Dreams are the stuff life is made of. We all have them. Yet many people wonder how they can ever realize their dreams, or they give them up when they experience roadblocks, detours and curves on their path.

It is often difficult to achieve a financial dream when there are many financial issues that seem to take priority. Daily expenses, buying a car, paying off a mortgage or debt, saving for your own or a child’s or a grandchild’s education, saving for retirement, taking a family vacation, or caring for aging parents, and the list goes on.

There are multiple and competing demands on our finances that make achieving our dreams sometimes appear to be impossible. How can you manage all these financial challenges and at the same time keep your dreams alive? How can dreams become reality?

Your goals start as a dream, but with planning, determination and communication, you can make them a reality! And by understanding your financial attitudes and values, you’ll have a better chance of reaching your goals. Your trip to financial security will be successful if you keep your destination in mind.

To manifest your new goals – remember this – it takes practice and it takes correction and it takes analysis – someone can show you how to hit a golf ball but that doesn’t mean that you can take the club and make a perfect drive down the fairway the first time. You may find that with all the instruction your body still has to learn new skills that will become automatic through practice…

So you may hit the ball many times – it may slice, hook or go in the woods – but if it doesn’t work the first time would you quit? If you do you will never learn to play golf.

So establishing goals is a step in and of itself; it doesn’t mean that you will be able to harvest the goal immediately. Setting the goal is like planting a seed – you put it in the dirt – water and feed it give it sunlight and nurture it. Sometime in the future the seedling breaks through and you continue taking care and nurturing your plant, enjoying its blossoms or fruits. You would not expect to plant a seed in the ground – stare at it and expect to get instant results.

If you have a dream that you haven’t yet transformed into a real goal, ask yourself this: What is standing in my way? If the list sounds like a bunch of excuses rather than legitimate realistic facts – then you have your answer.

Time to break out and go for what you really want in your life!

One of my favourite quotes from Henry David Thoreau is:

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be; now put the foundations under them.”