Laura Berman Fortgang: Dreams Are Never Foolish
Most people suffer from what I call “the misinterpretation of the dream.” They had (or have) a dream about what they wanted to be when they grew up, and if it never came to be, they either consider it a flight of fancy or a failure. Wrong! There is so much left untapped in that discarded dream that can lead to your utmost satisfaction and fulfillment.
What we have been trained to do is see our dreams as a literal mandate from our hearts, minds and imaginations. If I dream of singing on Broadway, then clearly I am to be an actress with all that it entails. However, when you are given the key to the clues that the dream holds, you are no longer beholden to one form that your work can take.
For example, one woman realized that her futile attempts to break into the broadcasting field did not mean she had failed at her dream. What she really wanted to accomplish by being a broadcaster was to get vital information to people that they needed for their lives. When she broke out of the one-way mold she created for her expression, she realized that she could do that in many, many forms, and it did not need to rely solely on landing a position as an on-camera newscaster.
Sometimes a discarded dream can mark a place in your life history where you got away from your truest self. A place where you left your soul on the side of the road to live the life you thought you had to live (instead of the one you wanted to live). It doesn’t necessarily mean you are supposed to go back to that dream because being a baseball player at age 52 just may not be feasible, but it does mean going back and picking up your soul from the gutter. It might mean getting that old glove back on your hand to remember who it was you got to be (or wanted to be) and then bringing that person into your life today. The dream must live; it will just have a different form.
I once met a man who wanted to challenge my method of looking for the true wisdom behind people’s dreams. He had accomplished every dream he ever wished for; therefore, he felt he could debunk there being any theme or connection between his dreams that would mean anything to his current conundrum about what to do next. This man’s past dreams included being a magician as a kid, an architect, which he did become, and a branding and advertising person, which he also became. What he was confused about was that he could not reconcile his love of outdoor adventure sports like rock climbing and kayaking with his next career move.
It did not take long to recognize that each of his dreams evoked a sense of awe in people. A magician’s impressive illusion, the architect’s astounding work, and the ad man’s bigger-than-life billboard — they all made people drop their jaws in awe. Nature does the same thing.
Upon tying the dreams together for him, he told the truth. He wanted to have an adventure travel company and introduce more people to the awe of nature. It all made sense. He knew what he wanted to do and why. He wasn’t confused anymore.
How about you? Can you reinterpret your dreams and find the clues in the past that point to your future? No dream is foolish. It’s just our interpretation that is flawed. Go back, retrieve yours and soar!
For more by Laura Berman Fortgang, click here (https://editorial NULL.huffingtonpost NULL.com/tmp/1506153_17 NULL.html?preview=yes).
For more GPS for the Soul, click here (http://www NULL.huffingtonpost NULL.com/news/gps-soul).
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Dr. Jim Taylor: Reevaluating Your Values For A Better Life
Your values form the foundation of your life. They dictate the choices you make and determine the direction that your life takes. Your values will influence your decisions related to your relationships, career, and other activities you engage in. Despite this importance, few people choose their values. Instead, they simply adopt the values of their parents and the dominant values of society. In all likelihood, the values that you internalized as a child remain with you through adulthood (yes, in some cases, people reject the values of their upbringings). Unfortunately, these values may also have created a life that is carrying you down a path that is not the direction you want to go at this point in your life.
What were the values you were raised with? What values are you presently living in accordance with? Are they the same or different? Do your values bring you happiness? These are essential questions that you must ask if you are to find meaning, happiness, success, and connection in your life. Yet, finding the answers to these questions is a challenge, and then changing them in a way that will lead to fulfillment is an even greater challenge.
Deconstructing Your Values
To truly understand what values you possess and live by, you must deconstruct them until you are able to clearly see what exactly you value and why you hold those values. Looking openly and honestly at the way you were raised is the first step in identifying the values that you instilled growing up. What did your parents value and what values did they impress upon you — achievement, wealth, education, religion, status, independence, appearance? Think back to your childhood and ask yourself several questions. What values were emphasized in the way your parents lived their lives? What values were stressed in your family? What values were reflected in the way you were rewarded or punished? For example, were you rewarded for being highly-ranked in your high school class and for winning in sports, or were you rewarded for giving your best effort and for helping others? You might even ask your parents to reflect back on your childhood to see what they perceived their values to be and what values they wanted to emphasize in your upbringing.
Your next step in the deconstruction process involves looking at your present life and the values your life reflects. In responding to these questions, you should ask yourself what values underlie your answers. What do you do for a living — are you a corporate employee, a business owner, a teacher, salesperson, caterer, or social worker? A common question that people in social gathering ask is, “What do you do for a living?” Periodically, I have seen people get rather defensive in response to this question. They say, “Who cares what I do. What I do is not who I am.” I would suggest otherwise, at least to some degree. Assuming people have choices in the career paths they take, which they choose, reflects of who they are and what they value. For example, though a bit of a generalization, it is probably safe to say that someone who becomes an investment banker has different values than someone who becomes an elementary school teacher. What those underlying values might be may vary, but one might assume that the investment banker values money, while the teacher values education and helping children.
Where do you live — do you live in a high-rise apartment in a city, in the suburbs, or in the country — and what values led you there? What activities do you engage in most — cultural, physical, religious, political, social — and what values are reflected in those activities? What do you talk about mostly — politics, religion, the economy, other people — and what does that tell you about your values?
Finally, perhaps the most telling question reflecting what you value is: What do you spend your money on — a home, cars, travel, clothing, education, art, charity? Because money is a limited resource for most people, they will use their money in ways that they value most. Over and above what people say and other indicators in their life, where they spend their hard-earned money says the most about their values.
You can then ask yourself whether your current values are the same as those you grew up with. Have you gone through a period of examination and reconsideration? Have you consciously chosen to discard some values from your upbringing and adopt new ones? My experience with people who live unsatisfying lives is the values they grew up with weren’t mostly unhealthy and that their present values haven’t changed since childhood. They never questioned their values and simply bought into them early in their lives and created their life around those values. In contrast, fulfilled people tended to grow up with life-affirming values or had a “crisis of conscience” in early adulthood that caused them to reevaluate and modify their values.
Now that you have deconstructed your life and have a clear idea of what you value, you can see the values upon which you have created your life. You can see whether those values contribute to your dissatisfaction or bring you happiness. Look at which aspects of your life contribute to your unhappiness — your career, marriage, lifestyle — and ask yourself what values underlie those parts of your life. For example, if your career in the business world makes you unhappy — no judgment intended, but many of my clients happen to come from corporate life — you need to ask yourself what values you have held that led you to a career in business and how those values presently cause you to be an unhappy success.
Popular Culture and Values
A recurring theme that runs throughout my work is that inadvertently buying into the values that predominate popular culture, for example, winning, status, power, appearance, and conspicuous consumption, is a leading cause of life dissatisfaction. The popular culture in America today — as reflected in our various media — no longer has the time, attention span, or energy to devote to weighty and deep issues such as values. It is much easier to focus on the superficial “things” in our culture. Thus, the pursuit of wealth and material goods has become the dominant “value” in much of our society in the mistaken belief that these values will bring people happiness.
One of the most powerful ways in which this “value” was impressed on you was in how you learned to define success. Popular culture typically defines success as winning, wealth, status, physical appearance, and popularity — the more money and power you have and the more attractive and popular you are, the more successful you would be. Growing up with these definitions, success was largely unattainable for most people. At the same time, our culture made losing even more intolerable to contemplate — being poor, powerless, unattractive, and unpopular is simply unacceptable. With these restrictive definitions, you may have believed, like so many others, that you were caught in the untenable situation of having little opportunity for success and great chance for failure.
Blindly having accepted society’s narrow definitions of success and failure takes away your power to decide how you wish to define them. By buying into popular culture’s limiting definitions of success and failure rather than choosing definitions based on your own values, you can’t become truly successful and happy because you are forced down a path that is, for most people, impossible to attain and that is not truly yours. You may become successful in the eyes of society, but you probably won’t feel like a success yourself. And this path certainly won’t bring you meaning, happiness, or real success in your life.
I’ll explore how to “reconstruct” your values in a future post.
For more by Dr. Jim Taylor, click here (http://www NULL.huffingtonpost NULL.com/dr-jim-taylor).
For more on mindfulness, click here (http://www NULL.huffingtonpost NULL.com/news/mindfulness).
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