At the age of 39, despite what I told myself in the past, I have accomplished many of my greatest dreams… though often not the way I expected. That’s the thing about desires and dreaming: the path is rarely what you anticipate and you often feel very differently when you get what you want from how you imagined you would.
As I was growing up, it felt like my dreams were taking an impossibly long time to come true. Like the 5-year-old who wants to be big overnight, I thought that having (or having done) the things I wanted would make my life so much better. I wanted them NOW! They just couldn’t come quickly enough.
When I got what I wanted, I was often happy for just a short little while before I began thinking about the next thing I didn’t have… or how what I got wasn’t exactly what I thought or hoped it would be. Rather that lingering in gratitude, I would get lost in my thoughts, I’d get sucked into noticing all of the things I didn’t like or want… and then feel like a failure because I still hadn’t accomplished [fill in the unrealistically ambitious blank].
Here’s the crux: because I unwittingly focused more energy on avoiding failure or disappointment than on my dreams, I noticed every failure or disappointment in my life. While I did achieve a lot, and often felt wonderful, I also felt my failures more acutely than my successes. That’s a very human way of being: if 49 people think you’re wonderful and one person heckles you, chances are, you’ll remember the heckler.
My solution? Seek permission or approval! Then you can’t get it wrong! Only, in my quest to “get things right” I learned to ignore my intuition. I focused on doing things the way other people said they should be done rather than trusting myself.
This made me feel really small. I jumped through the hoops. I made myself fit in. I won approval being a follower and dampened my creativity and excitement about pretty much everything.
I would like to say that I ended my approval-seeing behaviour when I burned out in my early thirties, but it took a few more years for me to realize how much damage it was really doing. A 360 review at work knocked the breath out of me. It indicated in writing that my approval seeking was noticed by others…and it was working against me.
My direct supervisor scored me zero on creative courage and zero on integrity. My other colleagues made comments about the importance of my trusting myself and standing up for my beliefs because I was not going to get approval from the partners at the firm.
Rather than keeping me safe, my approval seeking had diminished me in the eyes of the people I was trying to impress. Rather than impressing them, I had showed them that I was afraid and lacked the courage to make bold moves and stand by my ideas.
This episode led to a breakthrough: I realized I had nothing to lose. If making myself likeable and compliant didn’t win anyone’s approval, I would simply show up as I am, speak my truth, and stand by my own ideas. I would have the courage to argue for what I thought was right, and listen to other people’s ideas with curiosity rather than the desire to come off as smart and helpful.
Everything changed. I started enjoying my work more. I started getting clear on the work I actually wanted to do and the work I could delegate. I started to see how much more was possible for me when I advocated for myself. I remembered who I was beneath the layers of niceness and self-protection.
That was the beginning of the adventure that would bring me to where I am now, to a life where I have the confidence to make my dreams reality.
The truth is, what you think you want is nowhere near as important as how you feel. Learning to trust myself and be grateful for what I have, for who I am, gave me the courage to choose how I show up in the world and to make magic as I go.
I get to go on adventures, tell stories that change people’s lives, help people to create their dreams. I get to create programs that combine the things I love, write about the things that inspire me, and trust that if I stay connected to the things I desire and to gratitude for what I have, all of my dreams will come true…in their own time. ✨
