Dreams Aren’t Just For Kids
In my years tending to my own development, and now guiding my clients to more fulfilling careers, I’ve encountered a lot of limiting beliefs. But in the last couple of weeks, I’d swear there’s something in the water. Because I’ve seen a dramatic uptick in all sorts of limiting beliefs, fatalistic resignation, and just plain catastrophizing among my clients, colleagues, and students – like some uninvited guest brought the absolute worst variety pack to our party.
Now by itself, each limiting belief doesn’t necessarily stand out as dramatic. In fact, the most frequent and most damaging beliefs and thought patterns are often the most subtle. And if you’re not actively on the lookout, they’ll easily slip by your defenses.
Worse, when you’re feeling scared and vulnerable – we all have our reasons– you perceive these harmful beliefs and thought patterns as simple, straightforward, and unremarkable facts. You hear them in your own mind and they sound like wisdom, like the voices of people you respect, or like your own intuition. Consider these examples:
Dreaming big just isn’t practical.
Leap of faith? No thank you. Too risky.
I’m not going to find better than this. Why waste the effort?
That’s all well and good for other people, but not for me…
Naturally, the lesson is this: Keep your job. It’s a “good” job. Who are you to think you could do better than you are right now? Ridiculous. Just sit down and be happy. Right? NO. Absolutely not.
A lot of genuinely good jobs might not be good for you in terms of alignment with your values, with the life you actually want to live, or with your health and wellbeing. Some “good” jobs are downright toxic! Nevertheless, from our grandparents’ generation to now, Black and Brown people have been trained to keep our heads down – grinding away at jobs that don’t serve us purely because they promise “security.” And we’ve been wired to think that “security” is the end-all-be-all.
Broadly speaking, we’re culturally wired to associate security with drabness and drudgery, and quite frankly different degrees of misery. That’s the trade we’ve been trained to accept. By contrast, we’re culturally wired to associate dreaming with sudden, inevitable demise – Stray from the path, and you can expect to fall hard. And don’t expect anyone to pick you up after you made that choice – you’re on your own. See how cruel that is? It’s a perfect little package of blame and shame to keep you feeling stuck and staying small.
But hear me out – is your current situation genuinely going to yield the security you imagine? Are you actually in a position to meet more than your basic needs in the foreseeable future? Are you financially covered for a potential emergency? Can you see yourself meaningfully contributing to your family, community, or causes you feel passionately about? For many folks in this quandary, the answer is still no. So the reality is that we’re trading the possibility of real fulfillment for the illusion of security, and the questionable “reward” of seeming like a down-to-earth, sensible adult.
We get it so deeply into our core that dreaming is immature kids’ stuff that we don’t dare to imagine what would genuinely bring us fulfillment. But allowing ourselves to dream big – bigger – is exactly the fuel we need to break limiting beliefs and start crafting our careers with intention. Dreaming bigger is a necessary step to discovering our strongest assets, embracing our genius, and writing our own destinies. Possibilities exist for you – not just for children. And if you need some help believing that, drop me a message.
