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The 3 C’s of Making Your Dreams a Reality: Courage

Hello jet setters! How are we doing this week? This morning I had a job interview and I got my hair done yesterday in preparation then I did my makeup on and put on my best interview outfit and guess what happened? They couldn’t get the video to work! I was so bummed that I went to all the trouble to look so professional for no one to see me, but at least it wasn’t my fault. Apparently they were having some Microsoft Teams issues.

But after that, I got to have lunch with my mom at the Dallas Arboretum - a beautiful local garden in the Dallas area overlooking White Rock Lake where we strolled around and talked. It was a really nice way to spend the afternoon.

This week, I’d like to start a 3 part series on the podcast about what it takes to make your dreams a reality. It comes down to 3 C’s - Courage, Creativity, and Compassion. Today, I’d like to dive into the first C - courage.

Courage Is Needed For Big Dreams

When we first think about courage, the image of a roaring lion comes to mind. I also think of a firefighter courageously rushing into a building and saving a dog from a burning house.

Now that is an incredible feat of heroism that of course requires courage, but today, I want to talk about the type of courage that’s not so in your face. The type of courage that’s quiet but constant.

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the silent voice at the end of the day that says ‘I will try again tomorrow.’”

— Mary Anne Radmacher

When you have a clear, constant voice of courage in your head - a thought like, “I’m going to do this no matter what” - giving up on your dream is simply just not an option.

Because here’s the thing about big dreams. Your big dreams will meet challenges - there’s no doubt about it. A dream is something grandiose that requires attention, focus, and dedication. If it didn’t require those things, it wouldn’t be a dream. It’d be more of a hunger pain, right? It would be more like something you needed to feed and address, but nothing that presented any great hurdles to jump over.

So by nature, our dreams will hold challenges. You’ll encounter lots of them. But having courage means that you keep showing up despite those challenges. You keep going and you will try again tomorrow, no matter how poorly today may have gone.

Big dreams also require passion. Deep seeded, meaningful passion. Notice how I’m not using words like: wish, interest, spunk. I’m choosing words that conjure images of grandeur. In this podcast today, we’re talking about dreams, not wishes. Passion, not interests. Courage, not guts.

Our big dreams will have passion behind them and that passion must be sustained by courage.

Now right now you may be thinking, “I don’t have a big dream. I don’t want anything grandiose. I’m not really that passionate about anything.” Or maybe on the flip-side you’re thinking, “I have lots of dreams; I don’t know where to start.”

But this is something that we work a lot on in Vision Voyage. Before the workshop even starts, I have a whole Introduction Week where I lead you through exercises to really hone in on what your dream is and where you should focus.

So we need a big dream that we are really passionate about, and then we need a quiet inner strength. It requires stamina and endurance. Last week, I talked about the 3 areas to upgrade in your life to live a jet set life - one of those three areas was Stamina. It takes a degree of stamina to take on the challenging task of creating our dreams.

When you have courage to face the challenges of your dreams, you don’t give up. You buckle up and double down on pushing through. Why? Because your dreams matter and they are important.

Courage Feels Uncomfortable

Executing on our dreams courageously automatically puts you in a place of discomfort. You can’t be comfortable and also courageous.

The definition of courage is: the ability to do something that frightens one; strength in the face of pain or grief. When we feel fear or grief, it’s an uncomfortable feeling, right?

So when you exude courage, you will most certainly feel uncomfortable. Anytime we push ourselves outside of comfort zones, we stretch our limits. But that’s not a bad thing. When we are willing to feel the discomfort and when we are willing to push past our comfort zone, that’s when we grow.

And that’s something we need in order to maintain courage - we need a growth mindset. There’s a book by Carol Dweck that outlines two different types of mindsets - a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

A fixed mindset doesn’t believe that we are capable of changing. It believes that we are given our skills and the rest of our life we can just be tested on them. So a person with a fixed mindset doesn’t take criticism well. And when they encounter mistakes or failures along the way, they are far more likely to give up because they are comfortable staying with what they know.

But that kind of behavior and thinking doesn’t serve you when you set out to make your dreams a reality. You need to adopt a growth mindset instead. Because you will face hardships when you are creating your dreams and if you have a growth mindset, you are willing to make errors. And you have the courage to continue despite those setbacks. With a growth mindset, you believe that your skills can be developed and learned. They are not fixed, therefore every mistake or failure is a learning opportunity that will keep you moving forward, not stopping dead in your tracks.

A growth mindset is inherently courageous because it sounds like, “This challenge will grow me. I will learn from this. Receiving feedback is helpful and constructive.”

The opposite of courage is cowardice which ultimately stems from fear. Oftentimes, we fear looking stupid. We fear what our peers will think. We fear what our family thinks. We fear what our friends think.

But what is the cost of that fear? That fear is what’s keeping you on the sidelines. It’s what’s holding you back from designing a life that you love. Fear loves keeping you in a room with a single window where you get to just watch your life pass you by.

But that’s not what I want. And I don’t think that’s what you want either. You’re a jet setter and we believe that the world is full of wonder and adventure.

Consider shifting your thinking from, “What if I look stupid?” to “What if I learn something new?”

Every piece of feedback is there to help you grow, not to tear you down. Now, yes, there are some people who are completely tactless and offer completely cruel and hateful feedback, but even when receiving that information, you learn something new about yourself. At the very least, you learn more about the type of people you want to surround yourself with and those that you need to distance yourself from.

Courage goes hand in hand with a growth mindset and a willingness to feel discomfort and learn new things.

Consider if your big dream is weight loss. Let’s say that you are weekly tracking your weight to measure your progress and one week you don’t lose any weight, in fact you gain a pound. You could choose to beat yourself up and feel like a failure and quit. Or, you could view that number as a piece of feedback - a mere data point - that helps tell you something.

Instead of letting that single piece of data derail your courage to keep going, you can look at it and say, “Okay, my approach this week didn’t quite work - I’ll try something different this coming week.”

Success is built on a mountain of failures. Mistakes and failures will happen, especially when you are making your dreams a reality. The people who actually live out their dreams are the ones that maintain courage and are willing to stand back up and try again the next day.

Having courage doesn’t mean that you won’t fail. Having courage doesn’t mean that you’ll be perfect. It’s far from those things. It’s all about how you deal with the failures and the perfectionistic tendencies as they come up.

It’s not about beating yourself up. It’s about being curious to learn why you had a setback and how you can learn from it moving forward.

Courage Takes Faith

Many times, we aren’t seeing the results that we are expecting as quickly as we hope, so we give up. We start losing hope and faith in ourselves and in the outcome. But that loss of faith is really just derived from thoughts - and we have the power to choose whether or not to believe those thoughts.

I had a friend who was blissfully happy being single in her twenties. She trusted and had faith in the fact that the right person would come along for her, so she wasn’t dwelling on it or worrying about it.

But as the age 30 started to approach, she began losing faith that the right man was out there for her. This seems to happen to many people - as they grow older they start losing hope in their dream of meeting their partner and starting a family together.

As you reflect on this though, the only thing that had changed was her loss of hope. Yes, the fact was that she was older, but she began telling herself a story that all the good men had been taken and that she was less appealing now that she was older. This false belief then caused her to stop trying to meet new people. Because she stopped trying to meet new people, she wasn’t meeting any new potential partners - so it created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Consider though if she had changed the story in her head to one of courage, not hopelessness. What if she had changed her inner dialogue to sound more like, “There are plenty of eligible bachelors out there for me. I will find the right person who I’m supposed to be with.” These thoughts would cultivate more courage in her, and consequently she would continue to go on dates and meet new people.

Your thoughts affect the choices you make and the actions you take. To create mental stamina and mental endurance, we have to practice thinking thoughts that encourage us to have courage. We have to believe in a story that keeps pushing us forward in the direction of our dreams.

Having courage means that we may not know the how. We know our why - we have our passion and our meaning for the big dream identified, but we may not know yet how to make these dreams a reality.

Courage is persisting on despite the fact that we may not know the exact path for how we will succeed. I struggled with this for a long time, especially after school ended.

When I was in school, I knew how to study; I knew how to take tests; and I knew how to make good grades. But after school ends, there’s no formula for how to get straight A’s. Navigating the corporate world can be ambiguous without report cards or finals.

But you have to have courage to set forth into the unknown. You have to make peace with not knowing and just persist.

You won’t know the how because that’s something that you have to discover as you progress. Remember what I said earlier in this show? The best part about making your dreams a reality is becoming someone new in the process.

It’s the courage to take action and the faith in yourself that you develop during the process that will help you navigate and ultimately fulfill your dreams.

Sometimes letting go of the “how” means that we just have to assume the attitude of, “Well let’s just see how this goes. At least I’ll have fun while I’m learning something new.”

And some of those things will turn out great and others will be duds. But that’s okay. Because either way, you’ll grow. Those failures will not be an excuse to give up.

At the end of the day, if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed. We just came back from a beautiful brief vacation to Sedona and we did a lot of hiking and climbing. On our last full day in Sedona, we climbed Cathedral Rock. Although it was a short hike, it was pretty steep the whole way. I was afraid of failing, but I knew that if I didn’t try, I’d never see that view from the top. I knew that no matter what, I wanted to get to the top of that mountain. It may take me double the time as all the other hikers so that I could catch my breath and give my knees a rest, but I wanted to make it.

It doesn’t matter if other hikers are passing you by on the way up the mountain. It doesn’t matter if you have to change course along the way. It doesn’t matter if you need to take breaks to stop and rest. The only thing that matters is putting one foot after the next and getting up to the top of the mountain at your pace.

Some of you may be thinking that you just want that hike to be easy. Some of you may wish that you had an elevator that could just take you to the top of the mountain so you could snap some pictures and be on your way.

But would you really appreciate the views as much from the top if you hadn’t been challenged at all? Would you feel any sense of accomplishment? No, probably not. It’s the climb itself that brings the sense of accomplishment. It’s not really the beautiful views at the end - although it was stunning.

It’s the process, not the ending, that transforms us. When you become so focused on the end goal, you begin to feel all of the lack in your now. A mindset of scarcity keeps you where you are. It doesn’t help you grow.

When you shift your focus to being brave in the now, you can concentrate on what kind of positive impacts and changes can you make today. This focus helps cultivate a mindset of abundance. And that abundance mindset will attract more of what we want. It will keep us motivated to stay courageous about making our dreams a reality.

When you have courage to make your dreams a reality, you show up. Again and again, regardless of setbacks. Consider how much more likely you would be to make your dreams a reality if you had the courage to overcome any challenge that came your way, no matter what. What if you had the courage to be proud of the woman you’re becoming despite what others thought and despite the failures you may experience?

So I’ll leave you with one more quote on courage…

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

— Nelson Mandela

Cheers,