Take a Stride of Faith | 10 Reasons to Follow your Dreams

"But suddenly I was free to choose differently"

    For us dreamers out there it can be scary to take the leap and actually follow our dreams, but what if it didn’t have to be a leap? What if it could be a stride instead? I want all those beautiful dreamers, which by the way, we all are, to know that following our dreams does not need to feel risky or like going off a ledge. If it feels like that, maybe there are some steps we skipped along the way to get there. This is how I took a once scary idea of following my dream of becoming a life coach and entrepreneur and turned it into the most natural stride of faith.

    A little over a year ago, I took a presentation board, sat down on the carpet floor in front of my bed, grabbed a red sharpie, and wrote down my career goals. It was just three things: to do amazing art, life coaching, and blogging or communication outreach because honestly, this introvert has a lot to say. My board was so simple, for sure these were the three things I would do for fun, for free, and happily receive monetary gain from. I felt happy to know that I had clarified my goals, but, then the doubt crept in, and it crept in fast. My motivational goal board quickly diminished into forgotten cardboard behind my computer desk. I didn’t know how I was going to achieve these big goals while working my 9 to 5. To add salt to the wound, I had maddening stage fright. The idea of being center stage, while appealing in my head, had conjured up a load of insecurities that still needed to be dealt with. Welp, that was the end of that. 

    I went back to focusing on building my savings account while my dreams collected dust on the shelf. I still found small ways to keep them alive by helping to coach friends on weekends, occasionally upgrading the look of my website, and doing art commissions. Was this enough? Plain and simple, no. Not nearly enough.

    And then something happened.

    Yes, yes we all know, it was Covid. Covid happened and so did quarantine [insert dramatic sigh]. For days on end, I was left to sit with my thoughts, not just thoughts, my stream-of-consciousness on crack. Honestly, quarantine was half great, I didn’t have to do any more physical labor, could sleep in, and watch an endless stream of Bollywood films till I was blue in the face. But then part two of quarantine kicked in and my twenty-something-life-crisis started to kick in with it. Can anyone else relate? Mid-Quarantine-Crisis has to be trending somewhere? I had all the time in the world to think about how my life wasn’t moving in a direction that I had EVER wanted for myself. In which version of my mind was this path of work and barely mustered creativity a part of my plans? It wasn’t.

    Here's the problem. I was a dreamer, twenty books worth of journaling dreamer. Not only that--I was also an idealist. In my head, I had an endless stream of ideas, that went unnourished and unseen. Falling back into my introverted and in-active tendencies, I dreamed and dreamed, but that’s all I did. And then it dawned on me…I was choosing this--which sucked. I had chosen not to make the choices I needed and insisted on just letting life drag me along. But suddenly, I was free to choose differently. This freedom of choice was uncovered by a very honest conversation that I had with myself. This is what I did, I realized:

1. No one was interested in my ideas because I didn’t share them.
2. No one believed in my ideas because I half-baked them.
3. There was no place for me to fit in.
4. I can dream as big as I want (in my head) and no one could say otherwise.
5. My body moving into action was the only thing that would make my dreams a reality.
6. No one can decide how I am supposed to live my life because they did not have ownership of my mind, body, or spirit.
7. It was my choice and has always been my choice.
8. Not having energy, money, or time wasn’t the problem at all (this one hurts but it's true)
9. In a year's time, my dreams were exactly the same.
10. And I realized, that in order for things to change, I had to change.

    So, I took accountability instead of making excuses, I dreamed bigger instead of being realistic, and I took radical action instead of playing it safe. These 10 reasons turned what once felt like an unobtainable leap of officially starting my coaching business into the most natural, needed, and right decision. I don’t just want to make a difference I want to be it, embody it. And the best part was the reward of incoming support from friends and family. I would have missed out on that if I hadn’t taken that most needed stride of faith.

To get the tools I used to propel myself out of twenty-something years of bad habits, schedule a coaching session with me at www.shantiacrowley.com/life-coaching, or continue to get a stream of inspiring creative entrepreneurial content from my blogs.