During the COVID-19 times, we all missed lots and lots of things, and I call it the four F’s: our family, our friends, our freedom and our forward planning. We were being told all the time, and the guidelines were telling us, “You can’t. You can’t. You can’t.” Actually, doing what you can’t in your business lives and personal lives can really be your hidden superpower.

What stops us from achieving what it is that we actually want in our life? By life, I mean both personally and professionally. What is it that we can change? Where is it that you would really like to be? Where is it that you want to be? What dreams do you have of perhaps a bigger, better, brighter future? What is it that you wish for when you see other people? What is it that you particularly admire in them? Or do you think, Oh, I would really like some of that. We are all born equal, but we’ve gotten to where we are because of the people and the influences that we’ve had around us, the education that we’ve had, but above all, the mindset of how we are actually going to be handling what life inevitably keeps throwing at us.

As soon as we often think about things we want to achieve, and we have these big, hairy, audacious goals, often our mind goes into what I would call defense mode, and it thinks of all the reasons: Yeah, but I can’t. We can’t. We can’t do these things. So, thinking back to being a child — my son, I remember when he was under 10 years old. He used to love running around the garden, and he would make things with his Lego sets. His imagination would run wild because, guess what? Not many people had told him by then that he couldn’t do that. Nobody had taken away and stolen those dreams from him. I think that’s a really magical place to be.

How can we take ourselves back to those places and start believing and dreaming bigger about our own lives? Unless we actually embrace that and change that phrasing in our head as to how we hear it and see it, we are always going to be held back by those fears, our frustrations and being told in our heads and by other people that we can’t. What if we could? Where would it actually take us?

If you knew you couldn’t fail, what is it you would actually set your goals and dreams to be? How big a goal, how big a dream would you really have if you didn’t think that failure was perhaps an option? It makes you think, doesn’t it? What would we all do? What would we like to try? What experiences would we want to have? What would we want to do in our business lives? What would we want to happen in our personal lives as well? How would we want to run our lives? What would our ideal and perfect life actually look like?

We need to be that childlike person again and dare to dream. Most people don’t make time to think of goals. To get you grounded and see where you actually are at the moment, look at those lists of areas of our lives that we all have. Where would you actually score yourself at the moment, out of 10, in each of those areas? Be honest with yourself. Would you score yourself maybe a five at a career? Would you maybe look at your family and friends and think, Actually, I don’t spend as much time with them as I want to, and score yourself a six?

Think about self-auditing in those very areas to give you an idea as to maybe what goals you could set for yourself. They don’t have to be big ones. It could be that you just want to maybe ring up one of your family members once a month and connect with them. Whatever it is, you need to start moving nearer to the goals that you actually want to have. Many people, and this is a word of warning, spend much of their time running around thinking about what they don’t want.

What I mean by that is we think we don’t want to be broke. We don’t want business to be so hard. We don’t want to be out of shape and not very fit. We don’t want our relationships to be bad. In thinking about what we don’t want, what we are doing is giving our focus and attention to those very things that are going to be even more true. We are focusing on what we don’t want, but what we need to focus on is what it is that we actually do want in life. For those who have clear, concise goals, it makes it easier to know when they are on track to actually getting closer to hitting them. And it means that we can actually, if we wanted to, obsess on them on a daily basis. And those people who achieve the next level of success — that we all want to have — are those people who act like that.

A vision board is a very simple thing. You put down this vision board — you can do it on an iPad if you want to; there are apps for it. You can do it simply on a corkboard, or just pin some things to a wall. But what is it, your vision? What is it that you want? It could be material things, it could be your fitness, or it could be your physical health. I have a vision board. I look at my vision board every day, and it reminds me of the goals and the things that I want to actually do.

What’s really interesting is that I had my ideal, dream car on my vision board. It must be about four or five years ago now, and I kept on looking at this, looking at it, looking at it, looking at it. And in 2020, I actually managed to buy my dream car. And what was really spooky about that was that it wasn’t just any of the dream cars; it was exactly the make, the model and, scarily, the exact color of car that I had on my vision board. So, when I now walk out of the house, I look at the driveway and my vision board is there in real life. I’m not saying this to you to show off. I’m just saying that if we take the time in our lives to sit and think for a moment, sometimes in our lives, we have to slow down just to go faster.

We all have the same amount of time, and urgency about that time can make your fears disappear. When you are really pushed to do something, you’d be surprised at what you can actually do. Imagine the old-fashioned sand glass timer, where you tip it up, like the egg timer. Imagine if we all have one of those that represented our lives, and, as soon as we are born, it’s turned over, and the sand starts falling through. Now, you can’t force that sand back inside the hourglass; it’s going to keep falling no matter what you actually do. So, there’s an urgency there because we are not having another life again. But it reframes this sort of context for you about how much time we have left.

When I was younger, about 9 years old, I struggled a lot with asthma. I had very bad asthma, to the point that I had some inhalers and all sorts of things. I used to get asthma attacks and had to go to the hospital quite a few times on a nebulizer, which gave you oxygen and drugs to make sure that you kept alive. There was one time when I went to the hospital because I had had a really bad asthma attack. They said, “We need to bring him in because we need to make sure he’s OK.” I was put on this nebulizer, and then I got a cough, which is the worst thing you actually want to have when you can’t breathe already. So, in coughing, I tore both my lungs open as a 9-year-old. Every time I breathed, air was leaking out. I turned out to be the equivalent to the Michelin Man, if you know who he is in the adverts. My whole skin blew up, and I was so exhausted. I remember lying there in the hospital bed trying to sleep. The nurses were doing a shift handover. They came around, and they thought I was asleep because I was faced the other way. They said, “This is David Braithwaite. We need to keep an eye on him because we’re not sure if he’s going to make it.” I vowed from that moment on — I’ve never forgotten that — to make the most of everything and every experience that I ever have because you never know what life can actually throw at you. So, be careful. Go out there, and think about how many weeks you’ve had and maybe how many weeks you might have left as well.

If we don’t actually do something, well, that’s the biggest single reason we are going to fail. Non-action. At least if we try, then it’s got to make us better. We are going to grow as people. We are going to get nearer toward those goals that we actually want to have in our lives.

David Braithwaite, Dip PFS, became a financial advisor in 1994, and since then, he has experienced huge changes within this exciting and ever-changing profession — which are a springboard to face fear and grow your business year after year. By sharing and speaking honestly about his experiences, Braithwaite hopes other advisors can implement his ideas immediately to make an impact for themselves and their businesses.