Finding Your Feet, Living Your Dreams

Most people have dreams and desires – wonderful things we want to do and achieve – and yet so few of us actually achieve them. Why? Because we don't base our dreams on solid foundations; we go through life scrabbling to find our feet, never realising our dreams.

This talk offers workable ways to find your feet and base your dreams on solid ground so that you can live your dreams.

Dim lights I have a client – Candice. Candice is the most gorgeous woman you could ever meet – she’s petite, exquisitely beautiful and in her early twenties. She came to see me because she was suffering from crippling headaches – dreadful headaches that she had had 3 or 4 times a week for most of her life. Medication wasn’t doing anything and she was taking painkillers by the handful. Her headaches were usually so bad that when she got a headache she had to lie down. She couldn’t do her work, and by the middle of the year had already used up all her sick-leave. Her job was seriously in jeopardy.

Candice had undergone all the tests possible. There was nothing physically wrong. Candice’s headaches were caused by stress.

Through working with Candice, I discovered that this beautiful, gentle woman had been sexually abused by her older boy cousins when she was just a little girl of 6 years old. Candice as an adult was petite, so I could just picture her as a tiny, vulnerable little girl being abused, and too scared to tell anyone because she was afraid of the boys’ threats. For four dreadful years Candice endured the abuse and then, at the age of 10, finally found the courage to tell her mother.

Her mother, the one person in the world who should have shielded and protected her, turned to Candice and said, “It must be your fault – you must being doing something to make the boys abuse you.”

There and then, this little girl learnt that when bad things happened it was her fault. She carried this belief into adulthood, and it was holding her back in almost every area of her life.

I tell you the story of Candice, because when Candice came to see me, she had not found her feet.

When we talk about finding our feet we are talking about finding our way in life. Having direction, a sense of purpose, knowing who we are, what we are doing and where we are going. In essence…having dreams and achieving them!

Most people have dreams – wonderful things they want to do and achieve – and yet, like Candice, so few of us actually achieve them.  I have given this some thought and I think it is because we don’t base our dreams on solid foundations; we go through life scrambling to find our feet and never realising our dreams.

Have you found your feet? Are you living your dreams?

If you want to find your feet and live your dreams you need to do three things:

1)      First, believe in yourself.

2)      Second, make a plan for your own dreams.

3)      Third, review your plan regularly, to keep up to date with the changes that are happening in your life.

Let’s look at them.

Firstly, you need to believe in yourself.

If we want to realise our dreams we do need to have a plan and set goals, but a plan on its own is not enough. We also need to have good self-esteem, because it is our belief about ourselves that really impacts on what we achieve in life.

As you know, our self-esteem is the degree to which we value our self.

If we have high self-esteem we do value ourselves. We think good things about ourselves, we like ourselves and we think we are worthy.

If we have low self-esteem we don’t value ourselves. We don’t like ourselves; we think we are useless, worthless and not good enough.

Now the sad thing about our self-esteem is that it is not necessarily based on truth or fact.

Our self-esteem develops when we are children. We learned to judge our worth based on what other people said or did to us - significant people like our parents, siblings, teachers and friends. It didn’t matter whether what they said or did was deliberate or not, it still had an impact.

When, as a little girl, Candice confided in her mother about her sexual abuse, her mother told her that she was to blame. Candice believed it and thus learnt that when bad things happened, it was her fault. This was not a valid judgment, but it was what she grew up believing. What’s more, she also believed that if things had not yet gone wrong, they would eventually go wrong and then it would be her fault. No wonder she was under so much stress!

The even sadder thing about our self esteem is that it is self-perpetuating - we only see or believe what we expect to see or believe about ourselves.

Candice expected things to go wrong and so she only saw the things that went wrong. She always noticed her mistakes, but never the things she did right. She noticed when people were upset with her, but not how she pleased them. In therapy she struggled to tell me anything positive about herself at all – she just couldn’t see anything good.

Now let me tell you about Angie…

One day, when she was only 10 years old, Angie was standing in her lounge, looking out of the window. She lived in a block of flats, on the second floor, and so had a great view up and down the street. As she stood looking out, a boy from the neighbourhood came walking up the street. When he got to her block of flats he looked up and smiled and waved. Angie was delighted to have the boy’s attention, so she smiled and waved enthusiastically back, and he waved and she waved and….you can imagine her embarrassment when she realised that he wasn’t waving at her at all. It wasn’t her he wanted - he was waving at someone else.

35 years later, Angie still cannot put herself out there. She still believes that she is not wanted. She notices all the times friends and colleagues leave her out or walk past her and don’t greet her, times when she is not invited to join in the conversation. If she is included in something, she believes that she isn’t really wanted and so holds back and comes across as unfriendly. She expects to be rejected and so she is rejected.

Angie told me about a team-building day held by her company. They were divided into teams, and for one of the activities, her team won the game. There was much back-slapping and hand-shaking, but Angie noticed that nobody put out their hand to shake hers. She believed it is because she was unwanted, and so did not put out her own hand. Nobody congratulated her. Years later, the memory still causes her pain.

So although our self-esteem may not be based on valid assumptions, it is self-perpetuating and has the power to affect everything in our lives - because we continue to believe the things we believed as a child, right into our adulthood.

We hear it in that little voice in our head.

The one that says: “You shouldn’t be doing this,

You’re not good enough,

You are going to make a fool of yourself”

This is the voice that tells us what our strengths and weaknesses are, what we are capable – or incapable - of achieving, and what we ought or ought not to be doing.

Remember…..

The most important judgement you will ever have to pass in life is the judgement you make on yourself.

So question the validity of your beliefs.

Access those beliefs that stop you achieving your dreams, and create new beliefs that do allow you to achieve your dreams.

A good idea to help you create new beliefs is to write down a list of affirmations about yourself and pin these somewhere where you can read them every day. Keep adding to your list.

An affirmation is a positive statement about yourself that you write in the present tense. For example: “I am confident”, “I am warm and loving”, “I am funny”.

The idea behind reading these affirmations every day is that you replace the negative self-talk you have been hearing in your head, with positive self-talk.

The second thing you need to do to find your feet is to make a plan for your own dreams.

Do you want to get to the end of your life and realise that you have lived someone else’s dream? If the answer is “No”, then your plan needs to be about your dreams.

So how do you plan for your dreams? Everybody knows that you have to ask yourself those two important questions, one “Where do I want to go?” and two “How am I going to get there? Just about every business and life coach in the country tells you that, but I don’t think these two questions are enough. We also need to ask “What are my values?”

Knowing your values is important, because values give you direction. If you have to make a decision in life, it is your values that will help you make your decision. Your values act as your compass, and you need to know where your true north is if you don’t want to lose yourself as you travel through life.

Let me share a personal example:

A year ago I was offered a phenomenal job working for a Jo’burg based company. The salary was fantastic, the perks were excellent, and I would have enjoyed the work.

My little eyes flashed Dollar signs, just like in the cartoons, and I was extremely tempted, but at the same time I was ambivalent – I didn’t want to work for someone else, I didn’t want a job with  regular hours, and I didn’t want to live in Jo’burg.

Being confused and uncertain, I did what many of us do – I asked a few people for their opinion. Almost everyone said I should take it because it was a great financial move – but no one understood what was most important for me.

In the end it was my values that helped me to decide.  I turned the job down because it wasn’t right for me. It didn’t offer independence, it didn’t offer variation and it didn’t allow me to see my beloved nephews.

It would have given me lots of money, but money is not my true north.

What is your true north?

Right now I would like everybody to stand up…stand up,,,everybody… nobody gets out of doing this.

Close your eyes.

Put your arm out and point straight in front of you – eyes closed.

Now turn and point to where you think True North is.

Keep pointing and open your eyes. Look around. See where other are pointing.

So what did we prove… nothing…except that most of us don’t know where true north is!

Knowing where you want to go is important too, because if you don’t know where you are going you won’t get there. You have to know what your vision for yourself is.

Right now, imagine that you are standing alone at the back of a big room – some sort of hall. It is very misty, so you can’t make out the shapes that are in front of you, but you can hear beautiful music playing quietly in the background. It is one of your favourite pieces. As you stand there the mist starts to clear and you see there are many candles burning brightly.  The mist clears some more and you take a step forward. You notice there are rows and rows of people seating in benches – all facing the front. The mist clears some more and you take another step forward. You realise that you know almost every person there. Your friends are there, your family is there, your colleagues are there and people from the groups and committees you belong to are also there. They are all sitting quietly. As the mist clears some more, you notice that there is a coffin in the front. It has a spray of beautiful flowers on it – your favourite flowers. As you are looking at the flowers, three people get up and move to stand near the coffin. There is a relative, a friend and a colleague from work. Your relative starts to talk and you realise that you are at your own funeral….

What would you like to hear your relative say about you and your role in the family?

What would you like your colleague to say about you and what you achieved in your career? What would you like your friend to say about you? What did you mean to your friends?

What do you want other people to say about you and your life at your funeral?

That’s what vision is – it’s knowing what other people will say about you at your funeral. Do you know your vision? Are you living that vision? Is it your vision?

To help you clarify your vision, it may be useful to create a vision board. A vision board is a collection of pictures of things you want in life. Put this collection where you can see it. This focuses your unconscious mind, which in turn steers your choices toward making the vision real.

But be careful, to really work, your vision board must come not from society’s ideas of the perfect life, but from your own deep and unique inner self.

Once you have your vision and you know where you are going, you need to ask yourself: How am I going to get there?

The how is about the short term steps that you need to take to achieve your final vision.

It is not enough just to have the vision – no matter how amazing it is! You need to take action to make it happen.

Ask yourself, “What little steps do I need to take to achieve my vision?”

We can refer to these little steps as our goals. It is by achieving our goals that we are able to realize our dream.

Remember Candice, my client who had been sexually abused as a little girl and whose mother blamed her for it? We worked hard in therapy and little by little, step by step, she learnt that it wasn’t her fault that she had been abused. She realised it wasn’t her fault that things went wrong, that she didn’t need to fix everything, she didn’t need to be perfect to prove that she was good enough. She already was good enough and beautiful, capable and successful. We went slowly, just a step at a time, and today, Candice’s headaches have gone away.

So do it! Take the steps, just one step at a time.

The final thing that you need to do to find your feet is to review your plan regularly to keep up to date with the changes happening in your life as you live your dreams.

Remember that life is dynamic, not static.

Know that you cannot commit to something forever – life is not the same forever.

You cannot keep attending gym on a Tuesday at 5pm for the rest of your life.

Belonging to the moms and tots group is not so cool when your kid is 16!

Your visions will change - and that’s fine. Be creative and flexible. Allow for change.

You cannot live the life of your dreams if you are stuck in an old dream.

Let me tell you about Johan. As a student Johan was studying to be an accountant. While he was doing his articles, he worked for a number of different clients, one of whom presented him with a very expensive leather briefcase as a gift. Johan told his friends and family that it was to be his reward for passing his board exam, and put it away. Well when the time came he failed his board exam. What did he do? He left his briefcase in the cupboard and did not reward himself with it. He has gone on to be the financial director of an international company and is considered to be very successful by his peers, but still he does not use his briefcase. 20 or so years later, it still sits in the cupboard reminding him of the dream he failed. It holds him back – he does not need the C.A. qualification, but still he constantly thinks about doing it. He is stuck in his old dream and has still not really found his feet.

To recap then…what you need to do to find your feet is:

1. Believe in yourself – learn to hear what the little voice in your head is saying to you, and make sure it is saying positive things.

1. Make a plan to achieve your own dreams and follow your own path. Have your own values and vision.

1. Review your plan regularly. Allow your visions and dreams to change as new possibilities open up.

Then you can enjoy living the life of your dreams!

I leave you with the words of William Ernest Henley from the poem ‘Invictus’

“I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.”

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening to me.