When writing Wednesday's post, I realized that I had overlooked an important aspect of discovering a dream. It's not enough to find the dream. We must then accept it. This topic is tricky because it sounds like something inherently easy and obvious. We think that when we find our dream, it will be a perfect fit. We believe it will feel like the puzzle piece we've been missing all our life. And hopefully, it will, but that's not always the case. When you finally discover a dream (and this is not for every dream), there is a period where you have to decide to accept this dream into your life. It's almost like the dream is standing at your front door, and like a vampire, you have to invite it in. It won't come in of its own volition, no matter how much it feels like it was made for you.

I want to wrap up our conversation on fear (for now, at least) with where I am today. We started the conversation with where I was seven months ago, so it seems right to finish with where I am right now. Fear is still here. It's always going to be here. That's just a fact of life that we have to live with. Even if we stay in our comfort zone, fear will still exist. Our imagination will still run wild thinking about the scary things that lie just beyond our comfort zone. We can fake that what we feel is fueled by ignorance or ego, but that is just a clever mask that fear uses.

I hope yesterday was a great day for all the fathers out there. As promised, that Mother's Day post wasn't just for moms. In many ways, moms can struggle to chase their dreams while balancing the responsibilities of kids, but when it comes to military life, all non-serving parents face the same struggles. We all deal with separations. We all deal with solo parenting. And we all deal with plans changing on a dime. Our spouses are getting to chase their dream of military service, but it can often be hard for the member back home to pursue their dreams. So this Father's Day, let's talk about how the dads can find a way to chase their dreams while their spouses go serve.

Sometimes it is hard to tell when fear is talking to us. We don’t always get that red flashing “do not enter, it’s scary here” sign. We aren’t necessarily talking about the fear that we feel standing outside of a haunted house or staying up all night with the lights on after watching a scary movie (I say this, not from experience, because I am definitely a scaredy cat when it comes to these things so I stay away entirely).

I hope you've taken the time to identify the fear or fears that you're struggling with. If not, I highly recommend reading my previous post on identifying fear because the first step to fixing any problem is knowing what it is. It's tough to help someone get where they want to go if we don't know where they're at first. I want to talk about a few tools to use when fear is holding us back from chasing our dreams. These are some methods that have worked for me, but fear will always be part of our lives.

Fear will come into our lives, and it can exit our lives. We aren’t too young to have fears now. Most of us passed that age a long time ago. Fear can be a very real aspect of our lives. Our every fear is there because we have taken the time to learn it, though. Whether we learned that fear through a life-changing incident like a snake bite or through an ongoing education on poisonous snakes and where they lurk, every fear can be learned and unlearned.

There is usually one thing that stops all of us from moving forward with our dreams. We will all come up against different obstacles, and a lot of them probably won't be universal problems (I do want to help you overcome the unique obstacles you face in your life, which is why I am designing a one-on-one coaching course that will launch soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that).

Dreams require fullness and completeness to them. We will need this to maintain our commitment in our journey to achieve them. There will be plenty of bad days and hard days along the way simply because this is life. It was never meant to be easy to achieve our dreams. But in a way, that is what makes dreams so worthwhile.

I have been thinking a lot about the Jewish prayer for healing, Mi Shebeirach (Me Sha-bay-rock. I don’t actually know how to do the sound-it-out spelling of words, but hopefully that gives you an idea). My son has a white noise piano lullaby soundtrack that he listens to when he has a hard time sleeping. The soundtrack promises to put you to sleep in five minutes, which has never happened to us. But when nothing else works, that seems to help at least a little.

To celebrate the beginning of June, I want to highlight one of the keys that will be most important to our success in dream chasing: consistency. Yesterday marked two months of my website being live. It marked 27 blog posts that were consistently posted on the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule I had planned for. It marked 38,644 words written (my current manuscript has 64,942 words which is about 105 regular printed pages to give you a little bit of context).

I want to wrap up this cartel conversation with the remaining source. I don't have a great name to call this collection of people on your team, but that doesn't make them any less valuable. These are the people in your life who don't live locally and aren't necessarily family (although for many of them, we probably would consider them family). This is a tribe we are all very familiar with as military spouses.

Here's the thing about my family cartel (Special Happy Birthday shout-out to my dad today), aside from my husband and son, they live halfway across the country. And while I know my family would be on the first flight over if I needed them, sometimes my need isn't big enough to justify a flight. I have needs from chasing my dreams and building a life I love that aren't met as easily by people who live multiple states away. That's why I have my Oklahoma City cartel.

You can call your support system whatever you want. It is entirely yours to decide. I call mine a cartel. I chose the word, cartel because, at its core, a cartel is a collection of parties working together for a mutual interest. And that's exactly what my support system is. Everyone in it is working in one way or another to help me reach my dream. I do the same for them. It doesn't matter what the method of contribution is. Some members will contribute lots, and some will only contribute a little, but they all work together for the greater goal. Plus, I always liked the idea of living the glamorous criminal life that I see on some of my favorite TV shows, so I can bring a little bit of that into my life by using this term.

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.

This post is a week late, but I wanted to wish a Happy Mother's Day to those that were celebrated. I know not everyone reading this post falls into the category of Mother, but please bear with me because I think this is important for everyone to hear. This was my first Mother's Day as a mom, and my husband made me feel very special and appreciated. My son gave us both the gift of sleeping in until 8 am (a personal best) and showing us how he could roll over from back to front (up until now, he's only done it when we weren't looking). It was a wonderful day, and I am grateful that my family was whole for it, especially since we had that deployment scare a few weeks back.

I want to get really vulnerable today and talk about a dream that I let go of. I’ve let go of dreams that didn’t mean a significant amount to me, like seeing a band or comedian when I didn’t like their new material as much. But the dream I want to talk about today was a big one. It was one that I cherished deeply and had aspired to for many years. When the time came to pursue it, though, other dreams took over, and I decided to let go of something that was once very important to me.

We discussed some bad reasons to let go of a dream on Monday. Today, let's talk about some genuine reasons for letting go of a dream. This is something that almost everyone will experience at some point in their lives. If you made a list of 100 dreams, you know that some were far more special than others. For many of us, the ones we cherish less are the smaller dreams. But there are times when we decide to let go of bigger dreams. The reasons from Monday may factor into why we choose to stop pursuing something, but they cannot be the only reason. So, here are four reasons that we may decide to let go of a dream.

I've mentioned a few times and repeated it in my post on Friday that sometimes we let go of dreams. Some of those graduates will enter the "real" world only to discover that they need to let go of the dreams they left college with. So when do we do this? First, let me share some reasons why we should not abandon a dream. Letting go of a dream is a big deal. It can be like letting go of a past version of yourself, and while that doesn't mean it won't be the right thing to do, it does mean that it is a decision that shouldn't be taken lightly.

Last week my son and I were lucky enough to attend one of my cousin's college graduations. Somehow our family has managed to make living halfway across the country from one another, feel not so far. It is always a joyous celebration watching thousands of people realize their dream of getting a degree, whether it was a bachelors, masters, or doctorate; it was easy to see how proud each of them was of their accomplishment.