember, however, that no matter what you do, if your kitchen is messy with junk food, alcoholic beverages, chips, fats, oily foods and mountain of sweets then all your hard work will come to nothing. After two hours of working out in the gym, you will return only to be tempted by junk foods.

Even if you live in a one-bedroom house, optimizing the kitchen corner can bring powerful impetus to your health goals.

Wealth

Looks around your house and ask yourself how well it reflects your current Wealth goals. Are your book racks filled with unnecessary magazines, romantic novels, video games and tablets? Are your walls crowded with pictures of favorite celebrities or sports stars? If your goal was to become a movie celebrity or sport star, then yes, then you’re in perfect readiness.

But if your plan was to become the best cardiologist in your country within the next two decades, then your environment is not yet in readiness. Think about your country’s top cardiologist today — how much does he earn? What is his contribution to society? Has he opened free hospitals for the poor and received national awards for his philanthropy? Do people think he is divine, almost a god? Make him your Wealth role model.

Download his picture from the Internet, print it and place it somewhere in your room so that you will see that inspiring face every day when you wake up. That will trigger your Vision, Mission and put you in readiness for your Wealth goal.

Relationships

Most people’s phones, photo albums and rooms are filled with memories, many of ex-lovers. Such people are still living locked into their pasts. Their exes, meanwhile, have married, traveled abroad, become parents of beautiful and amazing kids and are living happily with their soulmates.

To ready yourself for new relationships, you must remove and clear all these stagnant, ancient memories wherever they are whether it be your room, mobile phone, social media tags or from your life, and re-organizing your environment. Buy yourself some smart new clothes, shoes and a watch. Hang an attractive photo of the new you somewhere in your living place.

Another way is to hang photos of your loving, lovable parents, family, parties and friends in your living areas so that you are greeted by affection and happiness wherever you look.

Personal Development

Let’s say your personal development goals are to improve you personality and body language and boost your confidence. Create immediate momentum by buying five or so new books on personal development and displaying them in your living area.

If one of your lifestyle goals is to have a car, your garage should not look like a junkyard, should it? Prepare the space by cleaning out the scrap and making a neat and clean area ready to welcome your dream car when it arrives.

Even a pauper sleeping on an old mat on the street can create a space for his Goals by cleaning the street around his spot and getting a better mat to sleep on. Nature abhors a vacuum — if you create a space for success, nature will rush to fill it with exactly what you have wished for.

It’s about the environment

Since the days of cave men, human beings have been acutely sensitive to and aware of their environments. Their very survival depended on knowing exactly what was around them and whether it would benefit or harm them. Even in today’s world, that has not changed much — the objects and experiences you surround yourself with daily affect you more than you realize. That’s why we feel most at ease in safe, secure and psychologically comfortable places.

Corporations that understand this pay special attention to designing positive experiences by creating pleasing, comfortable and friendly environments in their customer spaces. Similarly, hospitals use colors and sounds to create spaces that feel secure, attentive, safe and have privacy for patients and their visitors. Patients in noisy and confusing hospital rooms tend to feel sad, anxious and helpless and may experience muscle tension, elevated heart rates and blood pressure.

Your environment directly and indirectly influences your mood and behavior. Rooms with both natural and artificial bright lights have been shown to improve health, reduce restlessness, deepen sleep and decrease depression. For example, studies show that a person is more likely to drop things in an already cluttered workspace. Contrary-wise, a clean workplace encourages people to be orderly and careful.

We are motivated to interact more positively with others when the environment itself is positive, with friendly, cheerful people that make us feel good.

This chapter is about how you can create an environment that reflects, supports and powerfully enables your dreams and Goals and thus makes it much easier to achieve them. The three steps towards this are —

1. Remove the unnecessary

2. Organize your environment

3. Create the spaces for success.

1. Remove the unnecessary

A cluttered, messy home or workplace can leave you feeling stressed, worried and overwhelmed, besides making things harder to find. Some people even feel choked up and unable to breathe if too many unnecessary objects are lying around, bombarding your mind with negative stimuli and overloading your senses. Stress hormones that are released in response to the emotional stress could suppress a person’s immune system and make your Goals harder to attain.

Such an environment is the enemy of creativity and productivity by streaming messages to your brain that things are incomplete and need attention. It sucks up space that could have otherwise been devoted to brainstorming and problem-solving. Creating a clutter-free environment that reduces stress is key to enhancing your ability to manifest your Goals.

Finally, there is the palpable embarrassment and guilt you feel upon entering your home, work or even relationship space when it is is untidy. A part of you wishes it could be more organized — though for some, the thought of organizing your spaces itself can be stressful. Nevertheless, it is the next step we must take.

How do you decide what is“unnecessary”? This word includes everything that can impede your Goals and keep you from manifesting your Goals. This includes people who bring their negativity and toxic energy into your life.

Decluttering is not a simple one-day task. Prepare yourself for a small marathon of several days, and be patient. Here are four simple and practical steps to removing the unnecessary —

1. COLLECT TRASH FIRST: Leave no drawer un-pulled, no closet unopened. Walk around your home looking for actual trash: napkins, receipts, papers, tags, empty shampoo bottles. Gather trash and walk it to the trash can (don’t just set it outside your door or in the garage; that is just more clutter). This exercise is specially for people feeling hesitant about clearing the clutter, because it eases you into the process.

2. RUTHLESSLY IDENTIFY THE UNNECESSARY: Room by room, drawer by drawer, shelf by shelf, unpack every space. For example, if you are beginning with your cupboard, take every item out first and set it on a large area. Now, as you begin placing them back into the cupboard, handle each one and make a decision about it.

For each item, ask yourself the following questions:

– Does it serve a key function in your daily life?

– Does it bring you joy?

– Do you have another one that is better?

– Have you used it in the past six months?

– Does it have sentimental value?

– Would the person that you’re trying to become own this item?

Create the following seven categories, with a cardboard box for each:

1. Keep. This will contain things that are necessary and aligned with your Goals.

2. Another room. Items that belong in a different room

3. Fix or clean.

4. Give away, sell or donate.

5. Discard

6. Return to owner.

7. Maybe. This is for things you can’t bear to toss out because you might need them some time later.

3. MAKE DECLUTTERING A DAILY HABIT: Remember that the universal law of entropy tells us that everything in the universe eventually degenerates into anarchy and chaos. Your spaces too will need to decluttered regularly or they will again become crowded and cluttered. Set a daily routine for inspecting your house and collecting every item that is out of place: cups, shoes, toys, others. Also pick up things that are no longer needed such as ticket stubs, receipts and packaging. Sort the out-of-place items and put them away; trash the newly unnecessary things.

3. Organize everything

Organizing your environment helps you to better track and assess your progress towards your Goals, visualize the results and manifest your desires. A Psychology Today survey showed that over 70 percent of people who make their own beds in the morning considered themselves happy while over 60 percent of people who don’t stated that they were not happy. The former group were also more likely to own a home, love their jobs, maintain a regular exercise regimen and feel well rested. Non-bed-makers, according to the survey, were more likely to rent their apartments, hate their jobs, not work out regularly and wake up feeling tired.

Use the following tips as a guide to organizing your newly de-cluttered space —

1. Designate a purpose for each room: Walk around your home and decide what activities you would like to carry out in each room as well as the mood you would like each room to convey. The living room could be designated as a social and networking place for family and friends to gather and watch television, play boardgames, bond, and have fun. It should reflect comfort and connectivity. Organize according to the function you want each room to serve, and how you want each room to “feel”.

Perhaps you want a spa-like environment in your bathroom so that it feels like a luxurious retreat.

Your study or workspace should feel like a focussed, practical and comfortable area, well-lit and equipped for work.

2. Identify zones: A room can have different purposes. Identify all the activities that could take place within each room and create zones for each activity containing everything needed to accomplish that activity.

For example, you could create a library area right within your living room and place most of your books there, with a comfortable chair, adequate lighting and perhaps a side-table for coffee mugs and snacks and a rack for magazines and newspapers.

3. Get containers: Once you’ve decided what items will remain, choose suitable and pleasing containers for storing them, making sure they are appropriate for the number and kind of things they will hold. Examples are towel baskets, filing cabinets, drawer dividers, laundry bags and so on. Now go ahead and fill the boxes with what they’re meant to hold.

4. Take action with the boxes: Once you’re done with your organizational efforts, take action with the boxes.

– Put the Give away/Sell/Donate box in the trunk of your car and dispose of its contents at the earliest opportunity

– Trash what has been rejected.

– Go around the house and put away all of the things in the Another Room box.

– Give back what is in the Return to Owner box.

– Repair or clean everything in the Fix or Clean box.  If you haven’t had these things cleaned or repaired within three months, throw them out.

– Tape up, label and store the Maybe box. Go through it again three months later. If you haven’t missed any of its contents in that period, discard or donate them.

5. Maintain the organization: As part of your ongoing effort to keep your space organized, spend two minutes picking up after yourself each time that you’re about to leave a room. These four rules may help you —

If you take it out, put it back.

If you open it, close it.

If you throw it down, pick it up.

If you take it off, hang it up.

3. Create a space for your success

Creating a space for your success is a step-by-step process that will put you into the state of living as if you have already achieved your Goals. The spaces you will create will be physical, emotional and feeling.

If you want more money, evoke the experience of having more money. From that feeling space, you will find more money flowing into your life.

If you want to lose weight, buy clothes of a smaller size — triggering your body to lose weight in order to fit into them.

Create a dedicated bank account for your new wealth to come or write yourself a post-dated check. Donate money as though you already have an abundance of it.

If you are searching for your life partner – buy that person a gift even before you know who he or she is. The moment will surely come when you meet him/her and hand over that gift.

If you want more peace in your life as a part of your Inner Fulfilment goal, buy a statue of the Buddha and some things that radiate and reflect peace, such as an incense stand or soothing wind chimes at the door. Play relaxing flute or pipe music in the house.

If you want to boost your confidence as part of your Personal Development goal gift yourself a smart business suit or perhaps an expensive watch and watch your confidence receive an instant surge.

If you want to have a particular car as a Lifestyle goal – test drive the car of your dreams in a showroom and thus bring the dream one step closer to reality. Buy a toy model of that car to keep until the real one comes.

If your Career goal is to become a professional — such as a doctor, civil servant, engineer, chartered accountant or a banker – print a visiting card for yourself now, mentioning your future designation.

Say your dream is an Indoor Plant Business or an eCommerce site – sketch out a design for your website to come.

As part of realizing your Financial Independency Goal, create a new savings bank account and start saving. You will see your independence surge from passive income, land, rent and similar things.

Move towards your Social Influence (Networking) goal by building you network. Get the application form for joining the best golf club in your city. Send strong signals to your subconscious mind that you are going to join that club one day and build your network.

As a part of your goal for Giving Back to society, you want to donate for the education of underprivileged children. Well, buy a piggy bank or locked box to save money for this. It doesn’t matter it’s a dollar or ten or thousand. What matters is that you do things in advance and live as though you already had the money, time and resources for that goal.

Why living as if you have already achieved your goals, works? Why does living as if your future was already here work? For the same reason that a movie moves you even though you know it’s a story and not even happening to you. Your mind triggers the same feelings in you whether it’s your imagination or reality. This is why you can use your imagination to create a space and thus pave the way for your Goals.

So go ahead — create your space for success. And have fun while doing it!