Always Listen When Someone Pushes You To Nurture Your Dream

Last updated on June 20th, 2012 at 03:55 pm

I read the following this week from an article fellow dreamer Remy sent me on entrepreneurial dreams called, Baby Boomer Entrepreneur, Why Does It Begin With Your Dream? by Shallie Bey, a entrepreneurial dream coach we featured here on 8 Women Dream.

Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream.

Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success.

Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success.

Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream. Lao Tzu

The same quote can be used for a fully-functioning dream support group. In order to achieve your dreams in a dream group, the group as a whole must always look for ways to turn setbacks, problems and obstacles into success — both individually, for the other members of the group and for the group at large.

You also have to actually work on, or be nurturing your own dream in order to benefit fully from a support group.

When I first started the blog part of this project, I set it up so that seven women wrote each day of the week and I managed the editing, technical aspects and the marketing. But three months into the project these same seven women complained that I wasn’t writing and they wanted me to write on the blog too. Suddenly I had to find a way to squeeze a post into a place where I wouldn’t overshadow another dreamer’s post.

I was reluctant, which is funny, because my dream was/is to get paid for writing, to be a publisher and talk about self-publishing (and dreams) to the world.

Now, how exactly did I plan to get there if I wasn’t writing on 8 Women Dream? Yes, there’s my mom blog, A Week In The Life of A Redhead, which has been very successful in the past, but since my son is a teenager, he might not take too kindly to being discussed too much on a popular blog.

I needed a writing platform — funny how I didn’t see 8 Women Dream as a writing platform FOR ME.

If you don’t write, you can’t get better at writing. If you don’t write everyday, you can’t really call yourself a writer. This is how it is with dreams: if you won’t do the work, you don’t live your dream.

I was still hesitant to write on my own project website. How redhead-crazy is that?

For many years I have been carrying around these notebooks. Each Christmas I usually get a new one from my son, and over the course of the following year I’ll write affirmations, thoughts, goals and quotes having to do with my dreams. I will also glue images representing my dreams and the life I see myself living. Each year on New Years Eve I look at my “150 Things To Do Before I Die” list and mark off anything I’ve completed.

Then I transfer what’s left of the 150 to the new notebook, and add new goals to bring my list back up to 150.

Each year it’s interesting to see what I’ve accomplished in spite of myself.

I also transfer forward any affirmations I liked, along with quotes, prayers and mantras into the new notebook. I skim over my gratitude list and say a silent thank you for the year that has just passed. One affirmation that gets rolled over every year is,

I am so happy and grateful now that I am a famous writer, richly paid for my creations.

Exactly how did I originally expect this affirmation to come true if I wasn’t writing? Or publishing any writing? Hey – I was busy! Or at least that is what I told myself.

So along come seven other women who said, “Hey! Wait a minute! You need to be writing too!”

Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream. . .

And there it was. These women were trying to tell me to nurture my writing dream. Thanks to the influence of the group I started writing regularly.

This is the dynamic a group can have for you , if you are open to feedback and willing to do what is suggested.

Can you imagine where I would be today if I wasn’t writing for 8 Women Dream? Thanks to women who cared enough to tell me the truth and my ability to hear what they were saying, I can now call myself a paid writer . . . a published writer as a matter of fact.

I was looking through this years notebook and my affirmation and realized that I have been paid for publishing a small book, for content, for articles and resumes. For a while now I’ve been a paid writer, and the offers are starting to intensify.

Somewhere along the way I became a freelance writer.

And that is a dream come true.

Where are you going to find your dream support? Who is going to push you to nurture your dream? Will you accept their pushing? Or will you give up and walk away from your dream for another year?

Catherine