Are Your Choices Helping You Achieve Your Dreams, or Holding You Back?

23 Jul Are Your Choices Helping You Achieve Your Dreams, or Holding You Back?

A couple of years ago at a networking event, I was chatting amongst a group of people (as you do at networking event). The topic of conversation? Travel. Some were sharing about their most recent adventure, while others were reliving their most memorable trip. 

It was small talk, the kind of thing you chitchat about to break the ice. That is, until one of the guys said, “I would love to travel as a lifestyle. You know, live nomadically.” My ears priked up because this is a dream that many of my clients have; it’s oftentimes what fuels them to want to create an unconventional career. 

So out of curiosity, I asked him what he did as a profession. The ice had officially been broken. “I’m a lawyer,” he said, and went on to share with me that he typically works 60-80 hours a week, many of which he spends in court or preparing to be in court. 

Certainly not a very nomadic-friendly career, that’s for sure. The career coach in me couldn’t help but mention this observation to him. And suddenly his expression changed to something akin to shock. 

I could tell he was churning this revelation around in his mind; that it hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that his dream lifestyle and his career choice didn’t align. In fact, they were nearly complete opposites. 

Herein lies a predicament that many people face, oftentimes unknowingly. They have these big, bold, beautiful dreams for what they want for their life, but their choices rarely support the creation of these dreams into reality. Sometimes, they even actively move them farther away from what they truly desire. 

And over time, they get frustrated. They get discouraged, because no matter what they do or how hard they work, they’re not achieving these dreams. They feel foolish for having allowed themselves to dream at all, because they should have known better than to think they’d come true. Maybe this is something you yourself have run into a time or two (or ten)?

But the problem isn’t the dream. The problem is that you never gave the dream a chance to come true, because you didn’t set up the right conditions for it to happen. You didn’t align the other areas of your life to support the achievement of the dream. You didn’t make choices or take deliberate action to realize it. 

Your dreams won’t magically just happen. You can’t hope them into reality. Dreams come true when you align all of the areas of your life to support you in achieving them. 

That’s what life design is. It’s the cohesion between the areas of your life—from career, to relationships, to health—to support you in getting where you want to go and doing the things you want to do. In living how you want to live. 

So if you’re finding yourself frustrated because you have big dreams, but you’re just not getting closer to reaching them, ask yourself what might be getting in the way of that happening? In what ways might the areas of your life be clashing? Try and identify what you might do to help them align better in support of those dreams. 

Because I know you didn’t just dream your dreams for them to stay dreams. You dreamt those dreams to be the seeds of someday. Plant them, and intentionally design your life so as to watch them grow into your future. 

 Published at Joy & Co.