Whose Dream Are You Following?

“To dream anything that you want to dream, That is the beauty of the human mind,
To do anything thing that you want to do, That is the strength of the human will.
To trust yourself to test your limits, That is the courage to succeed.” -- Bernard Edmonds.


Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear someone say something like, “If only I had followed my dreams…” To be sure, not all dreams are worth following (I’m glad I didn’t follow my childhood dream of riding the range as a cowboy, too many ticks, chiggers, snakes, etc.). But many of us have had worthwhile dreams that we failed to follow because we wanted someone’s approval, feared failure or ridicule, or were afraid to break out of our comfort zone. The result is that in private moments we wonder what would have happened if we had become the person our dream told us we could become.

One man who dared to follow his dream to become the person he could become was the late singer John Denver. After high school, he enrolled at Texas Tech University with the intention of becoming an architect. But that was someone else dream for him, so he quit in order to pursue his dream of becoming a singer.

Denver is quoted as saying, “Not one person said I was doing the right thing. Everyone said I was making a big mistake.” And so it seemed for a while. Six Flags Over Texas hired him, but cancelled his shows—he wound up running the kiddie car rides to support himself!

But he refused to listen to well meaning friends and family and tenaciously followed his dream of becoming a singer. “I knew deep down inside I was born to sing for people” he recalled, “Listen to yourself, you’ll always know what’s right. Listen to that (inner) voice. That’s how you find success as a human being.”

What has your inner voice been telling you? Has it been telling you that in spite of difficulties you need to redouble your efforts? Has it been telling you that you can do better than what you have decided to settle for in terms of your career? Has it been telling you that the dream you’ve always had (but didn’t follow) is still attainable if you are willing to take the risk necessary?

We all have that inner voice. It speaks of what it knows we are really capable of, what we can become, what we can achieve. Of course, as the years go by we pick up other voices—voices telling us we’ll be a laughingstock if we try; that we will fail; that we’ll never amount to anything; that we are too old to change or learn new things; that we don’t have the time, connections, personality or the training to follow our deepest dreams. Unfortunately, we let these voices drown out the little voice that seeks to inspire us to become the person we know deep down we can become.

Who defines your dream of what you can be, can do or will become? If it is someone else’s dream for us, we will only go through the motions or do only as much as we need to do to keep our job, etc. Unless it is a dream that we have bought in to and internalized and made our own, it will lack the power to motive and inspire us.

Our dreams motivate us, which means that they furnish us with an incentive to act. The word motivation comes from the word motive, which is a thought or feeling that furnishes a reason to act in a certain way. In other words, real motivation is something that stimulates an individual to act based on an inner conviction of what they should be doing (but not doing or wanting to do).

While a speech or story can light a spark in us, it usually does not provide us with lasting resolve because real motivation must come from within. The speech or story simply activates something in our mind that we knew all along and encourages us to dust off our dreams and try again.

For example, I gave a speech in the 1980’s in Houston, Texas. A man came up to me afterwards and told me that for past year he had been beating himself up as a failure (he had lost “everything” in the oil bust), but that a story I told helped him realize that his past successes provided a foundation to begin dreaming of could be, if he applied himself. I ran into him at DFW a couple of years later and he reported that he was moving forward again and “everything was on track.” My talk had simply awakened him to the fact that he could have the confidence to rebuild his life, this caused other internal motivational factors (that had lain dormant since his business failed) to reactivate his own dreams.

Finally, when you begin to listen to your inner voice and dust off your dreams be careful what you put into your mind. Several years ago, a service station attendant topped-off the brake fluid in my car. A week later I had no brakes because the attendant had used the wrong type of brake fluid and ruined the entire braking system.

The human mind is like that sophisticated braking system. We have to be careful what we allow into it. Research has shown that just one negative concept takes seven positive concepts to offset. Some of the negative concepts can’t be avoided, but we can avoid deliberately putting them into our mental system. We need to be careful of what we read and listen to, how we talk to ourselves and others about our abilities and how much time we spend thinking about past mistakes or failures.

Perhaps Rodgers and Hammerstein put it most best in their famous song from the Sound of Music, “Climb every mountain, Ford every stream, Follow every rainbowTill you find your dream. A dream that will need all the love you can give, Every day of your life for as long as you live.”
Have A GREAT and PROFITABLE Week!
Robert Hidde