Giving Up Something To Get Your Dreams – Brand New House!
What Do You Need To Change In Your Life So You Accomplish Your Dreams?
Wow! I just fulfilled one of my lifelong dreams and bought a new house!
This was one of my dreams for a long time and I made some sacrifices to achieve it that might inspire you. If you’re “aching” for the day when one dream is a reality you will be inspired by my story of how I accomplished my goal of buying a beautiful 4 bedroom/4 bathroom, 3 car garage home before the age of 40.
I Was Comfortable But I Had Bigger Goals
Being comfortable was actually stopping me from accomplishing my dreams. I was living in the city of my dreams (San Diego)… surrounded by tons of supportive friends (I knew so many people I didn’t need to make new friends)… running a small business and feeling proud of what I was accomplishing (what I had was enough!).
But at the age of 34, there were huge personal life goals that I was NOT on track to accomplish that had a timeline on them. I wanted to be able to:
1) Keep more profit in my business so I could grow… faster
2) Buy a NICE house before I was 40
3) Meet a nice hardworking guy and start a family!
The ability to keep profit in California was totally dampened by a 10%+ state income tax (I wanted to save 20% of my income to be able to hit my goals). Plus the California housing prices where even an old small home was $1 million or more. And although I met nice guys in California – I hadn’t yet met the nice guy of my dreams in the circles I was regularly hanging out in. Being in my comfort zone meant I wasn’t meeting new people and I wasn’t saving.
Plus – in a more sensitive and emotional place – my family had gone through some difficulties and my parents didn’t have a house to call home. We didn’t have a safe and quiet place where all the members of my family could congregate to experience “family” together. And I didn’t have the ability to fill the gap because I had just started a small business and wasn’t financially there yet!
That hard moment made me realize that A HOME was a personal priority goal for me so I could have a restful place to enjoy my family and so I always knew there was a safe place for all the people I cared about.
Making Changes & Getting Uncomfortable
I decided to make changes in order to support my personal life goals – and those changes felt like sacrifices because they were UNCOMFORTABLE, UNKNOWN and UNCERTAIN!
I started my journey by deciding to:
1) Move to Dallas.
2) Find an affordable apartment to
fit my budgeted goals.
3) Downgrade my car lease to an inexpensive Rav-4.
4) I auto-allocated the % I would have spent on taxes to savings.
5) Moved the money I was saving out of my eyesight and into a separate “savings” account so I couldn’t be tempted to spend it.
6) I also started dating like it was my job to find –
but I will write about that goal in a separate article!
Yes, that means I chose to move away from family and friends and my dream city of San Diego… I chose to downgrade my car… I chose to make changes to my business model… Within a few years, I was able to buy a house and the timing was amazing because I am now able to do it with my new husband – Dylan Lin.
What Does A Sacrifice Need To Look Like?
When you read what I did and see that I call these choices UNCOMFORTABLE, UNKNOWN and UNCERTAIN sacrifices you might think “Hey Emily – those aren’t that bad…” and I would agree with you! Other people have sacrifice harder things. That is the point though – I chose the LEAST PAINFUL and MOST AWESOME way I possibly could imagine for me. I wanted to still live a good life that I could be proud of how I was living, while still accelerating my dreams. So I crafted actions that would create an exciting adventure!
But don’t be mistaken – making the change was painful to consider and was often lonely! I had to choose to ignore the voices of fear or worry or comfort telling me to stop. It required letting go of some thoughts, patterns, choices inorder for me to think outside of my box, sacrificing immediate comfort for future gain.
Our brain is chemically wired to HATE change… it’s literally chemically painful to listen to an opinion we don’t like or learn something we don’t know yet. Our brain enjoys and chemically rewards us when we do things that are familiar and comfortable.
Accomplishing our goals is always going to require sacrifice in the form of choosing to CHANGE our minds.
Where Our Dreams Start?
Your dreams are also within grasp… Do you want to change your mind and create different results?
It starts with clarity on what you want. Clarity means:
1) WRITING OUT A CLEAR DEFINITION OF YOUR GOALS – Define in detail the outcomes you want and the more specific you are the more empowering this process will be to help you accomplish it.
2) PRIORITIZE YOUR GOALS – You must put these outcomes in a list that is ranked by importance based on your own personal priorities.
3) KNOW WHY THIS MATTERS – get clear on why you must have that thing. Make time to write this out and stare at it over a few days to be sure that is sincerely what you want.
Then the results come from writing a strategy. Strategy means:
1) BRAINSTORM IDEAS TO GET THERE – Brainstorming lots of options of paths to get to what you want – which includes finding mentors, friends or family, coaches, podcasts, and articles that have outside opinions on how to accomplish those goals. Depending on how honest and similar in ideas your family or friends are, the best ideas come from people who either know you really well OR from people who don’t know you at all but have accomplished your goal.
2) ADD CONTRARIAN IDEAS – Seeking out and adding to that list contrarian opinions and ideas. If all of your ideas on your list sound safe and what everyone else is doing – go find some opinions of people that make you feel uncomfortable! You don’t have to end up applying those opinions but YOU CAN’T grow without getting uncomfortable and it takes a unique and brave person to express opinions to you that aren’t popular but that could be good.
3) PRIORITIZE – Pioritizing the strategies means organizing the options based on your perception of pros/cons. You have to decide what is worth sacrificing and investing in your goals.
Then you implement action. Action means:
1) WRITE OUT THE STEPS – Once you pick your strategy, write out all of the steps you would need to take to make the result inevitable.
2) SCHEDULE YOUR RESULTS – If you don’t put it on the calendar or on auto-draft, making a time on your schedule so you ensure you put in effort towards those results.
3) DON’T GIVE UP – Not giving up is essential because making dreams happen comes with a sacrifice. What support do you need to put in place to ensure this happens for you?
What Do You Want To Create In Your Life?
If you see a gap between “where you are” and “where you want to be” – I hope my experience inspires you to ask yourself these questions today:
● Am I on track to accomplish my goals in an exciting and reasonable timeline?
● What would it take for me to make those goals a priority and accomplish them?
● Would I be willing to get uncomfortable to accomplish those dreams?
As a small business owner – scaling can be financially challenging and therefore buying a house is also a far off goal. Being willing to be uncomfortable is VERY EMPOWERING. When you accept that making a sacrifice is what it will take to accomplish your goals you realize you ARE more in control of your outcomes than you knew. You just have to give up something to get something else – but that means it is within reach. Most of the goals you have ARE!
Let’s not let life just happen to us… let’s realize what we want and do what it takes to get it!
I’m wishing you an amazing and growth-filled rest of your year!
-Emily
CLICK TO WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC_3K-G4_O4&t=8s
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MORE ABOUT START TO SOLD
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MORE ABOUT EMILY PAGE
Emily is CEO of Pearl Resourcing and has managed and launched multiple 7-figure brands in Costco, Williams-Sonoma, Kroger, and Amazon. She’s bringing you the expertise, resources, and mentors you need so that you can develop products and make them sell. She also offers business growth consulting(https://www.emilyannepage.com) and free advice for brand owners through START TO SOLD (http://starttosoldpodcast.com)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilypage/
