Challenge: Admit your dreams to yourself

Dream chasing is a funny thing. The term gets bounded around like there’s nothing easier in the world. Yet we don’t really speak about our dreams. Often not even to ourselves. We may have our vision boards in Pinterest (stay tuned for an upcoming post on using Pinterest to create your Vision Board), we may roughly have a few goals written down, but they’re somehow distant and in that land of ‘somewhere, someday’.

(Or we’re told to just wait and they’ll appear, so we sit and wait for them to happen. But that’s a rant for another day.)

I think it's one thing talking about telling other people your dreams, but sometimes it's just as scary admitting our dreams to ourselves.

And sometimes we don’t even acknowledge our dreams.  Or they're resigned to the page of a beautiful notebook that we're too scared to write in. They’re too overwhelming. Or we’ve convinced ourselves we would fail or it wouldn’t work out even before we’ve started thinking about them properly.

But sometimes they force themselves up from where we’ve been hiding them.

And they come out in a rage of bravery, when we're feeling on top of the world and everything feels possible. This happens when we allow ourselves to really dream big for a second and our inner critic goes away long enough to let us go to places we're usually too scared to go.

And that feeling doesn’t usually last too long.

But it’s crazy exciting when we get to that place, but it’s also terrifying. It’s like admitting that we have to act on them, that we need to find a way to handle our inner critic(s) and shit does get real.

And they’re actually possible. *Gulps*

I only started writing down my actual real-life-shit-this-could-happen-fuck-me-this-is-scary dreams down recently.

And it took guts.

Real fucking guts.

It was scary.

I was led there on my bed at 1am, almost paranoid that the world was judging me. I might as well have put my arm around what I was writing like a primary school child who doesn’t want to be copied on a test.

I didn’t realise my dreams were as big as there were. I’d never taken the time to actually write them down, and like what usually happens when we put pen to paper, they developed. They became more lucid. They became concrete things to work towards. And in that moment, they actually felt achievable. They felt like they were something legit I could work towards.

That was 1am in the morning when I was feeling inspired and the courage was raging.

And since then I’ve thought about them in a whole variety of moods. And they’ve felt unrealistic, unachievable, absolutely within my reach if I work hard enough, possible, stupid and everything inbetween.

What would happen if we all spoke about our dreams?

This dream chasing stuff is scary shit. Don’t get fooled by all the pretty pictures into thinking that it’s not.

Because it is really scary when you come face to face with something you really want. Our minds are so programmed to think about how we would deal with failure and things going wrong that we don’t often go to that place. We don’t go to the place where we actually envision it happening.

But I’m working on it. I’m working on finding creative ways to display my dreams around me so they become the new normal, and an actual real life goal instead of this mini-fantasy film in my head. (I’ll share them with you as I find them).

So this week I have a dare for you. And that dare is to join me.

Create a space for yourself that feels safe. Do it on your own in the dead of night or in the hustle and bustle of a busy coffee shop.

Write your dreams on a post it note. Forget the beautiful notebook for now - just get them down. And don’t judge yourself.

Put on earphones or your headphones with music that makes you feel alive and let yourself daydream. Give yourself five judgement free minutes and play around with those two powerful words ‘What If?’

And then put the post-it somewhere you’re going to look at it. This could be in your purse, it could be on your bookshelf, it could be a note in Evernote on your phone.

Let it become the new normal.

We can do this.