People talk about dream holidays and travel companies offer all types of dream holidays. All types ?

If you ask 50 different people about what their dream holiday would be like, you need to be ready for 50 different answers. Indeed, everyone is different and so are our unspoken expectations of a dream holiday.

What we know about a dream holiday is that it is a holiday where everything is just great or even perfect – but only for YOU. What a dream holiday is to one, can be a nightmare to another or totally uninspiring at best.

In order to find or create a true dream holiday for yourself, you need to know yourself. Specifically, you need to be aware of what matters most to you on a holiday. It’s not about planning the execution, it’s about finding your personal strategy.

You could try two different techniques:

Ask yourself “If I could have ANY (absolutely any) holiday I wanted,  what would I choose ?” Now either paint a perfect picture in your mind imaging every detail of the perfect holiday for you; alternatively write down bullet points of things that are truly important on a dream holiday for you. It doesn’t matter whether your list or picture is very concrete e.g. a lonely jungle hut in the rain forest or more general e.g. calmness, no time pressure, no timetable, nature, hot, sunshine, etc.

Once you have a clear picture or a list of at least 20 points ask yourself

“What about this picture / each of the 20 points is important to me ?” Try to figure out what about each part of your picture or list it is that matters so much to you. Which new insights can you gather ?

Which other ways (other than your picture/20 points) can you see that would le you have what matters to you so much ?

Now ask: “What would it be like if I got it (the picture/ the 20 points) ?” “What would that give me ?”

Finally ask yourself on a scale from 0-10 how much of a dream holiday your picture or list would be (0= my nightmare holiday, 10 = my total dream holiday)

If you score a 8-10, you have the perfect blueprint or 20 criteria for choosing or creating a holiday which will truly become a dream experience for you. If you score any less than that, ask yourself “What’s missing  ?” and then add that to your picture or list.

Rather than getting seduced by other people’s definitions of dream holidays (including the travel agents) you can now create or look out for one that fits your needs and dreams exactly. A holiday created in this way is garantueed to make you feel fabulous.

Former Soviet dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had unique insights into the best and worst aspects of capitalism and communism. “Self-limitation is the fundamental and wisest step of a man who has obtained freedom and it is also the surest path to its attainment.”
English philosopher Bertrand Russell captured the concept elegantly: “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

Isn’t it true that our pursuit of more and more has in fact made us more unhappy, unhealthy and exhausted ? There are plenty of studies to prove it. Emotional distress is a disease of the affluent world !

Yet, our most fundamental needs as human are to feel secure, to be part of a community, to feel competent and to feel autonomous and authentic. So in these nerve-wrecking times, with many of our savings being wiped out, it is high time to preserve our mental health and remember what truly matters to us:
The things that truly enhance our lives – family, friendships, good neighbours and health – have one thing in common: They can’t be bought. Having and working towards them is REAL WEALTH, a wealth no financial crisis can ever take away from us.

I have worked on this with numerous clients and this summer, when realizing my dream of moving to and coaching from our beautiful new location in the Alps, I have experienced the full blast of it myself.

To create the life you really want, you most likely need to break with the familiar, “break shells and bust out of boxes that may have become quite familiar and neatly decorated, lined with the soft illusion of safety”. This is likely to be painful. Staying where you are is certainly easier, yet the question is: does it make you happy ?

Once you have become clear about what really matters to you, what uniquely defines success for you, you are ready to take the jump, make the changes towards a life that is more aligned with who you are inside. At that moment you can garantuee, absolutely garantuee that your inner critic, that voice that says “don’t try”, “it won’t work”, “you are crazy, stay where you are”, “what if you won’t make enough money”, etc etc will shout out its objections loud and clear. People around you might join in, pointing out all the risks….all the risks whether real or just their own fears and worries.

It is very important for you to know, that it is inevitable that your inner voice will point out all your fears, most likely blown out of proportions. This doesn’t mean you are on the wrong path. The fact, that your inner critic presents those worries and counter arguments so strongly, is a sign that you are on the right path, the path to fulfillment, to becoming alive !
The way to handle those objections is not to give up and return to where you were, but to explore those worries “you will not make enough money and starve”, and cut them back to realistic size “well, I will earn less at first, but I will survive, won’t starve”. Or maybe you realize them as your parents’/grandpa’s/teacher’s old voice. Ask yourself, what life would be like if you it stayed as it is for the rest of your life. Would that be ok for you ?

Knowing that you can expect those objections to come up is 90% of the battle won, because you are prepared, ready to tackle them, rather then being tackled by them.

When we had decided to leave Dubai and move to our dream location in the alpine countryside (with no major industry nearby), we had our own inner critical voices as well as many parents and people around us pointing out the risks. We could have kept talking and day-dreaming about it and stayed where we were.
Having taken the jump, gone through restoring an old house this summer (work I had no idea how to do) and creating our new home and coaching base was the best thing we have ever done. We are living the outdoor life, climbing mountains, cycling along lakes and running through the fields. We spend loads of time together as a family and engage with our neighbours. And we are helping other people realize their unique definition of a fabulous life, coaching them from this magical place – mostly on the phone.

But, yes, moving along the road of fulfillment is a RADICAL act. It is not about not having fear, it is about keeping going despite the fears, knowing that what lies on the other side is worth it.

1. Change is going to happen

2. You can choose to try to fight it or adapt – or even better: be pro-active and create the change YOUR way !

3. Although you can’t stop things from changing, you can control how you respond/react to them

4. Everyone reacts to change differently

5. Often when a door closes, a new, “better” one opens – but you need to choose to see it !

Yesterday, I experienced a real life example of these principles. Listen to this:

I could not believe what I saw in the letter, but indeed, our landlord was telling us with 6 month’s notice that he was not going to renew the tenancy agreement for our villa beyond December. He was going to demolish our entire compound of 10 villas built only 4 years ago ! If you know Dubai, you know that it has become common practise to “re-develop” plots to increase the profits. It is also a way to kick-out tenants with the view to charge new tenants a multiple of the previously charged rent (rent increases to existing tenants are limited to 7% p.a.).
When we rented the villa 4 years ago, the rent was at the top end of the market, but with rents rising 30% p.a., I knew that villas like ours where now being let at double the price we were paying. Finding an affordable villa that was still near my daughter’s school (traffic in Dubai is terrible) could have become a nightmare for us … but instead, after the initial surprise about the notice, I just couldn’t help but smile….

We had spend the past 6 months trying to work out how we really wanted life to be for us, where we really wanted to live ourselves, where we would be able to do the things that deep inside us mattered most to us and had meaning and ….where we really wanted our daughter to grow up. And the result was, that we took the decision to move, move away from the stress, the city life and lack of nature in Dubai ! Yes, we had decided months ago to not only move locations but also scale down and simplify our life so that we could do more of the things that mattered to us, be the type of wife/husband, mother/father, friend/colleague etc we really wanted to be and create those events and experiences that we would be proud of in old age.

Yes, we were going to leave anyway !

I felt so relieved, and so happy. The little voices in our heads had surely tried to convince us to keep things as they were “Why bother changing ? It is so much work. Just stay and enjoy life. You have it good, don’t be ungrateful for what you have…” The little voices were trying to convince us to just stay one more year, earn some more money, just keep going one more year. But we had finally chosen not to listen to them and go anyway. We committed ourselves to a new place in beautiful nature, where we would be able to spend more time with each other and live on a lower budget. And it felt so right.

I was so glad that we had not waited for things around us to change, holding on to the hope that what we liked about Dubai would stay the same… I suddenly felt (rather than just knew) what it meant to be in control of your life …rather than being controlled by life’s events. We had created our own change, the change we really wanted, the change that was surely hard work, too, but had a clear direction for us and hence felt wonderful !

And the best of it all….I know how to repeat this !
If you spend the time to figure out what really matters to you, clarify your values and those of the loved one’s around you, you have a guiding light for your path ahead. You can initiate the change that is needed to make you live more aligned with what matters to you, to have more integrity. This is a choice and you have to be pro-active. But as a result, you will change your life – rather than your life changing you.

Great to see you on developandgrow.com.