3 Times We Need Support When Chasing A Dream
On Monday, I introduced the concept of support, which will be essential during every stage of chasing our dreams. Today, I want to discuss how support works in each stage of chasing a dream. We need support at all levels, and as much as our dreams are our responsibility, we do not have to take this journey alone. We are chasing our dreams for ourselves, but we do not have to do it by ourselves.
1. We need support during the “make a plan” stage.
While a decent amount of the planning stage will fall on us, we still need support. We don’t necessarily need help Googling “how to become a real estate guru.” We don’t really need someone to hold our hand while we go to the library to check out books on sword fighting so we can finally write the medieval romance novel of our dreams. And we probably don’t need support when we email the base’s FRG to get help writing our resume.
We may very well need support in all those moments, and it is always nice to have someone sitting next to us when we press “send” on taking the next step. But these are not the crucial moments of support that I am talking about. When we first discover a dream, it is fragile. It is so easy to look at everything that pops up in our research and feel overwhelmed. It is so easy to look at the hard things that will come down the road and think, “Maybe this isn’t for me.” And it is so easy to forget what made us excited about the dream in the first place. That’s why we need support. We need someone to remind us of the passion we felt for that dream. We need someone to reassure us of our calling to pursue it because, remember: if the dream is in our hearts, then we can achieve it. We need someone to help us simplify and remind us that we don’t need to know everything right now. We just need to know the next step.
The other reason we need support is that we probably know people that know more than us. In fact, I guarantee that you know people who know more than you; if you don’t, you need to get some of those people in your life. Often, our dreams develop because we see someone else pursue them. Watching a close friend grow successful with their pottery business may inspire you to follow your dream of t-shirt printing. Or maybe watching a stranger on the internet go from 5,000 followers to 5 million as their music popularity grows inspires you to put your first song out on YouTube. These people have a great gift to give us in their experience. I don’t know if the stranger on the internet would answer your questions or help mentor you in some way, but I do know that they will never do it if you don’t ask. And I know in many cases, people are more accessible than we think they are. Why don’t we let them decide if they are too busy to work with us rather than answering that question for them?
The planning stage is vital to achieving our dreams, and it sets us up for a more straightforward journey if we do it properly. And part of that is seeking advice from people who know more than us. Experience is the best teacher, but it is so much better when it comes from someone else’s experience. Many of us will be walking paths that people have walked down before us. And, even if we are forging a new course, we can often find people that have walked parallel or have intersected in other ways, whose advice we can take hold of. These people can tell us when to walk straight and when we are better served taking side roads.
2. We need support during the “stick to the plan” stage.
While support is necessary during the “make a plan” stage, it is essential during the “stick to the plan” stage. When we are sticking to the plan, we will have good days and bad days. On the bad days, especially, we need people to remind us of what we are fighting for. We need people to remind us of all the victories we’ve achieved. We need people to remind us of the struggles we’ve overcome and that the struggles of that bad day will just get added to that list. We need people to be a shoulder to cry on because opening ourselves up to our dreams often does mean opening ourselves up to hurt. And, when the time comes, we need people to kick us in the butt, so we stop our pity parties and get back to work.
These people can act as accountability partners for us on this journey. Chasing a dream can be a lonely business because, ultimately, it comes down to the work that we do as individuals. And, when it is just me, myself and I, I am very good at convincing myself that I am working. It is very easy for me to pretend to work. It is easy for me to believe that the time I spend scrolling on Instagram is research for reels. It is easy to pretend that Googling author agents in my niche is productive. Yes, these things matter (although I know there are better methods of Instagram marketing than scrolling through for ideas), but if we constantly research, then we never actually accomplish anything. I can spend an eternity reading agent bios and scouring their websites while never sending a query that could start a relationship. We need people to be accountable to. We need people that we love and trust to check in and ensure that we are doing the work that we committed to.
And we absolutely need support from people because chasing our dreams requires changing our schedules. It changes who picks the kids up from school. It changes who is home to cook dinner. It changes who has time to grocery shop. All the basic things that were once easily, or not so easily, taken care of in our schedule before chasing our dreams now become question marks. It may be as simple as going to the grocery store on Wednesday instead of Tuesday. Or it may be more complex, like setting up a carpool system. It may require changes to things that were considered standard in your household. Maybe it means ordering take-out more because now no one has time to cook. Maybe it means letting the house get a little dustier than y’all would prefer so that you can focus on chasing a dream rather than the daily household management tasks that you used to handle solely. Maybe it means no more Sunday lunches with the extended family because now we need that entire day to work. I don’t know what changes chasing a dream will bring about in your life, but I do know it will bring changes. Anytime we make minor or major tweaks, our already busy schedules get thrown off very quickly, and everyone has to be ready to pick up the slack, rotate responsibilities or compromise on what has been the norm.
3. We need support during the “ALWAYS DELIVER” stage.
When we finally reach our dream, the people that have supported us the whole way deserve a shout-out too. They have earned the right to bask in our victory because it would not have been possible without the help we received along the way. But even more than that, it’s just more fun to celebrate with other people. These people have watched our entire journey. They know the work that we’ve put in. They know how hard we fought. They were with us through the bad days. They know how desperately we wanted this moment and they want to celebrate us. Everything pays off in this stage, and it is much more wonderful when we get to turn to the ones we love and say, “I did it.”
Support is essential in every stage of dreaming. Some people are with us from the very beginning. There will be people that join us along the way. And there will be people who pop up right as we cross the victory line to celebrate everything we’ve achieved. We will lean on these people during our time of need, and we will have the opportunity to return the favor when they chase their dreams. I hope you already have a team supporting you, and if you don’t, I hope you can find it soon; we all deserve support in our lives. I firmly believe that if you want to single-handedly chase and achieve your dream, then you can. But I also know the journey is so much sweeter and smoother when we have friends and mentors along the way.