Stop Sabotaging Your Dreams
You know the voice, the one that bellows, “And just who do you think you are, young lady (or young man)?” How many times since you were a child have you heard THAT voice echoing in your head, even though there is no authority figure around to ask you except yourself? And how silly is this “young lady/young man” bit when you’re over 45?
We usually end up listening to these bombastic Saboteurs that live inside our heads, thus, remaining exactly where we’ve been our whole lives. What if we said to them (with just the slightest hint of sarcasm back), “Thanks very much for your concern. Now excuse me if I ignore your vote of non-confidence and continue on with what I was doing.” How DOES one find the guts to deal with the constant barrage of negativity we harbor in our own minds?
At the age of 52, I made plans to move across country from Florida to California and spend more time writing. For years, my Saboteur had told me it wasn’t practical, and on my salary as an administrative assistant, I couldn’t afford it. I agreed. I was a procrastinator anyway, so if I couldn’t achieve my dreams right where I was, I would fail miserably no matter where I went. I meekly endured the litany this purveyor of failure intoned. It went something like this: “Creative people end up as starving artists. You’ll be a bag lady in a city where you don’t know a soul. You haven’t got what it takes to survive on your own…blah, blah, blah.”
Eventually I got brazen enough to say, “Enough!” and contemplated my break for freedom. I awoke every morning with terrifying anxiety as I thought seriously about moving. Then one day as I lay in bed almost crying with the fear my Saboteur had stirred up, I began to envision staying instead of leaving. In that moment I realized, the only thing scarier than following my dreams, was witnessing them die a slow death. And so I began to pamper my dreams and ignore their adversary, my Saboteur. Concerned as he was for my safety and well-being, I still had to kindly tell him repeatedly to get lost.
How did I nurture my dreams? Every day I spent at least an hour of quality time with them, not just envisioning them, but living them vicariously by logging onto an Internet community where I could look for suitable apartments, cool activities, interesting jobs and social connections in the city where I wanted to live. In other words, I gave my dreams real substance until I accepted them as a “done deal.”
So just who DO you think you are? It’s not too late to be it!