My Rules For Making Dreams Real (When I’m Feeling Full of Doubt)

“Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.” Tupac Shakur

Yesterday, I woke up feeling a vague sense of dissatisfaction, for no concrete reason. All day, it kept dogging me. So finally, I sat down on the couch with my journal and started asking myself some questions.

“What am I afraid of?” was the first one. The answers that came out: that my dream – the big, hairy goals I have for my life – aren’t going to happen. That I am not doing the “right things” that will lead to my dream. That because “it” hasn’t happened yet, maybe that means it’s not going to.

Around and around went Matilda, my inner skeptic – because that’s what I named her – wallowing in doubt while pretending to look for an answer. Finally, I said, “Enough! All this going around in circles is a waste of time. From now on, these are the rules and whenever there’s doubt, we’re going to follow them.” (Sometimes you just have to put your foot down with these pesky egos.)

Here are the rules I came up with (feel free to steal, borrow or customize):

  1. Don’t judge whether your dream is happening based on current circumstances. Circumstances don’t matter, only your “state of being” — your thoughts and emotions — matters. If you stay in a place of doubt, your circumstances will continue to reflect that.
  2. Create the “state of being” that matches the circumstances you want.  Energy trumps matter. A friend recently told me that he always answers the question, “How are you?” with one word: “Phenomenal.” One day, even though he only had $12 in his bank account, he refused to feel a state of lack. Everywhere he went, people started giving him things for free. Because that’s how it works.
  3. Follow your excitement. Stop thinking of your dream as being “over there.” Trust that what you’re doing now is part of the dream and find ways to get excited about it. Paradox: the more you enjoy the journey, the sooner you will get where you’re going.
  4. Keep looking forward. Would you get in your car, look in the rearview mirror and wonder if you were on the right road? Start driving around in circles, or back and forth along the same 100 feet? Well, doubt and second-guessing are the mental equivalent of that. Focus on signs – a chance encounter, a serendipitous piece of information — that you’re on track and the dream is happening.
  5. Remember what it’s like to feel unlimited. Because that is our natural state — we’ve just been conditioned that there are limits to what we can do. Fall in love with the sense of possibility.

Want to create your own rules for high-performance living? Send me an email (renita at theflowfactor dot com) and let’s have a conversation.

Renita