What’s your dream? — A practical way to find purpose and stop wasting your time.

What’s your dream?

This is usually one of the first questions I ask people that I meet. Often I add in the primer of, “if you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do or build next?” This second part relieves some of the pressure of a big question like this right off the bat.

When people don’t know, It opens up an exploration. When they do know, they are immediately talking about something real for them.

When we identify our dreams, it’s a helpful tool to work our way back into an understanding of who we are, what we care about and what’s most important to us.

When we can’t articulate a dream, it often shows us where we have limiting beliefs, uncertainty, or anxiety in our lives.

Both tracks are valuable for growth.

My mentor Lauren Zander bases a lot of her work around the belief that you can (and should) have a dream in all of the major areas of your life.

Money, Love, community, purpose, career, health, relationship to self, contribution…just to name a few of the most important ones.

As I started to develop clarity about my dreams in these areas (with her help), I was able to identify the stories and beliefs that got in my way. I became more capable of acting in integrity in the moment.

• Having hard conversations with my wife
• Understanding my family on a deeper level
• Finally getting a bookkeeper to own my finances
• Starting a business I was scared to start

An important distinction here is that I by no means have achieved all of my dreams. I just made it easier for myself to act in alignment with what was important to me. As I started to live this way, I started to develop more of the contentment, confidence and self respect that made me feel good, enjoy my life and feel like I was doing something that mattered.

Ultimately, I believe we want things because of how we think they will make us feel. It could be a relationship, that promotion or a number in our bank account.

We want these things because we subconsciously think we’ll feel a certain way when we achieve them.

When our actions lead towards dreams that we deeply care about, we’re more capable of creating the feelings we want in the moment. Our actions become aligned with what we really care about and value. The mystery of “am I doing the right thing? Am I wasting my time? Suddenly becomes clearer to us.

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A dream is not just a flippant declaration of the wildest success you can imagine in any of those areas (money, career, love etc.). It is a desire backed up by an explanation.

It is not me asking you what your dream is for your finances and you saying…”I want 10 million dollars in the bank!”

It might be “I need 10m in the bank because then I can support my family and my parents off of the interest and will be free to pursue filmmaking full time.”

When you have a dream that is true for you, you can’t help but get excited by it. There is a motivation that comes from feeling connected to a deeper purpose for our actions.

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One of the last things I love about the question “what’s your dream? is that while this question remains the same…the answers will change. That’s not an excuse to stop short of articulating our dream in the moment, it’s an invitation at ask the question more frequently and to shift course when life calls for it.

So, what’s your dream?

If you’re curious about this work, a great crew of people that I’m organizing are connecting for our first accountability call this Tuesday (free). Over the next three months we are going to be identifying our dreams in these core areas of life and taking massive action to move things forward.

If you’re curious, dm me for the invite. Virtual meetup happening tomorrow night at 7.