SUMMARY 

• Take 100% Ownership – It’s down to you. Nobody else is going to do it for you. Take ownership for your own successes and failures. If your dreams succeed great, if not what is it that you did or didn’t do that led to that?
• Up Your Game! – Pause for a moment and ask yourself, “Where do I need to be upping my game?” Are there skills you could be developing? Or people you should be surrounding yourself with to learn from?
• Schedule Your Dreams Into Your Calendar – Have you ever thought about scheduling your dreams into your calendar? What gets scheduled gets done, and that includes your dreams as well.
• Create Some Outside Pressure – That could come in the form of an accountability partner such as a coach or friend. Somebody who is going to recognise whether you are reaching your targets.

TRANSCRIPT

So many people fail to realize their dreams. They keep putting them off till someday, but someday never comes. As a result, they feel frustrated, disappointed, and maybe even resentful.

Hi, my name is Eric Partaker and I’m on a mission to help people realize their full potential in both their work and life. For years, I had dreams that I wanted to pursue, but I never got around to it. I felt exactly those feelings that I just described. I felt very disappointed, very frustrated, even resentful for the people around me when I wasn’t looking inward enough. Today I want to give you a simple set of tools that you can use to make sure that you turn your dreams into reality, because we can all do it if we just apply ourselves. You may be thinking, “You know what? I’ve tried turning my dreams into reality before.” But obviously you haven’t been using the right tools in the right way if it still hasn’t worked. So, make sure that you stick around for the whole message so that you can apply these tools to your life.

So, number one with turning your dreams into reality, it starts in the mind and you need to take 100% ownership. This is the hard truth about making your dreams come true. It’s down to you. Nobody else is going to do it for you. It’s down 100% to you. If your dreams come true, that’s down to you. If they don’t come true, that’s down to you. You need to take 100% ownership. 100% ownership for the success, 100% ownership for the failure. If your dreams succeed, great. If they don’t, what was it that you didn’t or did that led to that happening? So, start with taking 100% ownership because then it puts you into the right mindset to do what follows next.

So, number two, if you want to turn your dreams into a reality, almost certainly you are going to need to up your game somewhere. I want you to just pause for a moment and ask yourself, “Where do I need to be upping my game?” in this pursuit of whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. For example, there’s probably something that scares you, a set of skills that you need to develop. What are you doing to develop those? What are you doing to up your game and how do you up your game? Well, there’s two ways in particular that you can be zeroing in on to help you up your game, and they deal with either things or people. So, what I mean is, if you need to up your game, if you need to develop a set of skills, it could be things that you need to be interacting with, like books or courses or doing some online research. Or it may be that you need to up your game through people. So, that could be an individual that you need to reach out to.

Maybe there’s somebody who could be coaching you, right? A lot of the people that I help, I help them, as a coach, close that gap between their current and best self. I have a coach myself. Is there someone that you could be reaching out to? Is there a friend, an expert that you know, a coach that you know? But it may be an individual. It may be a group of people that you need to plug yourself into who are all pursuing the same thing that you’re trying to do, the same dream that you’re trying to achieve. It may be a mastermind that you need to plug into. If you haven’t heard the term mastermind before, that’s when you just assemble a group of people all in the pursuit of the same type of dream, and they help each other on a monthly basis. Perhaps they meet up or on a quarterly basis, and they share what they’re doing in relation to their goals, where they are struggling, where they could use some support and some help, and they do that.

They collaborate together to help each other up their games so they can achieve their dreams. So, where do you need to up your game? Could you do that through things, through people, through books and courses and online research, through plugging into some individuals, groups, or masterminds or a combination? But everything that you need, you can find in one of those two avenues to help you up your game in your quest to achieve your dreams. Okay, so we have the mindset that we have to take 100% ownership for achieving our dreams. Our success and failure comes down to us. Number two, we’ve asked ourselves, “Where do we need to up our game? How do we do that? Through things, through interacting with people. The next thing that we need to do is we need to schedule our dreams into our calendar.

Have you ever thought about scheduling your dreams into your calendar? I mean, what gets scheduled gets done, and that includes your dreams as well. So, for example, when you’ve decided, “I need to up my game and read this book, or take this course, or interact with this person, or get involved with this group,” well, that should show up as an appointment in your calendar. If I can’t see where you’re going to be working on these things, then your likelihood of doing the work, of actually upskilling or acquiring the knowledge and the skills and the expertise that you need is very low. You need to schedule your dreams in your calendar. Schedule the work on these things that you’re pursuing in your calendar. What gets scheduled gets done. If it’s not appearing in your calendar, it’s not going to be appearing full stop. It’s not going to be appearing at all.

Number four, we need to create some outside pressure. So, that could come in the form of an accountability partner. We could make a bet or we could go public. Let me explain each. So, accountability partner. What do I mean by that? I just mean that. Similar to upping your game and realizing that, “Maybe I need to get help through an individual,” that same individual could be somebody who helps keep you on track. Maybe you decide to work with a coach, for example. Every so often you’re meeting up with that coach or with a friend who’s going to be an accountability partner and it’s doing what the term suggests. It’s somebody who’s going to hold you accountable. Did you do what it was that you said you were going to do from the last time we met until this point in time?

Or it could be that you’re going to create external pressure by making a bet. Science has proven that when we put some money on the line for something that’s important to us, it increases the odds of us achieving whatever that goal is by up to three times. This is some behavioral science research from Yale University. So, who could you make a bet? How could you create a financial consequence for not achieving your goal? Because when you do that, you’re more likely to achieve the goal. And then I talked about going public and what do I mean by that is, well, if you’re walking by a basketball court, for example, and there’s a couple of kids playing ball, the moment you hold up a scoreboard and you turn it into a competition, it’s going to totally change the way that they play. Your pursuit of your dreams will change if you somehow create an equivalent of a public scoreboard about it.

So, how can you go public with your goal? Can you post your progress on Facebook? Can you state what you’re going to be achieving and regularly communicate your score, that is your progress towards your goal, with others so that others can see? Because when it becomes public, when there’s a scoreboard that other people can see, we’re more likely to achieve whatever it is that we’re working on. Last but not least, if you want to turn your dreams into reality, then recognize that balance is critical. The secret to peak performance, for example, is to realize that stress plus recovery equals growth. If you’re all pedal to the metal on the work front and you’re sacrificing your health or your relationships, eventually that’s not going to work. So, make sure you’re investing as much time in your health, your sleep, your nutrition, your exercise, your mental clarity, as much time in your relationships, your friendships, your significant other, partner, spouse, your children, as you are in your work.

I don’t necessarily mean to invest as much time because most of our time goes into our work in the context of a work day, but you can still be getting good quality moments with the people that matter most. You can still be making time for exercise and for looking after your health, because without that balance, your chance for achieving your dreams is not going to happen. So, the hard truth about making your dreams come true is that it requires some work from you. It starts in the mind. Take 100% ownership for the fact that the success and failure is down to you. Number two, make sure you’re upping your game and think through, “Is it things that can help me up my game? People? A combination of both?” Number three, schedule your dreams in your calendar. Make sure you’re creating some outside pressure to make them happen. Last but not least, respect that balance is critical in your mission to become all that you’re capable of being. So, I hope you’ve enjoyed that. If you head over to my website at ericpartaker.com, you can also subscribe to my weekly Peak Performance Insights newsletter.