A Study of Dream Supporters
Chasing a dream is not a one-person job. It would be if we existed alone in the world, but that's not the case for most people. We have spouses, kids, parents, siblings, and friendships that depend on us. Changing our habits to chase our dreams has ripple effects in that community. That's a good thing, and it's how we change the world, but it's not always received that way.
One of the biggest things I have in my corner is a supportive spouse. I also have supportive parents, siblings, and friends. I'm sure my son will be supportive, too, but there's only so much an 18-month-old can do. This support is what allows me to take chances and bet on myself. It gives me the space to work and go after what I want. It helps keep all the balls in motion so I don't drop as much when my plans change.
To illustrate this point, let me share my experience versus someone else's at the conference I attended recently. Let's meet Julie, a married mom of two from out of state, very excited about getting started in the insurance industry. This is her first major event with the company, giving her a chance to meet the team from across the country. She is so excited about the event, and because it is happening in a different state, she brings her husband and two kids (ages 9 and 2) along so they can explore the city.
The event starts Friday evening and goes all day Saturday and Sunday. At the end of the first night, Julie returns to the hotel excited and ready to talk about everything she learned. She is met with an angry, frustrated husband who is not used to caring for the kids alone. He questions why she would want to do this and if she should even finish out the event. I don't know the total outcome of the conversation. I do know that she was at the rest of the event, so some sort of agreement was reached, but I imagine it took a long time and a decent amount of arguing to get there.
Let's compare that to my weekend, which actually started that Wednesday when I left town to go to a concert. We have a nanny who worked her standard schedule on Wednesday, covering the time between my leaving and his coming home from work. He took leave on Thursday to stay home with our son, and our nanny covered all day Friday while he was at work. After work on Monday, my husband drove my son three hours to meet up with me so I could take him while I worked in North Carolina for the week. We ate a quick dinner together, and then he drove the three hours back home.
He did this all without complaint. He was excited to have this time with our son. And I did not have to make a list for him to be capable of caring for our son. He took the entirety of the mental load while I was gone, and I didn't have to think or worry for a second about what was going on back home. This was his first opportunity to solo-parent for more than one night, and my chance to be the one who goes while the family stays behind.
It definitely opened my eyes more to how hard it is to leave the family behind, even when we know it's the right thing to do. I do think there is value in partners experiencing both sides so that we don't fall into the "who has it worse" mindset. But that's really a topic for another day.
When we start chasing our dreams, we will either be met with support or resistance from the people we know and love. Often, the resistance isn't from a hostile place. Sure, we will encounter people who actively want to hold us back, but the resistance usually comes from a well-meaning or uninformed place.
Take the example of Julie's husband. If we asked him point blank if he was trying to hold Julie back from achieving her dreams, he would likely say of course not. He most likely loves his wife and has no ill intentions towards her (granted, one could argue that weaponized incompetence is ill-intent, but again, a topic for another day). He just didn't want to adapt to the changes in his life that chasing her dreams would cause.
In The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson, he describes the encounter people have when they come to the end of their comfort zone. At the edge of our comfort zone, we meet four different types of border bullies:
The Alarmist
The alarmist worries about our safety in a new venture. This isn't just for physically risky dreams like skydiving and climbing mountains. It's also for the financially risky ones like opening a business or investing in a new venture. Every dream carries some risk, and the alarmist worries about the worst-case scenario coming to fruition in our lives.
The Traditionalist
The traditionalist doesn't like change. They like the way things have always been done and prefer to stick to the path paved in front of them. Take a military family that has served for generations and add a child with dreams of teaching or video game design. They may meet the resistance of carving a new path, different from anything the family has done before. Dreams take us out of the familiar, somewhere the traditionalist rarely goes.
The Defeatist
The defeatist believes that failure is the only option. They are often someone who has let go of their dreams because fear overwhelmed them. Or they may know someone who chased a dream with everything they had and didn't succeed. The defeatists don't want us to get our hopes up only to have them dashed, so they try to keep us from hoping to begin with.
The Antagonist
The antagonist is the person who is actively trying to keep us from our dreams, and they are doing it with malicious intent. This would be like a boss who doesn't put us up for promotions because we are too good of an employee. It would be breaking the kneecaps of a competitor to take away their dream of winning (like the case of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, which may be a very outdated reference today).
We'll meet all these people as we chase our dreams and push the border of our comfort zone. If we're lucky, those people won't come from inside our house, but we won't all be lucky. It's our job to push past those bullies in pursuit of our dreams. It's also our job to check ourselves when others come to us with their dreams because we can become those bullies, too. It's usually not as easy as cutting out the toxic people in our lives. With a lot of dreams, the "toxic" people are only hurting us in this one area while filling our lives with love and meaning in every other spot. We can demand the support we need and, at the same time, fight through it ourselves to find a path to success, which is what we'll talk more about on Monday.