Everybody has had a dream before. Dreaming is not a bad thing, dreams give us a hopeful version of ‘what can be’; they allow us to be what we cannot be yet. Having dreams that we think we can achieve gives us a moment of happiness, the hope that our dreams might one day be fulfilled can get us through a tough period in our life. Dreams can motivate us and give us a reason to get out of bed every day.
I used to dream that one day I’d become a pianist, so I decided to start music lessons. But before I started them I decided to take a look at an advanced music sheet, it seemed so hard and I couldn’t understand any of it. I felt like I could never do it and so at nine years old, I killed my own dreams.
Most of us do that, we never get to live our dreams and sometimes we let that happen. Looking back on some of the dreams I gave up on that ‘could have been’, I realized they are things that do kill our dreams and we can identify them. If we know what they are then maybe we can kill them before they kill our dreams.
The biggest thing that kills our dreams is our fears. Mine was the fear of failure, I let the fear of failure paralyze me and prevent me from even trying. Looking back I have realized that this has happened to me more than once. We all have something we are scared of, and that is typical of us human beings. But if we let our fears take control of us, paralyze us and create our circumstances they will end up destroying our dreams before we can even muster up the courage to start working on them.
Our feelings also play a role in killing our dreams. It is easy to dream and work towards our dreams when we are feeling great about ourselves and everything is going well for us. When we start working on our goals and dreams, we are usually feeling motivated, inspired and energetic. When the going gets tough when life has done a number on us and we feel defeated…we usually give up on our dreams. When we let our feelings determine what we do, we won’t get much done. Discipline your feelings and have the awareness to use them and not let them use you.
We sometimes tend to allow the opinion of others to drown our dreams. Have you ever told someone a great idea or a goal of yours and all they did was give you two hundred reasons why it wouldn’t work? Sometimes we listen to that and coupled with our own inner critic, our dreams don’t stand a chance of survival. Are they your dreams right? So be responsible for them. Don’t allow anyone to tell you what you can’t do, instead, listen to that one voice at the back of your head that gives you one reason why your ideas and goals will workout.
Negative opinions are usually brought up by Negative people. They are people who are dedicated to bringing other people down, it seems like it is their life mission. I have had the unfortunate experience of meeting a few people like this and they managed to convince me that some of my goals and ideas weren’t worth fighting for. Negative opinions are easy to absorb the more we hang around with negative people the more we start thinking like them.
Self-doubt will hold you back from working on your goals and dreams. Self-doubt will have you wanting to be someone else, it will have you waiting for others approval, make you compare yourself to others and it will have you looking for formulas to go for your dreams when the truth is…they are none. If you don’t want your dreams to die, believe in yourself.
Other things that can kill our dreams include Our ego, laziness, procrastination, lack of passion and addictions.
If it was easy to live up to our dreams, we would all be happy. The fact is achieving anything worthwhile will be difficult, but not impossible. If we are not focused and dedicated to our dreams we will one day wake up with regrets.