Few things are more tender, or more meaningful, to us than our heart’s deepest dreams.
In fact, the tenderness of our desires is so real that we often find sneaky, subtle ways to side-step them completely.
Have you ever known someone who said, for years, that they wanted something more than anything?
And yet, when push came to shove, you saw them doing next to nothing about those dreams?
Or worse, maybe you saw them overtly sabotaging by making choices or accepting conditions in their life that directly contradicted what they said they wanted.
Perhaps you, yourself, have envisioned your ideal life time and again, yet it seems just out of reach.
Today, we’ll explore the five most common barriers that prevent dreams from becoming reality. Then, we’ll get into what you can do to cross the gap from wishing and dreaming, to experiencing and having.
First, A Personal Story
Years ago, I was living in a major city with my then fiancé (now-wife) Demetra.
While I loved living with her and the life we were building, I increasingly felt drained by the city.
The noise of downtown exhausted me. I rarely left my house without my custom-fitted earplugs and noise-cancelling, over-ear headphones to block out the sounds around me. The surrounding volume of concrete felt lifeless and sad.
In my heart of hearts? I was craving nature. A lot of nature.
And while I could give myself little boosts of nature-exposure by going for forest walks, or going to the local nude beach in the summer, I still wanted more.
I didn’t want a weekly, multi-hour top-up of nature. I didn’t want to occasionally vacation in nature. Truthfully, I wanted to be immersed in it.
It was around this time that Demetra and I started searching for a home of our own. We both acknowledged that while the big, green, shared backyard of our rental unit was fine, we wanted more.
We set out on our journey and looked at increasingly nature-soaked homes.
As soon as we did, every possible layer of my internal resistance started to bubble up.
“What if the idea of being surrounded by nature is a pipe-dream and I actually hate the reality of it?
What if I’m not handy enough to live a rural life, and Demetra sees that I can’t do major renovations all by myself and she thinks I’m a loser and so she leaves me?
And what if it’s so quiet where we live that I’m under-stimulated and I lose my mind (like the guy in The Shining) and can’t create anything ever again and our marriage implodes and I die alone while sipping rain water in the gutter?”
On and on my mind went!
Every possible neurotic thought! I had them all.
In truth, my body, heart, and mind were onto something.
I was craving nature. Deeply.
And so it makes sense that such a tender, honest desire was being attacked by anything and everything that my mind could think of to keep it at bay.
In time, we found our dream home and bought it right away. It was more than 120+ years old, and it was ridiculous and it needed so much work… and now it brings us immense daily joy, and we know all of the birds and animals that visit our land on a daily (and seasonal) basis.
Obviously Demetra had her own fears come up around us actually buying the house as well, but we didn’t let our minds win.
If we had let our fears win, we wouldn’t have the life we have today. Surrounded by farmland, and trees, and chirping birds, and hundreds of ribbitting frogs in the spring and the tink-tink of the rain on the tin roof over our bedroom in autumn.
Alright, enough about me. Onto the five things that get in the way of our dreams.
Why People Don’t Achieve Their Desired Life
1. They convince themselves out of what they truly want
The simplest reason people don’t get what they say they want is they essentially gaslight themselves out of their own desires.
They notice the desire for the healthy relationship… the dream body… the increased income… and they do the mental gymnastics required to convince themselves that that desire is silly. That it was never true for them to begin with.
“Oh that? Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking. That’s so not me.”
“I’m just bound to be a crazy old cat lady…”
“It just isn’t in my astrological chart to be successful in love/money/friendship/health in this lifetime…”
Of all of the reasons on this list, this one is both the most sad, and the most psychologically lazy.
It’s sad because these people are often the closest to actually doing something about making their dream-life come true.
And it’s lazy because there’s only two ways to achieve what we want in life. 1) Take responsibility for putting in the work and getting the thing, or 2) Pretend we don’t want it, and simmer with ever-mounting resentment, despondence, and depression for the rest of our lives.
In the short term, it is so much easier to just drop the goal. Discard the dream. To say, “Meh, I don’t even care about that really.”
But think of the daily pain you will live with, every day for the rest of your life, because you didn’t go for it. You didn’t honor what was true in your heart.
Think of all of the people who you would have impacted, inspired, lifted up, by your sheer example. But instead, the opposite happens.
The person who convinces themselves out of their deepest desires does triple-damage by not being who they could have been, being a far worse version of themselves, and not lifting the others they would have had they become who they could have been.
Is this line of thinking depressing enough yet? Well, we’re just getting started.
2. They cherry-pick evidence that supports their fears (instead of their desires)
One favoured strategy for people who side-step their dreams is to steep themselves in selective evidence about why it’s a bad idea.
“I couldn’t possibly marry this amazing person who I love and who loves me back. Have you seen the divorce rate lately?”
“There’s no way I’m going to start my own business. Haven’t you heard that 1 in 5 businesses fail in their first year?”
“Why would I even bother trying to get my body into a fit and healthy shape? All of the women on my side of the family have this exact same body type, so there’s no avoiding it. I’m doomed!”
Whether they selectively gather evidence from a familial, social, societal, or global level doesn’t matter. They use what they need to to feel justified in staying put.
Over and over again, they mentally rehearse the reasons why it won’t work out. They focus on the infinite ‘What if’s,’ but only in a negative direction.
3. They don’t deploy courage
Many of the items on this list are secretly being driven by this one thing. They simply don’t deploy the necessary courage to make a change.
Whether they’re terrified of ‘failure,’ or the reality of taking responsibility is beyond what they perceive themselves as being capable of, so many people will find a way to leave their dreams unfulfilled until their dying day.
And here’s the thing. Growth requires courage. Of course it would. In order to become someone new, you need to do something new. And doing new things requires courage.
It requires courage to say, “Yes, I will try this new thing and I will be bad at it and it will be scary, but oh well! I am here to make my life a masterpiece anyways, so who cares if it’s messy and I stumble along the way?”
Here’s the thing. The time’s going to pass anyway. You’re going to age anyway. Life will march on, relentlessly.
So do you want to live the expanded life that a bigger you is capable of? Or are you going to let fear win for a few more years? The choice is entirely up to you.
4. They listen to their rational mind exclusively, and ignore their heart
The untrained mind is simply a Pandora’s box of noise.
It is literally its job to express worry and doubt.
Imagine you had a co-worker who everyone knew was chugging coffee 24/7 and they were literally paid to be the one who forecasted all of the potential what-if’s of all of the possible worst-case-scenarios. Sure, you might ever listen to what that person said at the team meetings. But you wouldn’t promote them to running the entire business and make every day-to-day decision.
And yet, this is exactly what people do, every day of their lives.
They take the most fearful, small, limited, wound-up part of them and they say, “From now on, you make every decision around here. And once you make those decisions, I’ll never question them. Not even once.”
Doesn’t this sound a bit silly? Maybe a sub-par strategy for a life well-lived? Yes, I would agree.
When someone hinges their entire life exclusively on their mind… on priding themselves on being a ‘rational’ person… you end up with a life that is as flat and dull as a piece of beige cardboard.
5. They don’t say ‘Yes!’ to their desires enough
Simply put, saying yes to your dreams is a habit. And it’s a self-reinforcing habit at that.
Why is that? Well, because action is followed by evidence and then by emotion.
So if you take the action of saying yes to your dreams, and then you get positive reinforcement of your desired outcome, you get the correlated positive emotions and you’re more likely to listen to your heart in the future.
Unfortunately, the inverse is also true.
If someone is in the habit of saying no to (or overtly shaming or minimizing the validity of) their dreams, then their life slowly caves in on itself. They make the safe choice. Get safe results. And their heart slowly withers and withdraws, joining the untold masses of the men and women who live quiet lives of desperation.
They become so used to settling in every area of their life, and so thoroughly surround themselves with people who do the same, that it just becomes normal. It becomes habituated. “That’s just the way things are.”
“I did my part (when they really didn’t)… the rest is up to life whether or not I’m supposed to have this.”
And meanwhile their soul goes out, spark by irreplaceable spark.
How To Powerfully Reclaim Your Desired Life
Listen, it’s not too late.
In fact, it never is.
I have worked with too many clients in their 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s who found the love of their lives…
I have witnessed too many people drop hundreds of pounds…
And I have seen countless people finally allow themselves to do the work, with their real gifts, that set their hearts on fire.
There is no such thing as too late. No such thing as “I guess it just isn’t in the cards for me.”
It comes down to a decision.
Will you admit to yourself that you want it or not?
You might say, “What’s the ‘it’?”
You know what it is. The exact thing that popped into your mind as you read through this article.
It will require you to move through your fears.
It will require a former version of you to die, so that the new you can be reborn.
You already have everything you need inside of you to make it happen.
The only question is whether or not you will allow yourself to go there.
To simply admit what is already there, wanting to come through you.
And then deploy the courage to make it a reality.
When I, Jordan Gray, was 25 years old, I launched this business through tears. I was terrified. But I was more afraid of what my life would look like if I didn’t follow what was true for my heart.
When I was 32, I met Demetra for the first time and the only way to engage in our relationship was to immediately jump with two feet in. I was scared. But I knew that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t leap into the void.
And when I was 34, life presented me with the opportunity to buy the home of my dreams out in the middle of nowhere in a place I’d barely heard of months prior. I jumped off the metaphorical cliff, and built my wings on the way down.
Yes, it is scary. Yes, it’s allowed to feel uncomfortable.
But please, for the love of God, just think of the life you are giving up (every. single. day.) by not making the choice that you know is in your heart.
I want for you, more than anything, to have the courage to reach out and say yes to life. To say yes to the thing you know you want.
Your dreams are ready and waiting. They want you to pick them up and run with them. Or even walk. Or crawl.
Just embrace them, one way or another. And do something with them.
Dedicated to your success,
Jordan
Ps. If you enjoyed this article about your life’s biggest dreams, you will likely also benefit from checking out the following resources:
– Apply For 1-on-1 Coaching With Jordan
– The Big Test Before You Leap
– ‘Why Am I Still Single?’ 5 Reasons + What To Do About It
– 7 Incredibly Reasonable Things You’re Allowed To Want In A Partner
