Video Transcript of Clearing Your Life Garden to Achieve Your Dreams:

“Hi everyone! Takara here from Deep Dive Publishers of Magnificent You, and today I want to talk about gardening – more specifically, cleaning out the garden. Okay, and I’m not just talking about physical gardening out in your yard or wherever your garden might be, but I’m talking about the garden of your life.

I was looking at my garden and realizing, you know, this time of year – at least in this part of the world – it’s spring. Whenever it’s springtime, we talk about planting our garden, right? And we talk about new beginnings and planting our garden and planting the seeds of dreams we’re holding so that we can achieve them later on at harvest time, whatever that might be for that particular goal.

But something that has to happen before you can plant a new garden is you have to clear it out. You have to remove all the mess left over from winter, from the fall leaves. You know, I’ve got all kinds of plants in my garden where they send up these beautiful shoots, and some beautiful flower happens on top of those stems, but then when the winter comes, the stems all die, the flowers fall off, and there’s nothing – it looks like there’s a bunch of dead sticks in the yard.

Right before you can plant in that garden, you have to clean all of that up. And I thought about it, and it’s like the same is true in your life – you have to clean out the dead sticks. You have to clean up the things that are getting in your way of achieving your dreams. You have to look at the things that are not working, and you have to do something about them. You can’t plant new ideas and go after new goals if there’s all this old dead weight happening.

Sometimes there are people in our lives that we really need to let go – not easy to do, but important. There are also projects we’re working on that are just not going anywhere. Sometimes it’s really big stuff like jobs and relationships and things like that – sometimes those really do need to shift. No, I’m not telling you what to do, but you know when things are holding you back. You know when things are causing you stress. If you are deeply unhappy and you know the cause, only you can fix it.

It’s your responsibility because if you want your life to get better, you have to change and you have to change things in your life. If you want to be more fit and more healthy, you’ve got to make changes in your diet. You have to focus on better things mentally – there’s all kinds of things you have to do. The same is true of goal achievement in any area. If you want to save enough money to go on some fancy trip somewhere (I call it fancy, I love travel, so it’s always fancy to me because it’s a great adventure), but if you want to save money to do that, you’ve got to say no to the things you’ve been spending your money on that are kind of frivolous or unnecessary.

I’m not saying don’t pay your electric bill – I’m saying skip the latte, or skip the thing that would be so much fun to go to. Whatever it is, you know I could put $40 in my bank account if I didn’t do that. You have to make those sorts of decisions. The goals you’re planting, the goals you’re wanting to achieve have to take precedence, and you have to stay focused on them, or you’ll never achieve them.

It requires that you make decisions all day long that are new and different than what you did before. So what I’m inviting you to do, as you think about spring and planting, is: what do you need to clean out first? What do you need to release? What do you need to shift and change and let go of so that you can plant a beautiful garden and your life can unfold the way that you desire?

Now, doing life on purpose doesn’t mean that there’s never the unexpected thing. There’s always an unexpected thing, but you don’t let it stop you. You just figure out a way around it, or over it, or under it, or whatever – whatever the boulder is that gets in the way, you have to learn to navigate it and to do it with some grace and ease. You know, you can’t get upset over every little thing because that causes stress, and stress does all kinds of harmful stuff in our body.

Now, for some people, stress is a good thing. There’s short-term stress that some people thrive under. They need a deadline because that helps them stay focused on the one thing that needs to get done by a certain date, and that’s the kind of force they need in order to make it happen the best way. Other people – stress is a bad thing. It’s very unhealthy, and we try to avoid it. I fall into that category.

So when things cause me stress, I look at them and go, “Do I still need you around?” And if the answer is no, it’s gone, because my well-being matters, my state of mind matters, my health matters – and yours does too. So what you’re feeding your mind, what you’re feeding your body, how you’re taking care of yourself, whether you’re putting yourself first or always putting other people first – you know, the only way you can change, the only way you can find true happiness, true confidence, true feeling like you’re making a positive difference in the world, is you have to matter and you have to take care of you. Then you can take care of everybody else, but you have to come first.

So what are you ready to let go of? What are you ready to remove from the garden of your life? Have a beautiful day! Until next time!”

If you want to achieve your dreams, there are probably things that need to be cleared out.

What are you going to clear out of your life garden? Let me know in the comments.