How to Achieve Your Dreams

Have you ever noticed how some people seem to get everything they want with ease while others struggle for years to achieve what they want in life? The people who are successful at achieving their dreams all have three characteristics in common. They exhibit courage, creativity, and compassion.

Without these three components, you’ll never be able to achieve what you want in life. In this post, I’m going to share with you how to cultivate each of these characteristics in yourself and how they are important to making your dreams a reality.

Courage

Courage Is Needed For Big Dreams

When we first think about courage, the image of a roaring lion comes to mind. I also think of a firefighter courageously rushing into a building and saving a dog from a burning house.

Now that is an incredible feat of heroism that of course requires courage, but today, I want to talk about the type of courage that’s not so in your face. The type of courage that’s quiet but constant.

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the silent voice at the end of the day that says ‘I will try again tomorrow.’

— Mary Anne Radmacher

When you have a clear, constant voice of courage in your head - a thought like, “I’m going to do this no matter what” - giving up on your dream is simply just not an option.

Because here’s the thing about big dreams. Your big dreams will meet challenges - there’s no doubt about it. A dream is something grandiose that requires attention, focus, and dedication. If it didn’t require those things, it wouldn’t be a dream. It’d be more of a hunger pain, right? It would be more like something you needed to feed and address, but nothing that presented any great hurdles to jump over.

So by nature, our dreams will hold challenges. You’ll encounter lots of them. But having courage means that you keep showing up despite those challenges. You keep going and you will try again tomorrow, no matter how poorly today may have gone. 

Big dreams also require passion. Deep seeded, meaningful passion. Notice how I’m not using words like: wish, interest, spunk. I’m choosing words that conjure images of grandeur. In this podcast today, we’re talking about dreams, not wishes. Passion, not interests. Courage, not guts.

Our big dreams will have passion behind them and that passion must be sustained by courage. 

Now right now you may be thinking, “I don’t have a big dream. I don’t want anything grandiose. I’m not really that passionate about anything.” Or maybe on the flip-side you’re thinking, “I have lots of dreams; I don’t know where to start.”

But this is something that we work a lot on in Vision Voyage. Before the workshop even starts, I have a whole Introduction Week where I lead you through exercises to really hone in on what your dream is and where you should focus.

So we need a big dream that we are really passionate about, and then we need a quiet inner strength. It requires stamina and endurance. Last week, I talked about the 3 areas to upgrade in your life to live a jet set life - one of those three areas was Stamina. It takes a degree of stamina to take on the challenging task of creating our dreams.

When you have courage to face the challenges of your dreams, you don’t give up. You buckle up and double down on pushing through. Why? Because your dreams matter and they are important.

COURAGE FEELS UNCOMFORTABLE

Executing on our dreams courageously automatically puts you in a place of discomfort. You can’t be comfortable and also courageous. 

The definition of courage is: the ability to do something that frightens one; strength in the face of pain or grief. When we feel fear or grief, it’s an uncomfortable feeling, right?

So when you exude courage, you will most certainly feel uncomfortable. Anytime we push ourselves outside of comfort zones, we stretch our limits. But that’s not a bad thing. When we are willing to feel the discomfort and when we are willing to push past our comfort zone, that’s when we grow.

And that’s something we need in order to maintain courage - we need a growth mindset. There’s a book by Carol Dweck that outlines two different types of mindsets - a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

A fixed mindset doesn’t believe that we are capable of changing. It believes that we are given our skills and the rest of our life we can just be tested on them. So a person with a fixed mindset doesn’t take criticism well. And when they encounter mistakes or failures along the way, they are far more likely to give up because they are comfortable staying with what they know.

But that kind of behavior and thinking doesn’t serve you when you set out to make your dreams a reality. You need to adopt a growth mindset instead. Because you will face hardships when you are creating your dreams and if you have a growth mindset, you are willing to make errors. And you have the courage to continue despite those setbacks. With a growth mindset, you believe that your skills can be developed and learned. They are not fixed, therefore every mistake or failure is a learning opportunity that will keep you moving forward, not stopping dead in your tracks.

A growth mindset is inherently courageous because it sounds like, “This challenge will grow me. I will learn from this. Receiving feedback is helpful and constructive.”

The opposite of courage is cowardice which ultimately stems from fear. Oftentimes, we fear looking stupid. We fear what our peers will think. We fear what our family thinks. We fear what our friends think.

But what is the cost of that fear? That fear is what’s keeping you on the sidelines. It’s what’s holding you back from designing a life that you love. Fear loves keeping you in a room with a single window where you get to just watch your life pass you by.

But that’s not what I want. And I don’t think that’s what you want either. You’re a jet setter and we believe that the world is full of wonder and adventure.

Consider shifting your thinking from, “What if I look stupid?” to “What if I learn something new?” 

Every piece of feedback is there to help you grow, not to tear you down. Now, yes, there are some people who are completely tactless and offer completely cruel and hateful feedback, but even when receiving that information, you learn something new about yourself. At the very least, you learn more about the type of people you want to surround yourself with and those that you need to distance yourself from.

Courage goes hand in hand with a growth mindset and a willingness to feel discomfort and learn new things.

Consider if your big dream is weight loss. Let’s say that you are weekly tracking your weight to measure your progress and one week you don’t lose any weight, in fact you gain a pound. You could choose to beat yourself up and feel like a failure and quit. Or, you could view that number as a piece of feedback - a mere data point - that helps tell you something.

Instead of letting that single piece of data derail your courage to keep going, you can look at it and say, “Okay, my approach this week didn’t quite work - I’ll try something different this coming week.” 

Success is built on a mountain of failures. Mistakes and failures will happen, especially when you are making your dreams a reality. The people who actually live out their dreams are the ones that maintain courage and are willing to stand back up and try again the next day.

Having courage doesn’t mean that you won’t fail. Having courage doesn’t mean that you’ll be perfect. It’s far from those things. It’s all about how you deal with the failures and the perfectionistic tendencies as they come up. 

It’s not about beating yourself up. It’s about being curious to learn why you had a setback and how you can learn from it moving forward.

COURAGE TAKES FAITH

Many times, we aren’t seeing the results that we are expecting as quickly as we hope, so we give up. We start losing hope and faith in ourselves and in the outcome. But that loss of faith is really just derived from thoughts - and we have the power to choose whether or not to believe those thoughts.

I had a friend who was blissfully happy being single in her twenties. She trusted and had faith in the fact that the right person would come along for her, so she wasn’t dwelling on it or worrying about it.

But as the age 30 started to approach, she began losing faith that the right man was out there for her. This seems to happen to many people - as they grow older they start losing hope in their dream of meeting their partner and starting a family together.

As you reflect on this though, the only thing that had changed was her loss of hope. Yes, the fact was that she was older, but she began telling herself a story that all the good men had been taken and that she was less appealing now that she was older. This false belief then caused her to stop trying to meet new people. Because she stopped trying to meet new people, she wasn’t meeting any new potential partners - so it created a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Consider though if she had changed the story in her head to one of courage, not hopelessness. What if she had changed her inner dialogue to sound more like, “There are plenty of eligible bachelors out there for me. I will find the right person who I’m supposed to be with.” These thoughts would cultivate more courage in her, and consequently she would continue to go on dates and meet new people. 

Your thoughts affect the choices you make and the actions you take. To create mental stamina and mental endurance, we have to practice thinking thoughts that encourage us to have courage. We have to believe in a story that keeps pushing us forward in the direction of our dreams.

Having courage means that we may not know the how. We know our why - we have our passion and our meaning for the big dream identified, but we may not know yet how to make these dreams a reality.

Courage is persisting on despite the fact that we may not know the exact path for how we will succeed. I struggled with this for a long time, especially after school ended.

When I was in school, I knew how to study; I knew how to take tests; and I knew how to make good grades. But after school ends, there’s no formula for how to get straight A’s. Navigating the corporate world can be ambiguous without report cards or finals.

But you have to have courage to set forth into the unknown. You have to make peace with not knowing and just persist.

You won’t know the how because that’s something that you have to discover as you progress. Remember what I said earlier in this show? The best part about making your dreams a reality is becoming someone new in the process. 

It’s the courage to take action and the faith in yourself that you develop during the process that will help you navigate and ultimately fulfill your dreams. 

Sometimes letting go of the “how” means that we just have to assume the attitude of, “Well let’s just see how this goes. At least I’ll have fun while I’m learning something new.”

And some of those things will turn out great and others will be duds. But that’s okay. Because either way, you’ll grow. Those failures will not be an excuse to give up.

At the end of the day, if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed. We just came back from a beautiful brief vacation to Sedona and we did a lot of hiking and climbing. On our last full day in Sedona, we climbed Cathedral Rock. Although it was a short hike, it was pretty steep the whole way. I was afraid of failing, but I knew that if I didn’t try, I’d never see that view from the top. I knew that no matter what, I wanted to get to the top of that mountain. It may take me double the time as all the other hikers so that I could catch my breath and give my knees a rest, but I wanted to make it.

It doesn’t matter if other hikers are passing you by on the way up the mountain. It doesn’t matter if you have to change course along the way. It doesn’t matter if you need to take breaks to stop and rest. The only thing that matters is putting one foot after the next and getting up to the top of the mountain at your pace.

Some of you may be thinking that you just want that hike to be easy. Some of you may wish that you had an elevator that could just take you to the top of the mountain so you could snap some pictures and be on your way.

But would you really appreciate the views as much from the top if you hadn’t been challenged at all? Would you feel any sense of accomplishment? No, probably not. It’s the climb itself that brings the sense of accomplishment. It’s not really the beautiful views at the end - although it was stunning.

It’s the process, not the ending, that transforms us. When you become so focused on the end goal, you begin to feel all of the lack in your now. A mindset of scarcity keeps you where you are. It doesn’t help you grow.

When you shift your focus to being brave in the now, you can concentrate on what kind of positive impacts and changes can you make today. This focus helps cultivate a mindset of abundance. And that abundance mindset will attract more of what we want. It will keep us motivated to stay courageous about making our dreams a reality.

When you have courage to make your dreams a reality, you show up. Again and again, regardless of setbacks. Consider how much more likely you would be to make your dreams a reality if you had the courage to overcome any challenge that came your way, no matter what. What if you had the courage to be proud of the woman you’re becoming despite what others thought and despite the failures you may experience?

Creativity

You may be thinking, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body. I’m not the creative type.”

That’s totally okay! Because the type of creativity that we are talking about today is the kind of creativity that makes you resourceful.

WE ARE ALL CAPABLE OF BEING CREATIVE

The definition of creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.

Even the seemingly least creative role, like say an accountant, can demonstrate creativity. That person may develop a new procedure at work. Maybe they are able to spot an inefficiency and make a process better. That’s creativity too!

So the first myth I need to bust as we talk about creativity is that not everyone is creative. That’s simply not true. We all have the capacity to be creative - we all have the ability to look at the world as it is today and find new and different ways to make it better.

Creativity is not a gift that you’re just born with or not. It’s a way of looking at the world. And when it comes to dream making, it’s especially important.

Creativity kicks into gear when doors close on you in the face of your dreams. Last week, we established that you will without a doubt face challenges as you set forth to make your dreams a reality. And it will take courage to face those challenges. Then it will take creativity to figure out what to do next. When a door closes, you will need to be resourceful to find that window.

Having creativity when dream making means that you take the initiative and take charge of your life. You don’t wait for the blueprint or the exact formula. You get ideas and you try them out. It’s about trial and error.

Here’s the thing - you may not know the ‘how’ yet but as long as you know your ‘why’ and your like it, that’s enough.

Although I’m not saying you have to be an artist, let’s take painting as an example. In high school, I always took art classes - I preferred painting over drawing. And I’m not saying I was amazing at it, but I loved painting because of how abstract I could make it. I loved blending the paint colors and seeing the textures.

When I was in my abstract paint classes, we never had a template. We were never given a formula for how to create the perfect painting. Even if we were all told to paint the same thing, every painting would look different. And that’s what it means to be creative. It’s about resourcefulness and originality. It’s about using your imagination again and again to see what works for you.

When you’re working on your dreams, it’s not the time to critique. Your art is not on display for others to comment or judge it. And I’m using the word ‘art’ loosely - I’m referring to art as anything new that you create for yourself. A new health regimen, a new website, a new business, a new relationship, a new perspective on money - it’s all art. And it’s not on display for critique. 

Because at the end of the day, it’s not really about the final product. The best thing that will come out of making your dreams a reality is who you will become in the process.

CREATIVITY IS ABOUT BEING RESOURCEFUL

It’s about doing the best you can with what you have in the moment; not waiting for someone to come along and give you the blueprint. It’s also not about complaining about what you don’t have. It’s about continuously looking for ways to make it better.

Take this very podcast for example. I know that it’s not professional quality. I’m making these recordings all by myself and I know very well that they could sound better in terms of audio quality. But I’m working with the resources that I have available today. I’m not complaining about how I don’t have an audio team to work with. I’m not waiting for someone to come along and sponsor me. I’m using my resourcefulness to move forward in my current circumstances.

So being creative means that we ask ourselves, “How can I make the best of this? What can I do in this moment to keep moving forward? What can I impact in my current circumstances?”

Maybe your dream is to get in shape but the gyms are closed right now. You’re not going to whine about how you can’t work out because you can’t go to the gym. Instead, you’re going to be creative, and use some food cans from the pantry as weights. Instead, you’re going to train along with a YouTube video.

Maybe your dream is to start a stationery business. You’re not going to complain about how you don’t know how to create your Etsy shop. Instead, you’re going to get online and watch video tutorials until you know what to do.

When we stop making excuses for ourselves and telling ourselves that there’s no way out or around, we are capable of amazing things. You’ll be astonished with how creative you really are when you are pressed to come up with alternatives and solutions.

IT TAKES CREATIVITY TO OVERCOME DISCOMFORT

So after you’ve identified what you want and why you want it, change will need to come next. And change is uncomfortable. Why? Because our brains like to stay with what we know and with what makes us feel safe. It doesn’t like getting stretched and expanding. But we absolutely have to if we want to make our dreams a reality.

Facing that discomfort will require creativity. Discomfort and creativity don’t really sound all that related, do they? But they are. Overcoming discomfort will require creativity.

No one likes feeling uncomfortable, right? We naturally prefer comfort, safety, and security. But in order to move past the discomfort, we will have to demonstrate creativity. We will have to use our imagination to look past the discomfort and see who we can become after we’ve overcome it. It’s looking for clever ways to face the discomfort then move past it.

Without creativity, we see the world exactly how it is today, without any idea or hope for improvement. We focus on what we have in this moment, and more often we focus on what we don’t have in this moment. 

But when you activate your creativity, you start seeing the potential for how things could be. You can begin to appreciate what’s in your now, and work to optimize your gifts and strengths to its fullest potential. 

Using creativity engages our imagination. Practice visualizing yourself already having accomplished what you set forth to do. Then reverse engineer it. What did your future self do to get there? What did she stop doing? Who did she seek help from? What resources did she use?

When you imagine yourself in the future, as the woman who’s already living out her dream jet set life, you’ll be able to figure out what you have right now that you can use to start moving in that direction.

Don’t get caught up in the master plan. You likely won’t know every step needed to get to where you want to be. All you need to know is your next step. Just focus on that next step - one step at a time so that you can move in the direction of your dream.

Take my dream for example of reaching 20,000 women in the next four years to share with them the mission of the jet set life. I don’t have a formula for how I’m going to reach that many women. But what I am doing is using my creativity and resourcefulness to try new things and learn how to best reach my audience, whether that’s through the blog, podcast, Instagram, or elsewhere.

(On a side note, if you haven’t started following me on Instagram yet, get over there and connect with me! You can find me at @thejetsetblonde.)

Courage and creativity is exactly what we need to be demonstrating in uncertain and confusing times like these. We can choose to live in fear and anxiety about what’s going on in the world today, or we can build up our courage and creativity. It’s your choice.

After you know what you want and why you want it, you’ll first need the courage to go after it, then you’ll need the creativity to look around you and use what you have at your disposal to start moving in the direction of your dream.

Once you’ve aligned those two abilities, you’re ready to start taking action in making your dreams a reality. Then, when you start taking action, you’ll need a big dose of compassion. So that’s what we’ll discuss next week as we wrap up this 3-part series on making your dreams a reality.

Compassion

The final piece to the puzzle is compassion. Compassion sounds like it has nothing to do with dream making but I would argue that it may be the most important aspect of them all.

WHY WE NEED COMPASSION WHEN MAKING DREAMS A REALITY

Compassion is the piece that people tend to disregard. People don’t think it’s needed in the process of dream making. But it’s an essential piece to the puzzle.

The definition of compassion is a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

When talking about compassion in this episode, I’m not talking about compassion for others, although you should try to put yourself in other people’s shoes and show compassion for them. Instead, I’m talking about having compassion FOR YOURSELF.

The undeniable piece of making your dreams a reality is the obstacles that you’ll face. You may get turned down for the job. You may feel overwhelmed with the tasks. You may feel impatient with your progress.

But you have to give yourself the time and space to work through those challenges. That’s what it means to have compassion for yourself. It means that you love yourself enough to forgive your failures and keep going.

When you fall short of your dreams, you’ll most likely feel discouraged. You’ll feel defeated and disappointed and you’ll likely want to give up. But when you have compassion for yourself, you give yourself permission to make mistakes and have setbacks.

You don’t beat yourself up and spiral out of control into thoughts of self-hate and punishment. You change your inner dialogue from, “Why do I always fail?” to “How can I learn from this?”

That’s what having compassion for yourself looks like.

In my senior year of high school and into college, I developed a severe eating disorder. I seriously limited my calorie intake and I had an intense workout regimen that I followed daily. This crazy focus on food and calorie burning caused me to lose all my friends and it prevented me from making genuine new relationships.

During this time, I had zero compassion for myself. If I felt like I had overeaten, I’d punish myself by adding more time and more weight to my workouts. If I didn’t get a good grade, I shut myself in from the outside world and punished myself with more studying. What had started as discipline, turned into a life completely void of compassion for myself, and eventually for others as well.

A life without self-love and compassion is a very dark place. It leaves no room for errors. It turns you into your worst critic. And it turns your mind into a mental prison.

I had set up all these rules in my head that ultimately didn’t serve me. I couldn’t eat certain foods. I couldn’t eat at certain times of the day. I had to work out this much more if I gained a pound. I had to study this much more if I didn’t get the A+. I can’t fail. I can never make a mistake. I have to be perfect.

Why had I set up all these rules? These rules didn’t lead to a life well-lived. We need to set high standards for ourselves but we can’t leave out the missing element - compassion. I set impossible rules for myself, which I then would punish myself for not meeting. I was mentally punishing myself, for being myself.

I love the quote by Pema Chodron, “Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don’t even want to look at.”

How many of you are your own worst critic? How often are you telling yourself that you’re not good enough, that you should be doing more, and that you are horrible at what you do?

We punish ourselves for being human. Being human means that we will mess up. We’ll experience setbacks. We’ll act imperfectly. 

In my efforts to become perfect, I killed the compassion inside of me. And I was able to achieve more and to control more. But at what cost?

Killing the compassion inside of me came at the cost of living a life fulfilled. Yes I made good grades and got awards and scholarships, but the achievements were hollow. Without compassion, I had no genuine friendships or relationships to celebrate those successes. And without compassion for myself, there was no internal joy for those successes. My compassion-less self would only tell me, “Well you should have received that award. What are you going to do next?”

Without compassion for myself, I was never enough. 

I lived in the sorority house for one and a half years. I remember one night I felt completely out of control and I felt like I was failing at everything. The thoughts in my head were very dark and I was spiraling in “not enoughness.”

I wanted to get out of the house and bawl my eyes out in solitude. I climbed up our fire escape at the sorority house and just sobbed. I didn’t want anyone to see, but a fellow sorority sister overheard me and climbed up the fire escape with me. I told her that I wanted to be alone because I just wanted to wallow in my self-pity and depression but she wouldn’t leave me.

To me, that’s what compassion looks like. 

Compassion is when someone reaches out to you, refuses to let you stay where you are, and pulls you out of the darkness. My sorority sister showed me so much compassion when I had none for myself.

Having a supportive community that surrounds you with love and compassion is important, but when making our dreams a reality, we need to show ourselves compassion too.

We have to find the divine part of ourselves that tells the scared part of us, “I love you and I’ve got you. You are enough and you’re perfect as you are. Now let’s get back up again and keep going.”

Success is made on a mountain of failures. A failure just means that we didn’t accomplish a desired result. That’s all. It doesn’t mean that you can’t try again or try something different. 

Many times when we fail, we hear the scared voice in our head that shouts, “You’re a loser. You’ll never succeed. You’re not good enough. You don’t deserve that.”

But what we need to do is resurrect the divine voice in our head that’s full of compassion. She’s the one who tells you that you’re capable. You’re a winner. You will succeed. You are enough. You deserve your dreams.

It doesn’t make sense that we punish ourselves for having the courage to set a goal, then we punish ourselves when we don’t reach it. For some of us, we are scared to fail, so then we don’t ever set the goal. And in essence, that in itself is failure. Because you’ll feel the regret of never having even attempted it.

COMPASSION IS SELF-ACCEPTANCE

Showing compassion for yourself means accepting yourself. Accepting all of you. You are enough as you are. You’re not broken and you don’t need fixing.

I set up all of those impossible rules for myself because I somehow wanted to affirm to myself that I was worthy. That I approved of myself. But the fundamental flaw in this was that it assumed there was something wrong with me that needed fixing.

So the very first step in learning how to develop compassion for yourself is to accept yourself and know that there’s nothing wrong with you. You aren’t broken.

Because here’s the thing, I’ve tried setting goals and achieved them both ways. I’ve achieved my goals with compassion and without compassion for myself. 

When you have compassion for yourself and you’re working on your dreams, you pursue your goals with enthusiasm and excitement. You can see how achieving that goal would be fun and would help you to grow as a person. Without compassion for yourself as you work on your dreams, you pursue your goals from a place of not enoughness. You are trying to achieve something because you think it will be better over there than here.

But the reality is - you’re enough right here, where you are now, in this moment. Reaching your goal won’t make you a better person and not reaching your goal won’t make you a worse person. Having a goal and reaching it is purely about growth. It doesn’t determine your worthiness.

And a funny thing happens when we accept ourselves. You’ll start to realize that everyone else will too. It doesn’t matter if others accept us or not, but when we operate from a place of trying to get others to accept us, we will likely fail. Because people can see through that.

It’s only until you are at peace and in love with yourself when you can begin to gain that from others. 

So compassion in dream making really comes down to self-love and self-acceptance. 

I encourage you to dream and dream big. But I want that for you so that you can look back on life and know that you lived it well. I don’t want you dream making from a place of not enoughness. Fulfilling your big dreams is about growth and seeing what you’re capable of because you’re curious and you like to learn. It’s not about gaining approval from others or believing that if you do something that it will then make you worthy or deserving. You are already worthy and deserving now.

COMPASSION IS FORGIVENESS

Having compassion for yourself also requires that you are able to forgive yourself. You need to accept yourself and be able to forgive yourself.

For some reason, many of us are capable of readily forgiving friends and family members, but we never forgive ourselves. I’ve seen women keep themselves locked up in their mental prison as I did for so long, not allowing any room for forgiveness. They refuse to forgive themselves for mistakes of the past, which keeps them stuck in the past, and unable to create the future they dream of.

We all will make mistakes in our life. We’re all going to feel shame or guilt about something that we chose to do or say in the past. But the difference between the people who can move past from those mistakes or get stuck is their compassion. If a person has the ability to accept and forgive themselves, they can see the error or mistake for what it was, then learn from it. They can then try again, or pivot, or try something new. If the person cannot forgive themselves however, they can’t move past that mistake. They turn that mistake over in their head again and again and they stop moving forward.

With compassion, you can choose to forgive yourself. And you’ll need to be prepared to forgive yourself many times over when you’re setting out to make your dreams a reality. Beating yourself over a choice you’ve made doesn’t serve you. It doesn’t help you move forward. It doesn’t make you any better. 

If anything, it makes you less effective. So practice forgiving yourself again and again. I see this happen a lot when women take on a new workout or diet. They believe that the only way to look good is to punish themselves. If I hate the way my arms look enough, I’ll change it.

You hate that part of your body, then you work out but you’re not seeing the change fast enough, then you feel bad, you eat poorly, and the cycle starts once again. You keep creating the result that you don’t want anymore.

But change doesn’t come through resistance. Change comes from acceptance. It’s only until we can accept ourselves when we can change ourselves.

So many of our problems manifest themselves in poor ways because we haven’t forgiven ourselves yet. We lash out emotionally. We overeat. We over drink. We make decisions that hurt ourselves and others. And it’s all because we’ve not identified the divine compassion within us. We haven’t yet practiced acceptance and forgiveness. 

That divine voice within you is the one that tells you, “It’s okay if you mess up. You are still enough. You are still worthy. You still deserve your big dream. I love you no matter what. Let’s learn from this and see why it happened.” You’re not finding out why it happened so that you can punish yourself. You evaluate why it happened so that you can know more about who you are and what you want in this life.

We all have that divine voice within us. Some of us hear her everyday loud and clear, while others have stuffed her away and can barely hear her. But we all have that voice within us - we just have to tap into it and let her voice be louder than any other.

In those moments of setbacks, which voice will you choose to listen to? The voice calling for punishment or your divine voice of compassion? Those who listen to their compassion will be the successful ones. Because what matters most is how you talk to yourself and how you choose to treat yourself in these moments of struggle. You need to hear that voice of compassion most in moments of struggle.

Earlier today I just met my cousin’s little baby for the first time. Her name is Sophie and she’s 3 months old. Right now, she’s learning how to hold her head up while she’s on her tummy, and she’s building her muscles and strength in her abs, back, neck, and arms.

When she’s trying to push her cute little head up and build her strength, we don’t say, “Well she’s worthless; she’s never going to learn; she should just give up.” NO! Of course we don’t say that. We encourage her and tell her how well she’s doing and how strong she’s getting.

Then, why in the world would we choose to do this to ourselves? You’re going to struggle to lift your head up out of the chaos. You’re going to struggle with your commitments and managing our emotions, and at times, it may feel like you’re drowning. But all of this is part of the process. It’s how we learn and grow and get better and stronger.

Practice having compassion for yourself. Accept and forgive yourself.

So, there you have it - the three C’s of making your dreams a reality - courage, creativity, and compassion. You need courage to identify your big dream, creativity to overcome challenges, and compassion to see it through to the end.

With these three ingredients, you’ll be unstoppable in making your dreams a reality.