What dreams keep coming back to your mind? What do you see yourself doing when you daydream? Do you see yourself helping people by performing surgical operations? Maybe you imagine that your efforts just won the national championship for your favorite sports team. Perhaps you sit at the piano, close your eyes, and begin to make music that causes listeners to weep from the beauty of it.
Your dreams are what keeps you going towards a goal. They are what you imagine doing and being when you become your true self in life. Dreams give you the vision of how you would run your fully successful business. They create the map of where you travel to and what you will do when you get there.
How do you recognize a true dream? A true dream has been with you for a long time, even since childhood. Life might have tried to take your dream away from you at some point, but it still lives in your heart and never really dies.
Protect Your Dreams.
Dream stealers are lurking everywhere so learn to protect your dreams. Here are five ways that you could lose your dream. Being aware of this can help you put a stop to the loss of your dreams.
1. Lack of support
Did you ever tell people you were going to be the President of the United States some day? Perhaps you shared a desire to become an entrepreneur or write and publish a novel. Did others look at you and tell you to stop dreaming? That type of response to sharing your dreams early in life can be a reason you might stuff a dream deep inside instead of making it happen. Or you at least stop sharing those big dreams.
An dream that is not nurtured does not die. It just goes into a place deep inside of you and keeps you restless. It wants to get out. You might live the rest of your life doing everything except what you really wanted to because you were told to stop dreaming.”
2. Living the dreams of others
Did others suggest to you what you should be doing in life? Did you decide to do that because it made sense, pleased others, or was supposed to be the way to really make a “good living?” Maybe you were only supported when you pursued the dream of others, not what you wanted to do. This is another reason why you can start denying your real dream in life.
How many times were you told to “get a real job” or “you’re dreaming if you think you can make money doing that?” It might be difficult to face the reality that the direction you are going in life is not what you really want to do but that you are actually living the dreams of others.
3. Not understanding how
Did your dream seem impossible? Maybe you wanted to be a surgeon, a performing artist, a college professor, or scientist. But somehow it just didn’t seem feasible. It costs a lot of money. You didn’t have the educational levels. You were side-tracked by other responsibilities.
Instead of pursuing ways to make it happen, maybe you put the dream away or tried to just drop it and went into a whole different line of work. But the feeling of frustrated still lingers insides. You feel you’ve missed your calling and wonder how to get at least a piece of the excitement back.
4. You lack the courage to try it.
Are you afraid of failure? Does that fear keep you from moving forward in your dreams? Maybe it’s no one’s fault that you are stuck except your own. Stop fretting. Some dreams really are so big that they are frightening to think about. It you don’t have role models or other support; you might not know even how to start in the direction of your dream.
Maybe it would take years to get to where you want to be, and the reality is that you can’t spare the time or take that direction. Or you worry that if you tried and didn’t make it in the area you pursue you could waste a lot of money and time. That’s a risk to take. On the other hand, you could succeed and do what you were born to do when you get the courage to try.
5. You only heard the negatives
Were you pounded by negative statements in your life? Did those statements leave an impact on your mind without your awareness? There was a student in a college class who turned in an incredible essay. It was so good that the professor called him in and asked why he had been holding back his great writing talent for so long. He said that a high school teacher he respected had told him he was a lousy writer. After that he hid his work, never to be slapped down like that again. Here it was years later that he “slipped” by letting his great work out.
He had lost his dream of becoming a writer and had even denied himself the opportunity to study creative writing in college, all because of the pounding of negative statements planted in his mind years earlier.
What about you? How many negative words from others have stopped your dream? Were these words from people who really mattered in the whole scheme of things in life? Where are those people now? Negative statements can hurt or even try to kill your dreams. But you have the power to bring those dreams back to life.
These five areas are just the tip of the iceberg for the reasons why you might have put your dream in hiding in your life. Go over these points and see what comes up in your thought process. How have you denied yourself your greatest dreams? Face the truth, then go about taking steps to pull that dream out of hiding to make it a reality in your life.
