Dreams Come Alive

Over several months I had agonised over how best to launch my first ever blog. As was a bad habit of mine, I felt it had to be perfect, clever, witty, original, creative, blah blah blah. As I ran through the myriad of ideas and angles in my head, the hours and days and subsequently, months, flew by and all I had to show was…well, nothing.

Recently a friend and coach impressed upon me the following quote by Da Vinci: “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough, we must do.” Coming from a man who sketched the design for the first parachute some 500 years ago (by the way, all 85 kilograms of his original contraption was put to the test a few years back and it does fly!), I decided to take the bull by its horns and started putting pen to paper. Or rather, I started tapping on the keyboard. And whatever comes out will be good enough; whatever “good enough” means.

And so now I find myself blogging. There is a certain sense of jubilant celebration, of triumphant achievement, that comes from simply doing it, and putting an end to all that torturous analysing and endless wondering of how it would turn out. After all it is actions that create outcomes, not considerations.

And so it is that there are two key sets of actions to having our dreams come alive. The first is that of a declaration. I find so many people I speak with or coach who have inspiring goals and dreams but refrain from really thinking about them, much less write or talk about them. And the biggest reason is that they have deemed themselves incapable or unrealistic from the outset.

Our identity and belief systems have been built and honed over several years of our existence and strengthened by our daily experiences. And it is these that determine our self talk, our conversations about whether we can or are good enough or whether we should. And so instead of casting our eyes to a future vision of what can be, many scrutinise the past and justify what cannot be. Which is a shame, a downright shame, for many years from now, we will look back in regret at the things we did not do, not the things we did.

So, imagine you have a magic wand…what will your life be like?