5 Reasons Dreams Die

Do you have a dream on your heart that feels further away than ever?

You might be experiencing one of the common dream-destroyers that prevent busy moms from turning their goals into reality, even when they deeply desire to make them happen.

In this candid episode, I share my personal journey of repeatedly postponing this very podcast and reveal the things causing our dreams as moms to die — PLUS how to overcome each one so you can finally make your dreams a reality!

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• The five dream-destroying "Ds" that prevent you from reaching your goals
• Why resistance is actually a sign you're on the right path (and how to push through it)
• How perfectionism keeps you stuck in analysis paralysis and prevents you from taking action
• Practical strategies to overcome each obstacle and maintain momentum toward your dreams
• Why you'll never "find" time for your dreams—you have to make it

Ready for more support? Check out my YouTube channel HERE or, better yet, book your FREE 60-minute consult to learn more about working together 1:1.

AS MENTIONED:

• Tim Ferriss's TED talk on 'fear-settting'
• Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning'
• Steven Pressfield's book, The War of Art

HOMEWORK:

Clarify a dream you want to pursue in the coming weeks, months, or as a longer-term goal. Then create a plan for how you'll handle each of the five "Ds" when they inevitably arise.

COMING UP NEXT:

In our next episode, I'll tackle one of the most vicious mental battles moms face: mom guilt. You'll discover how it's stealing your time and sabotaging your joy, plus learn a powerful mindset shift to overcome it for good.

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

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Do you have a dream on your heart or a goal that you have wanted to reach for so long and yet it just feels farther away than ever? Like one thing after another is constantly coming up and making your goal impossible? In this episode, I want to walk you through five common things that cause your dream to die. But more importantly, how you can overcome each of those things and realize that they are just normal parts of the process so that you push through and make that dream reality. Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. There are so many things that, as busy moms, we think of doing, we want to do, and yet almost never happen. Sometimes, maybe they genuinely don't happen, and this podcast is one of them. In this episode, I just wanted to have a real open heart-to-heart about how hard it is to have big goals as a mom and to actually make traction on those goals, let alone bring them to fruition, by telling you the story of how this podcast didn't come about until now. I started my business six years ago, wanting to share all of these tips that had made such a difference for me as a full-time working mom of, at the time, three and now four young kids. And I was so nervous to put my ideas out there. I did a bunch of research on what the best platform to do that might be. And I finally worked up the courage to start a YouTube channel. I will put that link in the show notes in case you want to go check it out. It was a great side project and passion project of mine for many years, but it wasn't necessarily something that was reaching the people I wanted to reach. And it just was taking so much time to produce every single video because, in case you haven't guessed it, I am a recovering perfectionist and I really, really, really just wanted to make everything so good. I felt so much pressure. Not long into starting my business, I noticed that a lot of other people had podcasts. And strangely enough, I had never listened to podcasts. It wasn't until probably 2020, 2021 that I ever listened to my very first podcast and instantly fell in love. I realized the wisdom of what people had been saying all along, which is that for busy moms, you need something that you can just pop in your ears and go. You don't have the luxury of sitting and watching a full video or being at a live workshop or something like that. You need something that can fit into your existing life. And I just found that I was consuming so many podcasts and it was such a great way for me to get information and then feel a connection with the podcasts that I have fallen in love with. So I really started to get that dream on my heart that I wanted to create a podcast. I wanted to share my life and my lessons in hopes that it would benefit anyone else. I think when you've been through some really dark times and then found yourself stronger on the other side of them, it's very natural to want to help those that might be in a hard place. And that is so my goal with this podcast and with everything that I do. I am never, never, never claiming to have things all figured out or have it all together. But again, I just knew years ago that I wanted to have a podcast. And so what I want to do is really walk through a lot of the different obstacles I faced in bringing this podcast to fruition. I realize now that all of these are very common things. They are almost inevitable. No matter what your dream is, no matter what it is you want to do, you are going to face all of these exact same challenges in one form or another. So I'm going to use my podcast as an example of each one as we go through. But again, this is like the guidebook, if you will, for what not to do if you actually want to reach your goal. It all comes down to five D's that destroy your dreams. Not to be confused with my 5 D's formula for prioritizing your tasks as I talk about in another episode. These all just happen to start with D. I don't know what that's about, but you'll see. So the very first obstacle you are going to face whenever you set a goal for yourself is feeling derailed. And this means that life throws you an unexpected curveball that fundamentally changes your circumstances, really reduces your capacity, and just takes away the time and energy you thought you were going to have to put towards something. I could just cry thinking about all of the big hard things that have happened between me starting my business or having the dream to launch this podcast and now actually making it happen. I'm sure we'll elaborate on all of these life events in subsequent episodes, but if we just even look at the pandemic, that really threw my life just into a crazy tailspin. My husband and I were one of those dual working couples who all of a sudden found ourselves at home with three young kids needing to do e-learning. At the time, my oldest was only in, I think, first grade. And then we had a 4K and a two-year-old. And we were still trying to keep up with our jobs and get our work done while having them home and without obviously any help because during the pandemic nobody wanted to be around anybody else. And there was so much anxiety and uncertainty and it was just an incredibly stressful time. So I had to get extremely diligent about focusing on my most important work, which was fulfilling all of the responsibilities for my academic job. And my husband and I were alternating days of who would be working on their own stuff versus who would be on full kid duty. And we did that seven days a week for over four months straight. And it was so exhausting that I was then completely burnt out by the end. By the time our kids could go back to school, of course, we were still in the crazy pandemic situation. I don't think I've really come to terms with all of the damage that did to me psychologically and just how hard it was for so many of us. Let me know if you can relate. But shortly after the pandemic started to subside, My mom got really sick and she had been dealing with chronic illness for a little while, but we thought things were going to get better, only to then have her suffer a brain aneurysm. And within the month before and after she had her brain aneurysm, we ended up losing three other close family members. And it was just so devastating for my family. I could hardly keep up with life, let alone think of making traction on my podcast. Then I was pregnant with my fourth son and I was so excited thinking that this is going to be my window. This postpartum period is going to be when I can really have a little bit of time for me. But I was wrong. And then we also had some child care issues. So I had my fourth son home with me for eight months before he could get child care. And on the one hand, I was so grateful for that because I was soaking up the time with him. But I definitely couldn't get things done. His naps were so unpredictable. I was still juggling the other kids and their activities and trying to keep up with work, and it was just a lot. And then I thought things were finally gonna get better, but my mom was diagnosed with cancer. And this really threw me. She ended up passing away and I was so blessed to get to be by her side and spend those last few weeks with her, but I just couldn't think about anything work-related in those moments. And then I spent several months, really a year after that, trying to pick up the pieces And by the time I felt like I had done that and was maybe partially through the grieving process, we got sudden news that our kids had gotten into a new school and we ended up moving an hour away. Biggest blessing, but moving is a whole thing. As you probably know, it was our first time moving with kids and we were still having to work. It was a mess. It was literally so unsettling. And I just couldn't focus on anything else. On top of that, I think because of the new environment, our family ended up being more sick than ever this past winter. Every week, one of my kids had something or multiple kids had something. And then my husband and I kept falling sick in the midst of it as well. I kept losing my voice. I lost my voice three times just since January. So every time I thought I was going to finally put this podcast out into the world, I literally couldn't talk. I felt so derailed every time I even thought about putting this dream out there. Long story short, life is going to surprise you. And we need to just expect that at some point along the path of declaring your goal to reaching your goal, you are going to get derailed. Whether it is sickness or illness or the loss of a loved one, whether it's some crazy economic crisis or global pandemic, or we hate to even put other worst case scenarios out there, but the chances are pretty high, if not certain, that something is going to come up and derail you from your original plan. So the challenge is to navigate those challenges without letting your dream die altogether. In this instance, I never lost the dream on my heart. This podcast has always been something that I couldn't wait to do, but it just kept getting pushed off and pushed off. And the friction, the internal pain I felt because of that was real. That leads to the second D, which is distraction. When things finally do open up and you make your plan and you schedule in when you are going to work on your goal and how you're going to make it happen, you feel that surge of dopamine. You are excited. Everything feels possible. And then self-sabotage comes in, doesn't it? Meaning that you might have time to work and you find yourself gravitating towards other lesser important tasks, or you are letting email run in the background and so new things are always popping up, you have other more urgent opportunities or requests, even really noble distractions like Keeping up with the house and your brain's inability to focus if things are not taken care of at home. That is still something that throws you off from just sitting down and working on your goal. And then it's just so easy to feel like you need big chunks of time to really accomplish what you want to do. I think this is so true. The bigger your goal is, the more your brain wants big open space on your calendar where you can get it done. But oftentimes, we are less productive in those big open windows. Many of us have brains that function best when there's actually more going on and we have more limited time in which we just have to buckle down and get it done. Just so many distractions every step of the way. It's very hard to put your blinders on and stay focused on your singular goal until you make it happen. It's really, really easy to chase that shiny object that maybe feels more exciting or fun and maybe also is something that's easier to get done because it doesn't require as much time or cognitive effort as your big, huge, audacious goal. Even when I was able to limit my distractions and I was trying so hard to focus, the third D hit me like a ton of bricks. And that is doubt. I know I'm not the only one that has wrestled with imposter syndrome, where you start to doubt, can you actually do this? Do you have what it takes? Are you smart enough to figure out the technology and the podcast hosting platforms or whatever else is relevant to your goal? It just paralyzed me, thinking that I wouldn't be good enough. But that doubt isn't serving anyone. It's really just the devil's way of keeping you small. And at the end of the day, I do want to offer all of the advice that I've learned both the hard way and through my years of academic research to anyone that might benefit from it. If I can spare you from being in all of the dark places I have been, I would be so happy. However, even when you move past that big old doubt stage, it is so natural to find dread creeping in. And I find that this comes in two forms. The first is fear of failure, which is really about fear of embarrassment, of humiliation, of getting it wrong, of somehow not having this turn out the way that I've hoped. I have such big dreams of this podcast really making an impact. And I would love for that impact to be deep over wide, right? To reach the people it needs to hear more than reaching lots and lots of people. But it's hard not to set your dream big and hope that something you're doing turns into something even more. And I just, I fear that I will fail. But that then also leads to the second form of dread, which is very counterintuitively the fear of success. I don't know how many women realize the extent to which this is actually what's holding you back. Because it's natural to be comfortable with who you are and where you are. Even though we have these big audacious goals, we know that reaching those goals is going to change us. We are going to become different people on the journey and we can't anticipate what is really going to happen when we reach that goal. What attention we might receive, what new unforeseen challenges are going to come our way. We fear that it will somehow change us for the worst. that makes me so nervous and so in reality it's this fear of success that has partly been holding me back. It's much more comfortable for me to be in the background and play small. But I also feel deep in my heart that that's not using my God-given gifts and talents and again it's not giving myself the possibility of helping whoever needs the help. If I can help, if someone could learn from my mistakes, if I can spare them the dark places I have been, that's what I need to do, even if it makes me uncomfortable. So two forms of dread, fear of failure, fear of success. We have to really pick those fears apart, figure out why exactly we are afraid, and even let our brains go there. What if that failure does happen? What if I am successful? And this is where I absolutely love Tim Ferriss' fear-setting exercise. I will put his TED Talk link down in the show notes for you, but it's so powerful. He really encourages you to list the thing you are afraid of, list all of the implications that you think will come from taking that decision, and then for each of those things, think about how you can prevent it and then how you could mitigate it even if it happens. I have found that exercise so useful over and over and over again. The fifth and final D is that even when you have overcome being derailed, you have fought the distractions, you are no longer in doubt, and you've even put that dread to rest, you find yourself in indecision. Now, I know that doesn't technically start with a D, right? But the challenge is to decide all of the little things that must be decided along the way of bringing your goal to reality. I have been so stuck here. This has been one of my biggest obstacles. It really pops up for me in terms of analysis paralysis, where when you start looking into how to achieve your goal, the reality is there are any number of means to reach the same end. And so the more choices you have, the harder it is to know what the right choice is. But this is a never-ending battle for this podcast. There were too many choices on what kinds of podcast equipment to get and all kinds of programs that I could have invested in to help me launch the program. Why is one program better than another? If I don't take this program, am I doomed to fail? Same thing when it comes to hosting platforms and every step of the way, choices need to be made. There are decisions involved. in reaching your goal, but it's all too easy to get paralyzed there. Part of that indecision is really wrapped up in perfectionism. I wrestle with this so badly. I am more aware than ever of where it comes from, what the roots of it are. Long story short, it is a trauma response. But my brain, and I would be willing to bet many of your brains, have internalized this deep belief that your worth is determined by what you do and by how well you do it. So the way that we have made ourselves feel safe and good over the years is by trying to achieve great things. And then if it's not going to be great, if it won't be perfect, We just can't do it at all. Lots more on that to come in other episodes. It's something I'm incredibly passionate about bringing to light and helping you work through, but it's still there. It's really how my brain is wired and I've had to go ahead and push record. I just have to make myself do this. You would laugh if you knew how many times I have written out ideas for podcast episodes and even started recording and then thought, that's not good enough. So I rerecord and I've wasted time in that way. I'm so caught up in wanting this to be perfect that it just didn't happen plenty of other times before, because there were little windows in between all of the different events that derailed me where I could have made this happen. I should have launched this podcast As early as 2023, that's really the main time that I think I would have been able to do it. But I pushed it off and then it was going to be multiple times in 2024. And I just kept pushing that goalpost down the road, feeling horrible about myself every time I did, not serving anybody. It really all comes down to what Viktor Frankl calls potentiality. If you haven't read Viktor Frankl's amazing book called Man's Search for Meaning, it is one of the go-tos, one of the must-reads for all of personal development. He is an amazing survivor of the Holocaust, and he writes on what helped some people get through the atrocious things they endured, and even thrive after that experience versus what led some people to give up altogether. He develops this logo therapy philosophy of how life is about meaning. And the more meaning you have in your life, the more full of a life you will live, the more you will feel that drive to live and live life to the fullest as opposed to give up. He talks about how there are infinite possibilities for every life. We all have this incredible brain that is serving you idea after idea. We have thoughts and hints popping into our brain nonstop of things we could do, or we see people that are doing things we feel a desire to do. And all of those ideas just live in this realm of potentiality until we actually decide to bring them to reality. You can imagine that one of the biggest regrets people express on their deathbeds is that they didn't make something happen. They didn't go after that goal. They didn't pursue that thing that they had wanted to do or they gave up on it too easily. And I don't want that to be me. I want to be someone that looks back on her life and feels so proud of having tried. No matter how it turns out, I just know that this is a deep desire in my heart that needs to come out and I've got to put it out there. All right, so those are the five D's that cause dreams to die. It's being derailed, getting distracted, having doubt, having major sense of dread, and then being stuck, trying to decide, stuck in indecision. If we wanted to boil it all down and label one big thing that causes your dreams to stay stuck, It is the concept that Steven Pressfield calls resistance. If you haven't read his book called The War of Art, that's another amazing book I'll put in the link in the show notes. It's this idea that as soon as you put a dream out there, that obstacle is going to arise. But how you perceive that obstacle is what matters. And the obstacle, in his view, is resistance. It's not a sign that something is wrong. It's actually a sign that you are on the right path, a sign that you are doing something that matters. Because if you didn't experience resistance and the path was completely free of obstacles, it might be a slippery slope leading you somewhere that maybe you shouldn't be altogether. But resistance is actually a good thing that is helping you prove to the world and to yourself How badly you want something and you just have to call it what it is. You just have to see it as an inevitable thing that is going to always be there trying to throw you off track. The way to get around resistance and push through it is to, as he calls, go pro. Meaning you've got to commit, you have to take your own dream seriously, you have to fight for what you want. And that's where I'm finally at, ready to make this happen. I hope hearing my journey is helpful to you. Feel free to laugh, feel free to ignore all of these ideas. They are just thoughts I've had as I've reflected on all the reasons that this podcast almost didn't happen. In the end, it really is all in God's timing and I think we can take so much comfort in that because I know that when I look back, all the pieces of my life really do seem to fit together in a way that I couldn't have planned myself. So I hope that helps you as well. And if you can relate, if you have a dream on your heart and you feel like it's taking forever and that it's such a battle to bring it to reality, I just want you to know you're not alone. I also want to encourage you that life is short and we do have to just make our dreams happen. That's a constant theme you're going to hear on this podcast that you never will find the time. You have to make the time. It's one thing to say that or even to know it. It is another thing altogether to act on it. I'm here to do that, to help hold you accountable. We are in this together. We can do it. Your homework for this episode is to clarify a dream. What is something that you want to do? It could be in the next few weeks or months, or it could be a longer term goal that you have. But how are you going to avoid getting derailed or handle those derailments when they occur and not let them stop your goal altogether? How will you handle distraction? How will you push past doubt, past dread, and then force yourself to decide even when you don't know the right answer or feel like it's perfect, how can you bring your dream to fruition? Now, one of the most well-intentioned but vicious mental battles moms face when trying to balance their dreams with motherhood is mom guilt. Join me back next episode to discover how mom guilt is stealing your time and sabotaging your joy, but then learn a huge mindset shift to overcome it for good. Until then, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day. I know more than anyone how precious your time is, so the fact that you spent it listening to this podcast means the world. Make sure to subscribe, and if you got value out of this show, I would be so honored if you'd leave a review and share this episode with another busy mama who needs to hear it. We've got this.