Resurrect Your Dreams

Resurrect Your Dreams
By
Bill Cottringer

“Deep down, nobody is ever quite satisfied with the amount of their childhood dreams they have actually realized and we are all disappointed with the amount that slipped away.” ~The author.

I consider myself having lived about half my early childhood dreams—about “average,” compared to the few thriving success shadow-makers that stand out in the world, the rest of us normal folks who are happy just surviving, and the few sad ones who aren’t even surviving. Yet, I feel very privileged in having had stimulating conversations with some very successful people who were living their childhood dreams, and of course with some who hadn’t quite given up and still had hope.

There seem to be a few common denominators with the real dreaming rain-makers:

• A penchant for learning from failure.
• Intense focus on the goals that give life to dreams.
• Resilience to weather storms and bounce back higher, even on cloudy days.
• Resistance to negative thinking about practical obstacles.
• Always looking for and being able to see a silver lining in a dark cloud.
• Tenacity and perseverance to start all over again a second and third time if need be.
• Having some perpetual cheerleaders in their network.

It has been said that success happens suddenly overnight when all your efforts meet the right opportunity; but for the people who are here living their dreams and not letting them slip away, this success seems to take its merry time arriving to that overnight experience.

There is a very simple success formula to live your dreams and it has never failed. The trouble is that it isn’t as easy to follow as it is simple:

1. Dream huge—the bigger the better, as limitations are mostly a bad mental habit.
2. Be clever—you have to be unique and different from the crowd using very clever means.
3. Work hard—nothing happens good without more work that you are willing to invest.
4. Never Quit—Success is often just around the last bend where you are most likely to want to quit.

The New Year is a good time to take an honest personal inventory: What dreams did you have as a child? What dreams did you let slip away? Why did that happen? What did you do or not do to be a part of your dreams not happening? How much do you still believe you can forge ahead living out your dreams? What is really holding you back most? What would it take to have a second go making your dreams into a reality? What are you waiting for?

The New Year is also a great time to make a commitment to do something that would rekindle and resurrect your dreams. Answering the above provocative questions in taking your personal inventory is a good start.

Here are ten other practical suggestions on resurrecting your dreams:

1. Take some on-line personality tests to identify certain types of thinking that you engage in that might be inhibiting your dreaming or acting to translate those dreams into results, which may need changing.
2. Talk to some friends about what dreams they had and allowed to slip away so you won’t feel so odd.
3. Make a list of all the major tripping and tipping points in your life to see how you can arrange your life more around avoiding the failures and encouraging the successes.
4. Hang around positive people for needed support and encouragement; avoid toxic negative people whenever you can.
5. The next negative thing or failure that happens to you, stop and make an effort to not let it go until you have figured out some positive benefit for yourself in the unwanted experience.
6. If you are not an overly optimistic, hopeful person, do some on-line research to learn the benefits of at least leaning in the optimistic direction and some strategies to think more in that direction.
7. Make a list of the smaller dreams on your earlier bucket list that did come true, appreciate them, and take credit for making them happen. Feel good about them.
8. It is always powerful to write down your bucket list goals and post them somewhere that offers a constant reminder, but don’t hesitate to add, subtract or change this work in progress.
9. Find a way to cozy up to some of the success shadow-makers (even if just in the audience) to see what you can learn about how they resurrected their dreams after facing the sad reality they had let them slip away. Reading about success is fine but firsthand conversations are better.
10. Try to talk yourself out setting a rigid standard of how much success in increasing money, power, education, beauty, knowledge, health, weight loss, friends, influence, property, professional recognition, etc., is enough. Such a standard only limits the size of your dreams. Besides, as trite as it may be to say, it is still very true—that life is a journey and not a destination. Besides, you may already be living your dreams more than you realize or give yourself credit for.