1. her husband loves Boston, the cold and his work
2. she takes care of her two adorable grandchildren one day a week
3. she’s worried about leaving behind Boston’s excellent medical facilities

She can’t decide whether these are serious roadblocks to her dream of living somewhere warm or simply excuses for staying stuck. Her concerns may seem very specific to her situation but just about any life question can be tackled using the 5-step D.R.E.A.M. guide that we discuss in Changing Your Course.

To get unstuck, the first step is always to Decide whether or not your dream is important enough to warrant spending time examining your options. If so, Step 2 will help you do that Research, part of which has to do with exploring the logistics. In the case of our reader, perhaps she could start off by spending a week or two in Florida and add more time the next year. For that week or two, alternate childcare arrangements could be made for her grandchildren. Part of the necessary research also means looking at the relationships involved. If our reader is really miserable, she needs to share those feelings with her family so that together they can come up with solutions. Maybe she can go south with a friend or perhaps her husband can come for some of the time.

As always, there are choices that have to be made. Flexibility is the key. If your goals are important enough, you can find ways to achieve them even if you have to make adjustments to fit the realities of your family, income, location, etc. You have to be prepared to modify and adapt your goals but don’t let this stop you. Get unstuck and get some sun!

Changing course starts with making a decision

We really love how easy it’s become to send a note to someone you’ve never met. It used to be that if you wanted to write to an author, you’d write to their publisher or agent and then hope the letter would actually get forwarded on. Now you can just send them—or more pertinently, us!—an e-mail with your comment or question. Readers do, in fact, send us lots of e-mails and we read each and every one of them.

When a similar question gets asked by different people, we try to respond to that concern in one of our books or more recently, here on-line. (And with the new interactive component of our blog, we want to encourage our readers to develop their own supportive forum of questions and answers.) One frequent concern has to do with starting something new with little or no experience. As one young woman wrote, “It’s easy for me to sit at my desk at my current job and say I want to [start a small business] but to actually make the first step is really hard. I don’t even know where to start!”

Well, our new book Changing Your Course is all about turning your dreams into reality and here’s what we want you to know about that scary first step: it doesn’t mean selling all your possessions and booking a one-way, non-refundable ticket! Our 5-step D.R.E.A.M. guide to getting the life you want starts with D for Decide. Changing course starts with making a decision. Nothing will happen unless you decide to make a change or at least, you decide to investigate what making a change involves. And the really important work happens as you examine which parts of your life need to change.

After all, if you want to build a bridge to your future, you have to know where you stand right now.

When did you last allow yourself time to dream?  

We’ve come up with a tactic that helps us focus on what’s important in our lives and what can wait until later: We run away from home. Not for long, of course – just long enough to give us perspective. For us, that means driving over to the coast of Maine for lunch. It’s a two-hour trip and we accomplish more in that time than we ever would during the same two hours at home. We take turns driving along the back roads and it’s amazing how the peaceful ride away from all distractions can get our creative juices going.

We head for Barnacle Billy’s in Ogunquit and sit on the deck overlooking the harbor. Often we end up talking about our lives. We think about what’s working and what’s not. We make lists of pros and cons about what we might want to change. Dreaming about how to improve the quality of our life is how we ended up spending summers in Vermont and winters in Anguilla. We gave ourselves the luxury of time to think about what we really wanted to do.

Figure out where you could go for a day of dreaming. Think about having a great lunch in a casual place where you can linger. (Good food really does help the process!) Take some time getting there, too. Let your mind wander around the thought of what really makes you happy. Allow yourself to think about change. If some aspect of your life was modified, how would that affect you?

You’ll find that if you indulge yourself with a day of dreaming, it won’t be time wasted. It’s the first step to a life filled with passion and enthusiasm – not to mention some memorable meals along the way.

Bob and the gang launching the boat they built together

Just got asked once again by someone who’s thinking of making a move, how did we ever make the decision to move to Anguilla? The long answer, of course, is it’s all in our books. But our decision to change course always starts with identifying our own ideal environment. It really, really matters to us where we live, who we spend time with, and how much we love what we’re doing. We don’t want to complain about things we can’t change but on the other hand we don’t want to stop caring about these questions. For us, they aren’t secondary to a steady salary or a familiar job, so if we can make a change for the better, we will.

Remember: Delaying a change in course may, in fact, be the right decision, but don’t rationalize that it’s going to be that much easier to do so in the future. You run the risk of getting stuck.

What we didn’t expect was how appropriate the title would turn out to be. After we finished the book and it was ready to go to press, we evaluated what we’d written and realized that we had to revise it completely. It seemed disjointed and not quite right. It was more a story than a roll-up-your-sleeves, do-it-yourself guide. We decided that if we wanted to make this book the best it could be, we had to change our course and start over.

So as ironic as it sounds, we changed our own course while writing Changing Your Course. That’s right. We re-wrote the entire book four times! But the best part about that experience is that we were able to revise and really test our 5-step process. We used the very same D.R.E.A.M. steps – Decide, Research, Evaluate, Act and Maintain – to create the book. First, we decided what parts of the original manuscript needed to change, researched the various approaches we could take, and evaluated which method worked best. Then we acted, working on the book for many months.

Finally, in order to make sure our system works in any life situation, we tested it using changes of all sizes. We applied our 5 steps to all kinds of goals: weight loss, new career, new relationship, and more. Then we launched this Web site to spread the Live What You Love spirit even further. That’s how our dream of helping people will be maintained for years to come.

What change would you like to make? Is it big or small? Have you been able to narrow it down? Are you stumped? Have you hit a wall? How have you started to change your course?