Write It Down, Make It Happen, by Henriette Anne Klauser, provides many different ways to approach reaching your goals. I like the variety of techniques and how concrete the lessons are, as well as how focused and well-organized the book is. Each chapter illustrates a different person’s story and how the technique in that chapter helped manifest goals. The chapter ends with a “Now You” summary recapping how to employ that technique. I find a lot of journaling advice to be too corny or unfocused; in contrast, Klauser has a warm and friendly tone, without coming across as New Age silly. She seems like a very practical person.

Klauser is an advocate of the belief system that writing down what you want helps you become clear about what exactly you want, why you want it, and how to achieve it. When we write down our goals, we become more attuned in our daily lives to unlocking the steps that will help even major, seemingly impossible, dreams come true.

I appreciated that this book doesn’t require you to follow an overwhelming “system.” There are no worksheets to fill out or daily journals to keep or other exercises that would make me feel like a failure if I didn’t complete them. You can pick up any single chapter of the book and do something useful with it.

Here are some of her ideas that I’ve used to achieve personal goals:

1. When you write down what you want to achieve, it starts to make it seem more “real” to you, and therefore you becoming willing to ask others for help in achieving your goal. Being open about what I want has helped me connect to people and learn about opportunities that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about. I’m writing a novel about massage therapy, step-parenting, and multiple sclerosis. Most writers keep their novels close to the vest – we are told that talking about the plot dissipates the energy we’d otherwise put into writing – but I find the more I share, the more people show up in my life to bring information or other support. After asking for help, I had great conversations with people who were experts on all of the above topics, and it got me moving in a better direction with my novel.

 

2. Sometimes you think you must have a certain outcome, but you realize later there was an essence you needed, not the particular outcome. Writing down your fears and desires helps crystalize what you really want to have in your life and when it’s not happening, you start to see the things that block you from getting there. In my own life, I felt like I couldn’t handle taking my kids on a trip alone, even though I’ve wanted to do so for the past few years. I had never traveled without a husband, mother, or mother-in-law. I felt like my family was “incomplete” without a husband. I wrote about these feelings several times and realized that if I can handle taking care of my kids at home, I can take them on a trip. The three of us are a family! You should have seen my hands shaking just before I clicked “confirm reservation,” but now we are all looking forward to an awesome vacation and my confidence is growing, knowing I will be doing something I’ve never done before.

 

3. Writing down your goals teaches you patience. I am not a patient person. I have a seemingly calm exterior, but inside I am churning with aspirations. I have high standards, highest of all for myself. There were times I seemingly failed at different things, only to realize through writing that I wasn’t ready to achieve those goals. One memorable story in the book was about a woman who waited years to find the husband of her dreams. She wrote letters to her “soul mate” long before she ever met him, and in the process, realized how many things she had to fix in her own life to be ready for this soul mate. There are still areas in my life in which I feel like I’m failing, but this perspective helps me realize it’s not a “no,” it’s a “not yet.”

 

4. Writing is a good place to express your fears (and then let them go). There have been many days where I felt emotional and unfocused. Talking with others only led me to be argumentative and feeling even more disconnected. When I sat and wrote instead, I could vent everything I may not have wanted to really to say to others, and then release it. The good part was to look back on this writing later when I was feeling calmer and see how the tumblers started clicking into place. My writing would start off as a bunch of disjointed ideas and start to gel into more coherent thought as I processed the ideas jumping out of my head.

 

5. Being thankful to others brings many returns. One of my favorite parts of this book is how gratefully the author expresses her thanks for the people who have helped her, and for the chapter in which a teenage girl wrote letters to God asking for help in various areas of her life, but always starting first with praise and thanks. Klauser’s writing reminded me that one of my goals is to practice “literary citizenship,” or open gratitude to writers I admire. Klauser has a bibliography that includes other books similar to her topic. She is not trying to hoard the market on setting goals through writing, and she writes about several other authors whose books paved the way for hers. I do not expect tit-for-tat promotion, but I do believe in the abundance of the universe – that if I do as much as I can to help the authors I love, some of that love will come back for my writing as well someday.

 

I started my blog for this week on a totally different topic, but I wasn’t feeling enthused about it and the more I wrote, the more it sounded like a pathetic, whiny rant. Who needs to put that out into the universe? Writing through my stress helped me get to a place of gratitude and optimism (and I’m hoping a blog you find much more useful and enjoyable!).

 

Please check out my first novel, Giving Myself Away, about a divorced mom making tough choices.

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