An Ally for Your Own Dreams

            When you have a dream you want to fulfill, there are many ways to set up roadblocks to stop its fruition. But are you the one causing the road blocks?

            In life coaching one of the primary focuses is teaching people to achieve their dreams. First, you have to create a dream that you can conceivably attain. Then you must plant seeds in your subconscious mind—seeds of belief and trust that you will get to your goal.

            Most times the problem with reaching the goal happens between your own ears. Your mind is the crucible that often melts a very strong plan of desire with doubt and fear. So, it’s not enough that you get rejection letters and doors closed, but even your own self can’t stand proudly with you on your best ideas. Why is this so?

            Let’s look at how we are wired as a physical human. From the moment we are conceived we begin developing synapses and neuro-pathways in the brain from behaviors that exist all around us. Are we responsible for the likes of most of them? Absolutely not.

            Most of our initial behavior triggers in the brain are set up by parents and the people who took care of us, when we were too young to make decisions for ourselves.  This, by itself, is an interesting paradigm and could be fodder for an excellent blog. Why would spirit set up life so that we were plagued as adults with the programming of parents who probably had no idea how to do the programming?

            I know in my situation, I did get a lot of motherly love, but lacked in the fatherly love area. I had five siblings, so getting attention was about being an over achiever for me.

            My eldest sister taught me to play the piano at six. Within a year, I became better than her at 12. I had to be, if I wanted to gain the attention of my father, whose presence was lacking in my life. Then I watched as he demeaned all the rest of the children for their lack of ambition and desire to study. So, I came home with straight A’s every six weeks. Over achiever again. But, fortunately, this set me up to be an excellent candidate to have a great career, no matter what I chose.

            But if you look at my brother’s scenario, his was almost the opposite. My father tried to instill in him the desire to do all the things my father was good at. My brother rebelled. So, instead of gaining praise, he got beat. This set my brother up to be an under achiever, even though he struggled for the same thing as I did—daddy’s approval.

            I can still hear my brother’s 56-year-old voice on the phone about two years ago. I hadn’t spoken to him since my father died ten years ago. He moved three times and never gave anyone in the family his address. But being savvy and ambitious, I helped my mother find him. We called him at work one day. The first thing he said to me was, “Dad never loved me!”

            He didn’t say, “Hey, how are you doing?” or “What have you been doing?” or “How the hell did you get my number?”  No, just began unloading about how his father didn’t give him the support he needed to survive. He sounded drunk as well.  If I remember correctly, he was working at meat packing company in a small town in Pennsylvania.

            He did speak to my mother, and Mom tried to give him love. But the paradigm of never getting enough early enough, makes it hard to fill the gaping hole that’s left as an adult.

            I tell you this story, because so many of us have the same kind of stories and workings in our brains that cause our best ideas and dreams to get the kibosh when we begin to hear the voices of the past in our brains tell us that we will never succeed and that our ideas are worthless.

            This is when it is very important to realize that your emotional brain is an amalgam of human input, which is mostly error. So, when the thoughts come up, you have to be of sound mind enough to realize that these thoughts are not your adult, present thoughts.  You have to slip into the frontal cortex of the brain and become an objective, compassionate observer of yourself and speak kind thoughts to yourself in the place of the old negative thoughts.

            You’ve heard of affirmations. This is the same concept, but with more push toward understanding why you must have an arsenal of strong positive input to deflect the negative. If you don’t, your ideas will drown in a cesspool of negativity, I guarantee it. And you will never see your dreams come true.

            Start with a seed (a dream). Plant it in fertile ground (your mind). Water it daily (with positive thoughts). When it begins to grow, nurture it, because it’s fragile until it becomes bigger and stronger (find people who support you and keep them close, and keep the people who don’t support you away from your fragile dreams). Eventually, the dream will be strong enough to take root and gain strength. When this happens, you need not have to worry anymore. What you have been dreaming about has come to your life with fruition and prosperity.

            Dream on.