Living your dreams has a very large amount of risk involved. In all cases you will travel to points in time that you have never experienced before and with that comes fear. Fear of the unknown. If you think that dreamlivers live without fear then you couldn’t be more wrong. Dreamlivers have learned how to live and conquer fear and move on anyway. That’s feeling uncomfortable. Sometimes very uncomfortable. Can you imagine Christopher Columbus sailing west when the conventional wisdom of the day was that the earth was flat and he and his shipmates were going to drop of the end of the earth and experience a nerve shattering death. Suppose after sailing out of sight of land he had turned around and gone back home. Can you imagine him approaching Queen Isabella and saying, “Hey I’m back. I’ve come back because it is scary out there, so I’ve come back here where it is safe.” A little preposterous isn’t it, and yet that is what the vast majority of the population says almost on a daily basis when given the opportunity to move on and achieve something they’ve dreamed about. I have written this book in an attempt to help those of you who need a nudge or maybe a push to get of off dead center and achieve something in the form of bringing one or more of your dreams into reality. To do it.
Now is a good time for you to stop and think about all those dreams that you have had for so long and have given up on. The ones where you say to yourself, “Oh I could never do that.” Why not? In order for this to work you are going to have to make a list of what you want. Another job? Another house? Live in another town? Another mate? Oh yes nothing is exempt from this examination. It’s amazing and at the same time tragic that so many are involved with the wrong mate. Do something about being overweight? Buy yourself a new wardrobe? Buy yourself that flashy sports car that you have always salivated over. You see when you become honest, really honest with yourself; those things that you love will become apparent. They have been stuffed in the back of your mind for years, buried over so that you weren’t forced to confront them and then become overwhelmed because you didn’t do them. Decide that you too will become a Dreamliver. However, I must warn you, that should you decide to overcome the fear and do it anyway you will be catapulted into experiences that will bring you joy beyond your current ability to feel. Be careful dreaming about what you really want. C.S. Lewis, British novelist, academic and literary critic. “You are never too old to set another goal or dream a new dream.”
Before you dash off to live your life’s dreams I must warn you of a villain who is lying in wait for you and whose whole purpose it is to thwart you in preventing you from bringing your dreams into reality. And who is that villain you ask? It’s you. Read on.
Research shows that all of us have our self opinions stored in our subconscious when we are about the age of eight. These are opinions of how we should act for the rest of our lives. We pick up these impressions by observing those authority figures around us. Parents, adult relatives, teachers and so on.
I am putting this quotation of Jim Fadiman PhD, in the early part of the book also because it sets the stage for what I want to present to all of you. I will be coming back to him later on: “Whatever our parents tell us, when we are very small, has all the power and authority of God speaking to Moses. There are no safe alternatives to our parent’s opinions.” I would add that it is our interpretations of what we believe they have said. These interpretations are not always correct and we can spend a life time operating with these inaccurate assumptions, as I have… “The truth is that if we have the correct information and we have the will, some of our capabilities are almost limitless.”… “Even when people are highly motivated to resolve a problem, the effectiveness of their solution is predetermined by their opinion of their own abilities. Our level of achievement is a direct reflection of our attitudes about ourselves. We do not get what we wish but what we think we deserve. We can reach no higher than the goals we set and we will set goals no higher than we believe we deserve. One can overcome almost any barrier, provided one maintains the willingness to do so.”