I am a list writer. Things I need in my wardrobe, food we need in the cupboards, to-do lists every day. I must have read that if you write it down you will make it happen. Plan the life you want and how you aim to get it and it will happen. But this is not happening for me. I know that this doesn’t happen for a lot of people.

While clearing through mounds of books and papers recently I discovered that my partner has been literally planning, through writing, scattegrams and mindmaps, a better life and relationships for years, not just once but over and over – years worth of plans. All the things we discuss now together with honesty and full hearted excitement, I realised with sadness he has planned and dreamed of all of this before in his former life. He is an articulate, imaginative, clever and hardworking person. So what stopped him actually just doing it?

I can honestly say I don’t know for sure what stops the dreams and schemes we all have from becoming just repeated words on pages. It’s sad to realise that unless we all do something extra-ordinary, and take an uncomfortable chance, life really is just Groundhog Day.

If I think about how I used to dream of better relationships, a better lifestyle, and better work it becomes visible to me. It is not fear. It is not bad luck nor errors of judgement. It is the people we surround ourselves with. The ones that unintentionally keep us small and take, and take again, because it suits them.

In the UK if you have a big idealistic mind and you tell people about it, it is rarely cultivated and admired, one becomes a dreamer or a boaster. Totally in opposition to Americans who seem to love and embrace people with big dreams; the bigger the better. They love dare-to-do’ers and winners. Here we love to lose; it allows us the self pity that we had ‘prepared earlier’.

One of my parents would always say ‘oh you don’t want to do that’ ‘why would you risk that?’ ‘It’s too soon’ ‘Its too late’. Then, as I got older, subsequent partners who liked life as it was (usually at my expense in one way or another) did exactly the same.

I am not historically blaming the people around me. No I am blaming myself for listening to them. I have recently broken off from associates, and fallen out with older members of my family because I have learned to claim my space, literally. I cant deal with their problems for them and trying to do so has been holding me back from moving forward. So I have become selfish. I will own that one because I don’t feel guilty: I need space from the nay-sayers and I don’t need the toxicity of my past in my present.

Resisting the urge to proclaim over and over that my life is brilliant is hard. I have so little in terms of finances and wealth. But my goodness, I am physically more healthy than ever, mentally getting stronger everyday, and I am putting myself out of my comfort zone to achieve greater things.

Procrastination does not work for anyone. Claiming your space to allow you to get on with whatever IT is, does.