If you are looking to achieve your dreams, then one of the best activities to do is to look at someone who has done exactly that and learn from the way in which they did it. For that reason I want to talk today about my great friend Michelle L Marquez who amazingly became one of the first ladies to work on the stock exchange in the early 80s, when it was very much a male dominated industry. These days there is equality throughout the stock exchange from the securities commission to the fraud prevention team, in arbitration and of course on the trading floor. Michelle was able to accomplish her dreams and here is how she did it.
Identifying
Michelle knew that she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and work for the securities commission from a very early age. What helped her here was the ability to identify her dreams as this can be incredibly helpful when it comes to actually going after them. You may think to yourself that your dream is to own a Ferrari but if you have no idea how to get from here to there, you may never even get to sit in one. Identify what your dream is, and how you plan to get there.
Tenacity
Michelle faced a huge number of challenges in her pursuit to get to where she wanted to go and she had to be incredibly tenacious in her approach to pursuing it. You will almost certainly face the same thing regardless of what your dream is and if you genuinely want to achieve it, you are going to have to push through obstacles like criticism, failure, lack of belief and lack of support. Without tenacity you won’t get to where you want to go.
Hard Work
Make no mistake, achieving your dreams isn’t easy and if it was then everybody would be out there enjoying their dream, but they are not. This is why you must have a solid work ethic and an approach to work which is unwavering. This could look like working all the hours under the sun, it could look like working in awful situations with the hope of a brighter future or it could mean making tough decisions which will stay with you forever. Michelle knew this too and she was absolutely relentless in her work ethic throughout education and then in her career, which helped her to get to where she did.
Belief
Everyone else can doubt you but you must never doubt yourself, not if you want to achieve the dreams that your heart desires. As I mentioned Michelle knew from a very early age what she wanted to do and most importantly she always believed that she could do it. If you are able to gain this inner belief, then you will be able to put yourself in a great position to overcome any obstacle on the path to achieving your dreams.
