How to Make Your Dreams Come True (Paperback)

I picked Forster's book because I read his first time management work. I implemented his daily 'what's better' list, I began a self-coaching dialogue, wrote out my future vision and began the goal achievement method with a short term goal that was seriously behind schedule. The results were astounding.

Within the first three days, through his methods, I realised that my stasis was caused by three main mental 'glitches', that I did an extraordinary number of tasks a day and then forgot how much I had done, that my confusion was caused by my mind not being able to cope with the amount of data I threw at it without a proper 'mental filing' protocol.

During the weeks that followed, I discovered more about myself than I had in the previous six years. I finished a major project in half the allotted time, I finally organised a holiday for the first time in 5 years, I wrote over 10K words a day, I began to go swimming everyday and I didn't feel like all this was any effort at all. I felt exhilarated, my energy levels were bionic. The speed at which I progressed was so fast, I could feel the wind in my hair. My partner started calling me 'Supergirl'.

I think Mark's key idea is the notion of narrative as a focusing tool for your mind. He asks you to live through 'story' techniques, constantly creating and revising towards your future vision, your grand narrative. This worked brilliantly for me. For the first time in my life, I wanted to do things, I lived through doing what I felt like doing and everything got done, even the ironing.

I heartily recomend his book. It has changed my life and I can't wait to see how it changes my future.

So I tried it. And it worked!

I created a vision that I guessed would take five or six years to achieve and began a dialog with my future successful self.

Just six months later I had to re-write my future vision - because most of my previous goals were already achieved! Since then I have continued to achieve major life goals with this method.

The approach seemed to provide me with a gentle but powerful incentive to keep focused and motivated to attain my dream - even taking setbacks and upsets in my stride. In the past I had been great at planning, dreaming and scheming - but found it hard to keep up momentum and motivation and almost impossible to take action. These dialogs with my future self seemed to effortlessly overcome those tendencies.

In a way it was the opposite of getting in touch with my inner child - I got in touch instead with my inner wiser older loving guru! One that knew my strengths and weaknesses. One that was loving but firm and tolerant of my defects. One that encouraged me to see the progress rather than the failures. Mark has hit on a lovely magical way to let me coach myself to success.

Now I'm back to buy more copies to give as gifts to my friends.

This may not be for everyone - NLP 'experts' will cringe at some of the steps since it does not follow their specific methodology for visualisation and one can find many shortcomings with the format and content of the work as pointed out by previous reviewers - but it worked for me despite my strong scepticism.