3 Mistakes That Kill Our Dreams
SUMMARY
“What you become in the process, is more important than the dream. The kind of person you become, the character that you build, the courage that you develop, the faith that you are manifesting. You look in the mirror and you see a different person. You have to give up who you are to become who you want to be.”
– Les Brown
Key #5 – Stop Killing Your Dream
One of the things that inspired me to get into this work is that I love talking to people about their dreams. I sit down with people and we’re having lunch and we’re talking about one thing or another and before I know it they’re saying “you know what I really want to do?” It’s either start their own business or something about a relationship or some new product they want to develop or it’s just some way that they want to be living their life that they’re not currently living. At first I thought, “man, people really love sharing their dreams with me.” But then I got off myself and realized that’s it’s not me – that these dreams just want to come out. We have this unique thing that whispers to us throughout our lives and it’s dying for us to bring it into the world. In fact, ultimately, that’s why we are here.
The problem is that most of the time we kill the dream before it even has a chance to come out. Before people finish their sentence they’re already starting up with “but I’m too old, I don’t have time, where would I find the money, I don’t know how to do that.” A mentor of mine once said that the difference between people who live their dreams and the people who don’t is that the people who live their dreams make it their job to make the time, get the money, and learn how.
People believe that they need to be the kind of person that ultimately fulfills on their dream before they can begin pursuing them. We tend to look at the ultimate outcome and believe that we have to have all the skills, experience and resources to accomplish that end, at the beginning. This “finish-line mentality” is backwards. In fact, it’s in the pursuit of a dream that we become the extraordinary people that we are all capable of becoming. It’s by tackling the challenges one small piece at a time that contributes to incremental personal improvements which, in their totality, create the extraordinary person we need to be to bring our dreams into the world. The Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King and Gandhi’s of the world didn’t start out that way. They became these great icons by overcoming all that stood between themand their dreams.
For most people their dream is somewhere in the future. Sometimes deceptively “near”. A good friend of mine was always ‘in the process’ of accomplishing his dreams. I appreciate that there is work to be done before something we are creating manifests but we also have to be careful of not finding ourselves always ‘in the process’. Many times when I get to the bottom of what people’s processes are and it’s not much different than what I would describe as ‘doing nothing.’ And so with our dreams in the near or far off future, we begin to fragment our lives. Living the dream is over there, but we’re over here doing whatever we are doing which is, I suppose, not living the dream. We have our ‘reasons’ and they all sound very ‘reasonable’. And we come to believe that once we just get these last few pieces of our life over here in order, we can start working on our dream over there, then. But here’s the truth – the dream only exists in the here and the now. If your dream is in the future it will most certainly remain there. You might be thinking “but come on David, I’ve got my job, my kids, my other responsibilities – how could I possibly find time now to start working on my dream?” I understand and appreciate that we often feel like we’re already tapped out and that we couldn’t possibly have time to bring our big, bodacious dream into the world. But here’s the thing – we don’t have to. We just have to take some small action, maybe an hour or two a week, towards our dream. Do a little research on the web about what might be required to accomplish your dream. Read a biography over the next month about someone who has already done it. Keep formulating in your mind the details around your dream and take a little bit of action in the real world towards it. Two things will happen.
First you will start to wire your brain towards the accomplishment of this goal and as you do that you will have more ideas about how you can transition from what you’ve been doing to living your dream. As long as you continue to kill your dream without letting it breath you’ll continue to cut yourself off from the ideas that are trying to get to you in order to make the transition to your dream happen. Second, you will allow the magic of the universe to work. You will start to experience people, places and opportunities that align with your dream. You will begin to experience what we inappropriately call coincidence around your dream. Someone will need your help on something aligned with your dream. Someone will come to your assistance with money or resources or ideas at just the right time. Money will begin to make itself available. Knowledge will become accessible at your fingertips. All kinds of opportunities that you never thought possible will begin to make themselves available to you if you will just begin to put your attention, and a little bit of action, towards this goal of yours. This is the fundamental secret of anyone who has been successful at constructing their dream life, of achieving their goals, of creating anything extraordinary in their lives. The only thing truly standing between you and everything you want in your life is your resistance to its possibility.
Today’s Distinction
The only thing truly standing between you and everything you want in your life is your resistance to its possibility.
