Reeta Wolfsohn, CMSW, is a social worker, author and therapist, as well as the founder of the Financial Social Work discipline.

By Reeta Wolfsohn, CMSW

Is where you are on your life journey where you want to be?

If it isn’t, what do you want to do about it? If it isn’t, what are you willing to do about it? If it isn’t, do you know where you’d rather be? If you don’t, what can you do to figure out where you want to be and how to get there?

Don’t spend your life waiting for your destiny to be revealed to you — go out and begin to create it. Your future is in your hands. You possess the power to shape the dreams you have today into the life you want tomorrow. Take charge of your own future or someone else will, and no one else knows what is best for you.

Accept that you will make some mistakes along the way, but the alternative of staying stuck where you are would be the biggest mistake of all. By risking nothing you risk everything — so take some well planned risks based on thorough research and sound information gathering.

Five Tips to Help You Get Started:
1.    Identify a minimum of two positive things about your life today and stay focused on them. (Focusing on the positive will help you to move your life forward.)

2.    Identify two specific areas of your life that you want to change. (Until and unless you know what you want to change you are not likely to create change in your life.)

3.    Identify two specific actions you can take to create change in each of the two areas you identified above in #2.

4.    Begin to take those actions and then continue to identify additional actions that will move your life forward.

5.    Be more accepting of who you are while working to create change. (Negativity keeps you stuck. You are the sum of all of your previous choices and that is ok. Tomorrow, next week, and next year you can be in a different place based on the sum of the choices you begin making today.)

Consider ways that you can change the course of your life journey by:
•    Changing your thinking
•    Changing your behavior
•    Getting to know and to understand yourself better
•    Accepting that wanting to accomplish more, striving to accomplish more and working to accomplish more is what living is all about

Reeta Wolfsohn, CMSW
Reeta Wolfsohn, CMSW, is a social worker, author, and therapist, as well as the founder of the Financial Social Work discipline (www.financialsocialwork.com .)

The Center for Financial Social Work offers weekly, low cost, on-line Financial Therapy Support Groups at www.financialtherapygroups.com .)

She is a founding member of the Asheville Strategic Alliance, a group of like-minded professionals who share the goal of making Asheville and all of Western North Carolina a more money-wise community.

The group offers free financial education workshops, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., two Wednesday nights a month, at 149 Lexington Avenue. To learn more visit www.moneywisewnc.com .