The Renewal of Your Mind: Key to Your Transformation into the Hero of Your Dream?

You undoubtedly have a dream,
A mental representation of yourself and your loved ones enjoying the rewards of your business or of your ideal job, free from any financial worry and able to go on vacation to the most exquisite destinations whenever you want. As you animate this picture in your imagination you see yourself playing your ideal role in this world and living your ideal life.

Seeing your dream, born from your imagination and your expectations from life, become a reality is your picture of success, and working at it is your day-to-day preoccupation.

So you plan, strategize and go out there trying to make it come to pass. You work hard to build a business or to find your ideal job which will allow you to live the kind of life that you want. You pray and hope that someday you will see your expected results. But at the end of the day you realize that nothing has changed in your life. Your condition seems to be as it has always been, if not worse.

I remember a song of one Congolese musician in which he literally says “Because of the hardships of my existence, I wish life were like in my dream where there is no worries, no struggles, and where all my needs and desires are fulfilled”.

The first thing that you have to do is to find out if your odds are good enough for achieving your dream by putting it to test but this is not the subject of our article. If you want to learn about it, you can get yourself a copy of Put Your Dream to The Test where John C. Maxwell, through a drilldown of this matter, shows how answering 10 major questions can help get clear about the achievability of a dream.

Now, here what you need to know about the process of making your dream come to pass: “Being precedes doing, and doing precedes having”. That’s where most dreamers fail – you as well might have been failing at this point which is the very beginning of the process of transforming your dream into reality. A mango tree cannot produce oranges, a lioness cannot give birth to a leopard, and a cat cannot bark.

You cannot produce your ideal life or living your dream without first becoming your ideal self. If you want to produce or live the life of your dream, you should first become the hero of your dream by integrating his values and acquiring his personality.

As you may know, a particular type of personality produces a way of thinking and behaving that are specific to it. Your natural tendency or inclination is to express thoughts and behaviors that are congruent with your personality. Words, actions and behaviors are born from thoughts, and it is your personality that determines your way of thinking.

That’s why Stephen R. Covey in his book, Principle-Centered Leadership, suggests a paradigm shift as means to implement change, as “significant breakthroughs often represent internal breaks with traditional ways of thinking.”

“…for as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…” I bet you know this epigram, don’t you? It inspired James Allen in 1902 to write his literary essay, As a Man Thinketh, where he made the following Statement: “Men do not attract what they want, but what they are.”

The bible, from which the above epigram is, reports the earnest request of the apostle Paul to the followers of Jesus Christ. In Roman 12: 1-2, it reads as follows: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Paul knew that the only way for Christians to live the kind of life that Jesus Christ lived – a life exempt from sin – was to be transformed by the renewing of their mind.

Likewise it is only through the process of mind renewal that you can turn your dream into reality. Trying to change your existence conditions by working only on your circumstances will lead you to frustrations. It’s you who need to change first, not your spouse, your work, your earnings nor your environment. You can achieve your dream only to the extent that you first become the hero of your dream. Instead of focusing on acquiring the rewards that your hero is enjoying in your dream, you should focus on becoming him by:

• Acquiring his personality,
• Integrating the values from which he draws the principles by which he lives, and
• Adopting the discipline that allows him to stick to his principles of life.