For years, I’ve practiced making vision boards, sharing publicly about what I’m going after in life, and letting people into what’s been working well (as well as things I’ve learned the hard way).
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I’ve happily shared because it was easy to talk about dreams and what I’m excited about, but I’ve been resistant to sharing this year’s vision because, well, it’s not created yet. After many attempts these last few weeks especially, it’s clear to me that this year won’t be like any other.
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“Hypocrisy is the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform. In moral psychology, it is the failure to follow one’s own expressed moral rules and principles.” (thank you, Wikipedia, for that very humbling definition).
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Ick. I abhor the idea of living as a hypocrite, yet this is what it feels like to tout about vision and struggle to have one of your own. I DO believe in vision. And I HAVE been hitched to visions all these years…but they haven’t been my own.
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You see, while I’ve had glimpse visions of my future life, I’ve been putting all of my energy and time into building other people’s visions and my own grew dim in the process. So dim, in fact, that I could no longer put words to them.
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When revisiting visions from past years, I realized that while I still wanted all of those things, my belief in the possibility of them actually happening had waned. I’d spent so much time building other people’s visions, mine hadn’t been getting any attention or care. They’d been unknowingly pushed aside, out of focus.
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I spent many years surrounding myself with incredible people, truly awe-inspiring people. And without realizing it, I began to identify as a tiny, small, little fish in their great big pond. These people are so extraordinary, and I respect and admire each of them, but I’d forgotten who I was in my process of seeing how outstanding they are.
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It was a bit of a confronting realization when I sat down excitedly to put together my vision board and nothing new was coming to me. No fresh visions. No new inklings of what was to come. Just a blur of previous visions that still hadn’t come to pass. Dream after dream staring me in the face, as if to say “you’ll never catch us!” and I must admit, it was quite disheartening. Discouraging. Disappointing. Defeating.
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It was exactly the opposite of what you want to happen when you sit down to purposefully envision your wonderful future, but it’s exactly what I needed to realize what I’d lost.
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I’d lost me. In all the hubbub of the last few years, and all of the excitement and growth my closest friends and clients were experiencing, I found myself going through the motions when it came to anything Susan-related. It carried me for a time, but that time has come to an end, and it’s now time for me to learn to dream again.
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So as we enter 2022, my focus for this year is to learn to dream again. You’re invited to join if you dare.
Learning to Dream Again
