Do you dare to dream?

Jenny Garrett4th March 2019

When you go for that job, make an offer on that house, get nominated for that award, do you dare to dream of yourself achieving a positive outcome?

There are many reasons why you might not, perhaps you don’t want to raise your hopes in case you’ll be disappointed, or maybe you want to save face incase it doesn’t work out and then you can say, ‘I didn’t expect it to have a positive outcome anyway’, or maybe you think if you start believing it you’ll become overconfident and that will backfire on you.

Any of those situations could occur, but have you stopped to consider the consequences of not even daring to dream?

After all, our thoughts become our words, which then become our actions. If we don’t dream in the first place, how can we then make our dreams a reality?

I love this quote from the late Steve Jobs:

‘Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.’

Changemakers dare to dream of a world positively different than the one they are living in. Here’s how you can do the same:

Tell it…

Harriet Tubman the American abolitionist and activist said ‘Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.’ There were so many reasons why she could have not dared to dream of her 13 missions to release people who had been enslaved.

Do you remember writing stories as a child? Tapping into your imagination, or how you would be able to suspend reality and become completely engrossed in watching a film that you would believe it was true?

To begin daring to dream you need to take yourself back to this child like state and write the story of your dreams, without judgement, without the if’s and but’s that adult life has taught you. Bring your dream to life through writing and speaking about it as if it were already real and true.

Feel it…

Eleanor Roosevelt said ‘The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.’ But do we know what the beauty is? Our emotions reveal this beauty if we choose to tap into them.

It’s not enough to tell the story of your dream, you need to experience the feelings associated with it, the excitement, the joy, the pride, the happiness, or whatever the feeling is for you, you should have that fluttery feeling in your stomach that you have when things are going great for you.

In fact Neuroscientists have found that we make decisions from our emotions and rationalise them with our logical brain. So if you don’t engage your emotions when dreaming, you haven’t really decided to succeed!

Habituate it…

Author, Marcia Wieder said that ‘commitment leads to action. Action brings your dream closer.’ There is no doubt that making a habit of taking action around your dream is critical. The most important actions to take are to:

Visualise achieving your dream daily
Break your dream down into the smallest actions possible and do something towards it daily
Create milestones so that you can celebrate your progress, this will spur you on to do more.

If you only dared to dream, what more could you achieve?

Here are some further resources to help you: