If you write down your goals

Mick spoke to his mum on the phone last night and she said "What a difference a month makes".  She reminded him of how just a month ago we were feeling rather down about not selling the house.  Yet here we are just a month later in the throes of packing up our household and with our tickets to the UK booked.  She's right... what a difference a month makes!

It got me thinking so I read back over some of my early blog entries.  When does a dream become a goal?  I feel like we really made progress towards making our dream a reality when we, or I, started writing about it.  We made a plan and committed it to the www!  We didn't have much control over the time frame .  Firstly, we didn't know how long Coco would live and if it had been our other dog, Zac who lived to 16 1/2, we would have another 2 or 3 years to wait.  Secondly we had no control over how long it would take to sell our house.  I vividly recall thinking that the Christmas of 2010 would be our last in this house.  But still, we had a plan.  Step by step we would tick things off our list and one day we'd get there.

Just the other day we were saying how glad we are that we impulsively booked our tickets to the UK on the same evening we signed the contract selling the house.  At the time it seemed a crazy thing to do but it has given us a fixed time frame and we'll simply have to get things done by that date.  If we had waited to book the tickets until we felt we were ready to go it would almost certainly have dragged into next year.

I've learned a good lesson from all this.  If you want to make something happen - just make a plan and work towards it.  Talk about it, tell people about it, live life as though it's going to happen just as you plan and at the very least, write it down.