At one time, you had hopes, dreams and plans for a great future. But circumstances, events and the trials of life, have caused you to put your plans on hold. But, a little while has become a long time. So you figured, why bother. It’s too late for anything to come of it anyway.

But still, now and then, you wonder how it might have been. Instead of living in regret, why not re-open your dream. A lady recently graduated from college, at 86 years old. It is not too late. Many people realize their dreams at all stages of life.

If you’re like most people, your plan was to someday run your own business, be your own boss, make it on your own. To make your fortune, so that you could live well and retire before you got too burned out to enjoy life. That sounds like a pretty good plan, to me.

Don’t let your dream die. Young, old or middle aged. Your age doesn’t matter. Neither does your financial status. Not even your educational level. Determination and motivation have more to do with success than education, anyway.

Whether it is in business or in everyday life, determination and motivation are key factors in obtaining goals of any kind. Determination is overcoming challenges. Whenever an obstacle gets in your way, you will find a way around it. Motivation is the reason behind your determination. What is the reason for starting your business? Is the reason respect, independence or self-esteem? These are all very good motivators.

But, it’s been a while. Where do you turn? Things are a little different now. You have sort of lost sight of what to do.

Maybe you should consult with counselors. In this aspect, counseling is simply mentoring or coaching. These are people who will help you with thoughts and ideas for starting your business. They will help you with such things as motivation, self-esteem, leadership, goals, putting together a business plan, and so much more.

Their coaching staff will help you to think through some ideas for starting a new business, as well as to refer you to people who can offer assistance if you need start-up capital, business insurance, or have any other business financial requirements.

Go online, and in the search box, type in either counselors, coaching or mentoring. Any of these will give you some very good options. Search through some of the various Web sites that appear, until you have found someone that you feel comfortable working with. By all means, check them over thoroughly before you indulge very deep with them. Make sure that you can trust them.

Now, perhaps you might be more ambitious than most people, and I hope you are, and you are not content with just being self-employed. Instead, you are thinking more of an all out career. If this is your case, I highly recommend tutoring. Just type tutoring in the search box, instead.

Tutoring is a little different than coaching or mentoring. With coaching and mentoring, you will be given help with ideas for business, self-esteem, motivation, and steps for achieving goals. We could all use a little push in every one of these areas. With tutoring you will receive all of this and so much more.

With tutoring, you will also receive technical training in the field that you have chosen. But along with training, they will teach you how to market your business. Every business needs customers to survive. Tutoring will teach you how to both market offline and to market online, in order to attract customers, which in turn will attract business.

Don’t give up on your dreams. If you give up on your dreams, then you given up on yourself. Don’t do this. You can do it. It takes effort to dream. If it is worth the effort to dream it, then, it is worth the effort to live it. Go, realize your dream.

Dreams are great, but reality is better. Far better. Go to http://www.MoneyMaverickDaily.com And live your dreams. Richard Vennes enjoys seeing people move ahead in life.

Pamela Dunn, founder of Executive Coaching International, is passionate about helping successful professionals and entrepreneurs achieve their highest vision of success. As a former trainer for world-class success coach Tony Robbins, Pamela has a tremendous amount of insight into personal and professional success. Her unique High Performance Coaching System is a results-oriented program that has helped countless professionals find focus, build efficiency, and eliminate overwhelm. For information about Pamela’s coaching program, or to sign up for more free, high-performance articles like this, please visit her online at http://www.pameladunn.com/.

Success is your personal responsibility and not an entitlement! You can not assume nor expect that others will ‘do for you’ in the quest for your own personal desires; that only happens for children and not grown adults! Many who have aspirations of achieving success in various aspects of their lives often times fall short.

All too frequently the cause for this can be traced back to a lack of personal accountability for their own efforts. There is no doubt that having goals and objectives is an important step towards improving yourself or your situation. However setting goals while also taking responsibility for your own efforts to achieve them is how to become successful.

When you take personal accountability of your own actions while planning or pursuing anything worthwhile you have taken the first step towards eventually reaching your goals. Just to want something however is not good enough; this desire MUST be reinforced by some type of proactive behavior on your part. Let’s look at 5 ways taking personal accountability influences and determines the level of success you will achieve

Vision

You and only you know what it is that you want and how it will affect your life. The vision needed to put together a realistic plan can only come from within the person who has the desire to make this vision a reality. This is not something you can ‘outsource’ to another since these visions are rooted in your own dreams.

Goals and Objectives

Once you have established your vision you will next need to put together the ’steps’ you will have to take to make this a real part of your life. Your goals and objectives are the actual steps you will need to take to make your vision your reality.

Once again only you are familiar with the ‘full context’ of what your vision really is and what it means to you so only you can establish the ‘unique’ goals needed to achieve this dream. After all your vision is just that, a dream, until you succeed in making it your reality. It is also important that you keep these goals realistic. They must be something you have the necessary skills and resources to accomplish otherwise you will be wasting your time.

Plan

You now must put together a ‘workable’ plan that will be effective in helping you reach your goals. As with every other step that has come before only you know what it is you are capable of regarding your skills, patience, resolve and resources.

Execution

As we spoke of earlier it is not reasonable or realistic to depend upon the efforts of others for you to accomplish your own goals. The plans you have laid out now require your personal involvement. Nobody can breath, walk or talk for you so why would you expect different in the pursuit of YOUR OWN goals? The actions needed to accomplish these goals must be by you and it is up to you to be sure these actions are carried out correctly.

Charting Progress

If some system is not developed or implemented for charting your progress there is no way of determining how far you have gone and how far you have to go. A sense of measurement is necessary to also keep you motivated by reminding you of the progress you have already made. By taking personal responsibility of your own actions in the pursuit of goals and objectives you have set increases your chances of reaching your goals.

Achieving success in any situation is dependent upon the active role you play in both the planning process and by taking the necessary actions. To become successful in any aspect of your life you MUST become actively involved in the 5 step process as we reviewed above. To believe your personal achievements can be realized through the efforts of others is foolhardy and will only set you up for repeated failure and disappointment.

Have you ever met someone who is amazingly talented and highly credentialed in a wide variety of areas? A person who is phenomenal in both the diversity and quality of their work, yet has just never truly achieved success? Someone who may be a gifted artist, an investment pro, graduated from law school, and has people skills galore – yet, they just haven’t made it. Have you ever wondered why? Perhaps this is you. Why, with all the resources and skills at your disposal have you not found success?

Success is a result of knowing where you want to go, creating a specific roadmap to get you there and having the discipline to stay on track.

Individuals and organizations fail to achieve success because they have never done the work of defining who they are or what they do and then sticking with it. People fail to succeed for the same reason businesses do; they are not focused in the way they invest scarce resources. Each person or business has only a limited amount of time, energy and capital to use pursuing their goals and dreams.

Most fabulously talented people fail because they don’t set limits. Have you met someone who has three or four different business cards? They are so busy doing a little of everything they never shine at any one thing. In order to succeed, you must select some one thing to be the vehicle of your success. You can’t be committed to two visions any more than you can drive two cars at one time.

Crafting an effective mission statement provides the framework for using resources in ways that will best support all your efforts to achieve the goals you set. Individuals, families, churches, charities and businesses all benefit from well thought-out summaries of who they are, what they do and why they do it.

Establish your vision. If you don’t know where you want to go, just how do you propose to get there? Do you really want to entrust your future to nothing more than luck? If so, quit reading and go buy a lottery ticket.

Once you have a vision, specifically outline the process of attaining it. Set a series of goals, beginning with step one and continuing all the way to where your vision becomes your reality. Vision and goals are useless without discipline. Stay focused. Invest your resources only in ways that achieve set goals; using each dollar, hour or calorie wisely to get you closer to your vision and not wasted on impulsive activity.

Another aspect to achieving success is being realistic. What are you really willing to change? What are you truly able to change? What are you willing to do? What are you willing to risk?

Set yourself up to succeed. Identify smaller goals and gradually build a foundation of success. As that foundation gets stronger you can increase your expectations, expand your vision and build as high as you can imagine. Even though each step won is a small one, they eventually combine, serving as your road to the top.

Success isn’t really all that complicated if you remember that Vision gives you direction, Focus determines the method, and Discipline makes it happen.

Is it winning a lottery? Or is it traveling the world and learning new cultures, tasting new dishes, lazing in exotic places? Or is it finding the perfect mate? Is it money, sex, power, fame? These are life’s pleasures, yes, but certainly not the biggest and the best.

Hold your breath ladies and gentlemen, for I am about to reveal life’s biggest and most satisfying pleasures of all. All other pleasures stand second to or stem from this glorious one. Life’s most pleasurable experience is doing what others said you could not do or achieving what others thought impossible for you to achieve. It may not sound all that fascinating an experience in life, but when you believe in yourself when nobody else does, and you go on to achieve something that somebody else said you could not, you will realize that all other experiences are overshadowed by this one.

It may take years to experience this feeling, eons to prove that you were capable of doing what you believed in but the final experience is totally worth it. A teacher once told a student, you are dreaming beyond your capabilities, beyond what your IQ potential actually is. The student mulled over this advice and instead of giving up on her dream, she pursued it with an even greater determination. Years later, the student achieved what the teacher said she would not. This made her realize that she can achieve whatever she wanted. She realized that success came from persistence and belief in oneself. She realized that she could achieve anything she wanted and nothing was too difficult or beyond her capability. She realized all of this and more because she was lucky to have pursued her dream that some completely ignorant teacher laughed at.

And that realization broke all those barriers that stood in between her and her dreams. She let go of her fears, “Oh, that is too tough for me, that is not my cup of tea because it requires logic, I can’t take up a job that requires analytical thinking because I suffer from shift of focus, I’m not good at Math, I can’t contribute in meetings because I have an accent, I’m too fat to feel confident.”

She realized that she could have whatever she wanted, no matter what anybody else said or felt about it. She was free to dream, because she achieved something that someone said she could not. What she experienced was blissful, rewarding and taught her the best lesson in life: Never judge yourself based on others’ comments. If you have a beautiful dream, that serves humanity in some way, pursue it, give it your best shot, achieve it and then look back and say: See, old friend, I did it, in spite of what you said. I didn’t give up on myself. And it feels terrific.