If you started the new year with ambitious goals and aspirations that are already on life-support, or have been abandoned altogether: CONGRATULATIONS. Only now do you have the real-world information you need to reassess your situation, gain more clarity, and tweak your approach.

To help you figure out how to achieve your most ambitious goals for real, I've invited master life coach Laurie Gerber of The Handel Group to share her tips for how to use setbacks to understand yourself more deeply, and shine a spotlight on the mental, emotional and practical strategies that will help you achieve your most ambitious goals.

Listen and learn:

• How creating multidimensional, holistic self-awareness can help you uncover blindspots that could otherwise become obstacles.
• Why the obvious path to change is often not effective (and what often unseen things actually are)
• How to get your thoughts, feelings and behavior into alignment
• Different ways of thinking that will help you stay motivated over the long haul

I hope that this conversation helps YOU dig deeper, get into alignment, and get clarity about where to refocus your energy.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

PS: We discussed a number of resources in this episode. One of them is our free Ten Year Plan exercise. If you haven't done this yet, here's the link to get the pdf or access to the online version.

It's so easy — especially for smart, determined, proactive and successful people — to spend a lot (a LOT) of time and energy pursuing goals that, at the end of the day, are not actually the most important or meaningful ones to them. Sounds crazy, but it's true: We're all vulnerable to absorbing messages from our families, social media, our culture, and certainly the combined efforts of many savvy marketers about what we should want. About who we should be. About what we should do with our lives.

You Are The Author of Your Own Life Story

At the end of the day, buying in to someone else's hopes and dreams for your life can lead you down the wrong path. Even if you — by virtue of your intelligence, determination, and hard work — are successful in creating all of it and achieving the ideals that you were handed, they will still feel hollow to you. Because they were never genuinely meaningful and important to YOU. And you will have spent so much of your precious time, energy, love, and devotion to achieving goals that — at the end of the day — could have been spent creating the life and reality that was your heart's desire.

You deserve better. You deserve to own your own goals and create a destiny that will lead to your heart overflowing with authentic happiness and gratitude. You deserve, at the very end of your precious life, to have zero regrets.You deserve to feel pride and appreciation for what you have created, and what will last long after your time on this earth has passed.

How to Design Your Life Around What Matters Most

To help you create this reality — the clear-eyed pursuit and attainment of the goals that are actually the most important and precious to YOU — I have a very special gift for you. On the latest episode of the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing a very wise and insightful man, author Chris Meyer.

Chris has a fascinating story: He spent many years as the director of a funeral home. (Stay with me here!) Over the years, he sat with many families as they planned their final goodbyes. He sat with people who were dying, and grieving families, and heard their stories — their gratitude, and their regrets, and the profound insights into what really mattered.... from the perspective of looking back on their lives.

Today, he is here to share these insights directly with YOU. He is bringing you the messages from people at the end, so that YOU can design your life with intention, clarity and love, and maintain you focus on what really matters most to you.

It's a heartfelt gift for you, on this edition of the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast. I sincerely hope that it helps you get clarity and self-awareness for how you'd like to design YOUR life as we enter into a new decade, together.

With love,

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby