I had my first two children on either side of my twenty-third and twenty-fifth birthdays. I had always assumed that by time I was forty, I'd have a ton of freedom to finally push forward with my dreams of becoming a motivational writer and speaker. It really looked like that was way my life was going to go too.

I fell in love with a man when I was in my mid-thirties and he was in his mid-forties. We were very much in love and planning to get married. I actually found myself wishing I could have his baby. I hadn't felt like that in many years. We were discussing whether or not to have a child together. We both loved idea, but we were also looking at reality of our lives, our finances, our circumstances, and especially our ages. Was this really something to even consider so late in game? Could we say yes to another child? Could we say no?

As it turned out, I got pregnant despite using two forms of birth control before we could even make up our minds if we were going to have a child together or not. We decided that it must be fate that we'd have one more. We agreed that I'd work from home on my writing career while carrying our child. I was nervous about having a baby when I was so involved in my work, but I was also so grateful that decision had been made by a higher power than me.

I had been talking with guardian angels for many years by that time and felt a spiritual calling to become a writer and to tell stories that my angels wanted told. I had been told which books to write and was working on an outline for one of them when a little voice whispered to me. It told me to go lay down on couch and meditate because it had something to tell me. I thought it was one of my angels, so I raced over to couch to hear what they had to say to me.

The entity told me that he was my unborn child. I saw a vision of a darling two-year-old boy with magical eyes. He looked at me like he had delicious little secrets. He said that he was going to be a boy and that we used to know him as Michael. He then told me what his new name would be. He also assured me that when they ran tests to check for birth defects, that I'd see that he was going to be strong and healthy. I had nothing to worry about.

Why is it that some goals have a fire and a passion behind them that creates an almost self-propelled drive towards completion, while other goals are left dead in water before they've hardly even begun? What causes that level of motivation to manifest itself? Can we harness it? Can we predict when and where it will hit? The answers lie in finding out if person setting goal is in touch with his or her own deepest desires. Do they really understand who and what they are? Do they really know what it is that drives them?

Write down a list of goals and dreams you've set for yourself over years. Take a nice long trip down memory lane. Think about kinds of goals and dreams you set for yourself when you were a child, a teenager, a young adult. Look at what kinds of goals you began listing when you became a spouse, a parent, an employee, or a boss. Don't worry if you can't remember every single goal you've ever set for yourself. Don't make assignment into a research project and a headache. But I do want you to spend a bit of time with it.

Now that you have your list of old goals and dreams, make some kind of a checkmark or run a highlighter over ones that had a strong powerful effect on you and you couldn't possibly put them down. These are most likely ones that you accomplished. If you didn't accomplish them, do they still haunt you? Do they still beg to be completed? Don't start counting and keeping score as to how many you followed through to finish and how many you let drop aside. It really doesn't matter at all what kind of a success rate you may or may not have had before today. This isn't about that, I just want you to separate ones that did put a fire in your belly from ones that had no fire or passion behind them.

Now, take your list of positive traits and attributes from Finding Yourself and compare it to your list of old goals and dreams. How many of goals that had you all fired up were somehow connected to wonderful things we found are within you? If for example, you found out that one of your positive traits is that you are intelligent, then how many of goals you were really passionate about involved using your intelligence? How many of them were about developing or enhancing your intelligence? If you found out that you are funny, how many of goals and dreams that you loved were somehow connected to your sense of humor?