The 3 C's of Making Your Dreams a Reality: Compassion

woman at the top of a mountain with raised hands

This blog post was originally a transcript from a podcast recording. Listen to the full episode below. Subscribe today!

Hello friends from sunny SPI!

I wish you could see where I’m recording today’s podcast. I am coming to you this week from South Padre Island. For those of you who don’t know about this place, South Padre Island - also known as SPI - is the southernmost point of Texas before you hit Mexico.

For a long time now, my parents have had a beachhouse in SPI and historically, I’ve gone to the Island for the Fourth of July. When I was in college, I was able to come down for longer during the summers, but ever since I joined the corporate world, I’ve only ever had the chance to visit once a year - twice a year at most.

So, in light of currently being laid off, I am appreciating some time in SPI because I’m not sure when I’ll get another solid 2 weeks to do this. Ultimately, my goal is to turn the blog and podcast and my online platform into a full-time job to allow me the freedom to work from anywhere on my own terms. But for now, I’m quite content with getting to spend the next 2 weeks here!

Let me share with you my view right now! My parents’ beach house is in a gated town home community on the bay-side of SPI. The homes sit on the water and each site has space for a deck and dock for boats or jet skis. In the center of the facility is a pool that sits on top of the water. The whole place has palm trees everywhere that gently blow around from the constant salty breeze that flows through the island. In the water around the houses, we’ve seen dolphins and I’ve even seen a picture of a manatee that wandered into the complex. The water in the bay is a light green color - almost like a teal - then as you look farther out into the ocean, the water turns to royal blue.

If you’re interested in seeing some pics from SPI and seeing the town home community I just described, go over to my Instagram at @thejetsetblonde and check out my highlight reel for South Padre.

Why We Need Compassion When Making Dreams a Reality

This is the final part of my 3-part series on making your dreams a reality. Two weeks ago, we talked about how courage is needed to decide what you want in this life. Then last week, we talked about the need for creativity to help you overcome challenges as they come up when you start working on your big dream.

The final piece to the puzzle is compassion. Compassion sounds like it has nothing to do with dream making but I would argue that it may be the most important aspect of them all.

Compassion is the piece that people tend to disregard. People don’t think it’s needed in the process of dream making. But it’s an essential piece to the puzzle.

The definition of compassion is a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

When talking about compassion in this episode, I’m not talking about compassion for others, although you should try to put yourself in other people’s shoes and show compassion for them. Instead, I’m talking about having compassion FOR YOURSELF.

The undeniable piece of making your dreams a reality is the obstacles that you’ll face. You may get turned down for the job. You may feel overwhelmed with the tasks. You may feel impatient with your progress.

But you have to give yourself the time and space to work through those challenges. That’s what it means to have compassion for yourself. It means that you love yourself enough to forgive your failures and keep going.

When you fall short of your dreams, you’ll most likely feel discouraged. You’ll feel defeated and disappointed and you’ll likely want to give up. But when you have compassion for yourself, you give yourself permission to make mistakes and have setbacks.

You don’t beat yourself up and spiral out of control into thoughts of self-hate and punishment. You change your inner dialogue from, “Why do I always fail?” to “How can I learn from this?”

That’s what having compassion for yourself looks like.

In my senior year of high school and into college, I developed a severe eating disorder. I seriously limited my calorie intake and I had an intense workout regimen that I followed daily. This crazy focus on food and calorie burning caused me to lose all my friends and it prevented me from making genuine new relationships.

During this time, I had zero compassion for myself. If I felt like I had overeaten, I’d punish myself by adding more time and more weight to my workouts. If I didn’t get a good grade, I shut myself in from the outside world and punished myself with more studying. What had started as discipline, turned into a life completely void of compassion for myself, and eventually for others as well.

A life without self-love and compassion is a very dark place. It leaves no room for errors. It turns you into your worst critic. And it turns your mind into a mental prison.

I had set up all these rules in my head that ultimately didn’t serve me. I couldn’t eat certain foods. I couldn’t eat at certain times of the day. I had to work out this much more if I gained a pound. I had to study this much more if I didn’t get the A+. I can’t fail. I can never make a mistake. I have to be perfect.

Why had I set up all these rules? These rules didn’t lead to a life well-lived. We need to set high standards for ourselves but we can’t leave out the missing element - compassion. I set impossible rules for myself, which I then would punish myself for not meeting. I was mentally punishing myself, for being myself.

I love the quote by Pema Chodron, “Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don’t even want to look at.”

How many of you are your own worst critic? How often are you telling yourself that you’re not good enough, that you should be doing more, and that you are horrible at what you do?

We punish ourselves for being human. Being human means that we will mess up. We’ll experience setbacks. We’ll act imperfectly.

In my efforts to become perfect, I killed the compassion inside of me. And I was able to achieve more and to control more. But at what cost?

Killing the compassion inside of me came at the cost of living a life fulfilled. Yes I made good grades and got awards and scholarships, but the achievements were hollow. Without compassion, I had no genuine friendships or relationships to celebrate those successes. And without compassion for myself, there was no internal joy for those successes. My compassion-less self would only tell me, “Well you should have received that award. What are you going to do next?”

Without compassion for myself, I was never enough.

I lived in the sorority house for one and a half years. I remember one night I felt completely out of control and I felt like I was failing at everything. The thoughts in my head were very dark and I was spiraling in “not enoughness.”

I wanted to get out of the house and bawl my eyes out in solitude. I climbed up our fire escape at the sorority house and just sobbed. I didn’t want anyone to see, but a fellow sorority sister overheard me and climbed up the fire escape with me. I told her that I wanted to be alone because I just wanted to wallow in my self-pity and depression but she wouldn’t leave me.

To me, that’s what compassion looks like.

Compassion is when someone reaches out to you, refuses to let you stay where you are, and pulls you out of the darkness. My sorority sister showed me so much compassion when I had none for myself.

Having a supportive community that surrounds you with love and compassion is important, but when making our dreams a reality, we need to show ourselves compassion too.

We have to find the divine part of ourselves that tells the scared part of us, “I love you and I’ve got you. You are enough and you’re perfect as you are. Now let’s get back up again and keep going.”

Success is made on a mountain of failures. A failure just means that we didn’t accomplish a desired result. That’s all. It doesn’t mean that you can’t try again or try something different.

Many times when we fail, we hear the scared voice in our head that shouts, “You’re a loser. You’ll never succeed. You’re not good enough. You don’t deserve that.”

But what we need to do is resurrect the divine voice in our head that’s full of compassion. She’s the one who tells you that you’re capable. You’re a winner. You will succeed. You are enough. You deserve your dreams.

It doesn’t make sense that we punish ourselves for having the courage to set a goal, then we punish ourselves when we don’t reach it. For some of us, we are scared to fail, so then we don’t ever set the goal. And in essence, that in itself is failure. Because you’ll feel the regret of never having even attempted it.

Compassion is Self-Acceptance

Showing compassion for yourself means accepting yourself. Accepting all of you. You are enough as you are. You’re not broken and you don’t need fixing.

I set up all of those impossible rules for myself because I somehow wanted to affirm to myself that I was worthy. That I approved of myself. But the fundamental flaw in this was that it assumed there was something wrong with me that needed fixing.

So the very first step in learning how to develop compassion for yourself is to accept yourself and know that there’s nothing wrong with you. You aren’t broken.

Because here’s the thing, I’ve tried setting goals and achieved them both ways. I’ve achieved my goals with compassion and without compassion for myself.

When you have compassion for yourself and you’re working on your dreams, you pursue your goals with enthusiasm and excitement. You can see how achieving that goal would be fun and would help you to grow as a person. Without compassion for yourself as you work on your dreams, you pursue your goals from a place of not enoughness. You are trying to achieve something because you think it will be better over there than here.

But the reality is - you’re enough right here, where you are now, in this moment. Reaching your goal won’t make you a better person and not reaching your goal won’t make you a worse person. Having a goal and reaching it is purely about growth. It doesn’t determine your worthiness.

And a funny thing happens when we accept ourselves. You’ll start to realize that everyone else will too. It doesn’t matter if others accept us or not, but when we operate from a place of trying to get others to accept us, we will likely fail. Because people can see through that.

It’s only until you are at peace and in love with yourself when you can begin to gain that from others.

So compassion in dream making really comes down to self-love and self-acceptance.

Compassion is Forgiveness

Having compassion for yourself also requires that you are able to forgive yourself. You need to accept yourself and be able to forgive yourself.

For some reason, many of us are capable of readily forgiving friends and family members, but we never forgive ourselves. I’ve seen women keep themselves locked up in their mental prison as I did for so long, not allowing any room for forgiveness. They refuse to forgive themselves for mistakes of the past, which keeps them stuck in the past, and unable to create the future they dream of.

We all will make mistakes in our life. We’re all going to feel shame or guilt about something that we chose to do or say in the past. But the difference between the people who can move past from those mistakes or get stuck is their compassion. If a person has the ability to accept and forgive themselves, they can see the error or mistake for what it was, then learn from it. They can then try again, or pivot, or try something new. If the person cannot forgive themselves however, they can’t move past that mistake. They turn that mistake over in their head again and again and they stop moving forward.

With compassion, you can choose to forgive yourself. And you’ll need to be prepared to forgive yourself many times over when you’re setting out to make your dreams a reality. Beating yourself over a choice you’ve made doesn’t serve you. It doesn’t help you move forward. It doesn’t make you any better.

If anything, it makes you less effective. So practice forgiving yourself again and again. I see this happen a lot when women take on a new workout or diet. They believe that the only way to look good is to punish themselves. If I hate the way my arms look enough, I’ll change it.

You hate that part of your body, then you work out but you’re not seeing the change fast enough, then you feel bad, you eat poorly, and the cycle starts once again. You keep creating the result that you don’t want anymore.

But change doesn’t come through resistance. Change comes from acceptance. It’s only until we can accept ourselves when we can change ourselves.

So many of our problems manifest themselves in poor ways because we haven’t forgiven ourselves yet. We lash out emotionally. We overeat. We over drink. We make decisions that hurt ourselves and others. And it’s all because we’ve not identified the divine compassion within us. We haven’t yet practiced acceptance and forgiveness.

That divine voice within you is the one that tells you, “It’s okay if you mess up. You are still enough. You are still worthy. You still deserve your big dream. I love you no matter what. Let’s learn from this and see why it happened.” You’re not finding out why it happened so that you can punish yourself. You evaluate why it happened so that you can know more about who you are and what you want in this life.

We all have that divine voice within us. Some of us hear her everyday loud and clear, while others have stuffed her away and can barely hear her. But we all have that voice within us - we just have to tap into it and let her voice be louder than any other.

In those moments of setbacks, which voice will you choose to listen to? The voice calling for punishment or your divine voice of compassion? Those who listen to their compassion will be the successful ones. Because what matters most is how you talk to yourself and how you choose to treat yourself in these moments of struggle. You need to hear that voice of compassion most in moments of struggle.

Earlier today I just met my cousin’s little baby for the first time. Her name is Sophie and she’s 3 months old. Right now, she’s learning how to hold her head up while she’s on her tummy, and she’s building her muscles and strength in her abs, back, neck, and arms.

When she’s trying to push her cute little head up and build her strength, we don’t say, “Well she’s worthless; she’s never going to learn; she should just give up.” NO! Of course we don’t say that. We encourage her and tell her how well she’s doing and how strong she’s getting.

Then, why in the world would we choose to do this to ourselves? You’re going to struggle to lift your head up out of the chaos. You’re going to struggle with your commitments and managing our emotions, and at times, it may feel like you’re drowning. But all of this is part of the process. It’s how we learn and grow and get better and stronger.

Practice having compassion for yourself. Accept and forgive yourself.

So, there you have it - the three C’s of making your dreams a reality - Courage, Creativity, and Compassion. You need courage to identify your big dream, creativity to overcome challenges, and compassion to see it through to the end.

With these three ingredients, you’ll be unstoppable in making your dreams a reality.

Your dream guide,