A friend of mine used to love to dance when she was a little girl. It was all she dreamed about. In the eighth grade, her mom pulled her aside and said, “You know you’re not going to be a Rockette, right? You know that’s not in the cards for you, right?”
Do you think she danced much after that? Do you think it was easy for her to lean into that dream with everything she had? Of course not. She left her dream behind in the eighth grade.
Most of us have done the same thing in our own lives. We’ve felt something big and true, but for a million reasons stopped doing it and left it in our past. That’s why finding your calling and your dream is not a first date; it is more often than not a reunion. And if that’s the case, if dreaming is an act of recovery and not an act of discovery, that changes everything.
Instead of asking forward-facing questions like, “What do I want to do with my life?”, we dream backward and ask, “What have I done in my life that I’ve loved?” And the answer we get is not a bottomless, faceless list of options that could apply to anyone. It’s a personal, small, uniquely tailored to our hearts and our souls, handful of life experiences that made us feel alive.
And finding those—dreaming backward—gives you everything you really need to move forward.
