Takeoff: Learning to Rise

There comes a moment in every dreamer’s journey when you realize: you’re not a caterpillar anymore. You’re not stuck on the ground. You’re not goo in the cocoon. You’ve been transformed — and it’s time to live like it.

In this episode, we talk about the metamorphasis season of a dream: the identity shift where you stop crawling through life and finally recognize that you’ve become someone new. Someone with wings. Someone with perspective. Someone with a calling that requires altitude, not hesitation.

If you’ve been shrinking back, playing small, or returning to old patterns, this episode is your reminder that transformation wasn’t the end — it was the beginning.

Inside, we explore:

• How to recognize when you’ve outgrown your old identity
• Why transformation feels disorienting before it feels empowering
• The difference between surviving the cocoon and stepping into flight
• How to stop living like the old you when you’ve become the new you
• What it looks like to bless the world from the sky, not the ground
• How to follow the “flight path” of your dream with clarity and courage

This is your invitation to stop crawling, stop hiding, and stop pretending you’re still who you used to be.
You’re a butterfly now — and the world needs what only you can bring from the air.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Dream Blueprint, where we build your dream into something real. I'm Catherine Craddock, and before we step into episode nine today, the dream pivot, I want to remind you of something. You're not the first dreamer who didn't feel ready to fly. In the Bible, it's full of dreamers who didn't feel ready. Gideon was hiding in the wine press when God called him a mighty warrior. Moses was hiding in a desert in Midian when God called him to lead a nation. Saul was hiding in the luggage. Jonah was running in the opposite direction from Nineveh when God sent him back with a purpose in the belly of a whale. And Nathanael was resting under a tree when Jesus said, I saw you. Simon Peter, impulsive, inconsistent Simon, was renamed Peter the Rock long before he ever lived like one. I wrote a whole screenplay about Harriet Tubman. She's one of my absolute favorite people in history. And today we know her and celebrate her as one of the great heroes of the Underground Railroad. But even after she had rescued people from slavery, she found herself living in Canada, scrubbing floors in a hotel. And one of my favorite anecdotes from her life is that John Brown traveled all the way to Canada, checks into the hotel, and they are asking him at the hotel, why are you here? Who are you looking for? And he points at Harriet and he says, I'm looking for her. And they're like, the maid? And he said, That's no maid. Who I see is General Tubman. And he helped her to her feet and elevated her to her proper status and reminded her who she was. She wasn't just a maid, and people were treating her like that. She was one of the greatest heroes the world has ever known. Every one of them that I just listed, they were living in an old identity when God was speaking a new one over them. He saw, God saw generals and kings and queens and rescuers. He saw leaders of great revolutions, but a lot of them were doing ordinary things, taking a nap, fishing, scrubbing hardwood floors in a cold Canadian hotel. This is the tension of episode nine. This is the moment after the cocoon, after you've been a caterpillar, you've melted away, you've dissolved into goo, and you've emerged this new creature, but your wings are new, your instincts are old. This is when the dream has emerged, and the dreamer is still learning how to live as a person who can carry that new dream and fly. In Luke 12, 48, it says, For everyone who's been given much, much will be demanded. It's not a threat, it's a truth about wings and what we're supposed to do with them if we have them. Because when God gives you wings, he also calls you to learn how to fly. He teaches you a flight path. So episode nine, this one I call the flight school for a dreamer, the sacred, necessary work of integrating the version of you that survived all that came before with the version of you that is called into a new dream. Let's begin. There's a strange moment that happens after a long cocoon season. You've melted, you've unraveled, you've rebuilt, you've done the quiet work that no one sees. You've healed the parts of yourself that were cracked. You've let go of the parts that were weighing you down. You've grown wings, real ones. And then you crawl out of the cocoon and you keep crawling. Not because you can't fly, but because you've forgotten that you're allowed to. You're a butterfly now, but you're still moving like a caterpillar, still hugging the ground, still hiding under leaves, still trying not to be noticed, still trying to blend in like a caterpillar. Camouflaged. But at some point you have to stop and ask yourself, why am I still crawling when I was made to fly? How can I be camouflaged when I have these beautiful new colors? That's what this episode is all about. It's the moment that you've realized that you've outgrown the ground, the moment you stop hiding your wings, the moment you pivot, and not into a new dream, but into the version of yourself who can actually live it. Coming out of the cocoon is disorienting. You're not who you were, you're not who you're becoming, you're somewhere in the hallway between these identities. And even though you've grown, and even though you've healed, and even though you've changed, your instincts haven't caught up yet. You still shrink, you still dim, you still hide, you still crawl. I did all of these things for far too long because the cocoon teaches you to be quiet, to be small, to be unclean, to be internal, to be safe. But the butterfly requires something different. It requires visibility, it requires presence, it requires lift, it requires courage, it requires stepping into the open air and being public. That transition from hidden to scene, from ground to sky, is one of the hardest pivots you'll ever make. My hiding didn't start in adulthood, it started much earlier. As a pastor's daughter and a pastor's wife, I've been raised almost like this royal princess thing where every eye is on you from the time you're in Sunday school to the time you're in church. I remember people saying, Oh, at my Bible study, people said they saw you crying in church. I was crying because my friend died, or I was crying because the song moved me. Why aren't your eyes closed? Why aren't you singing in worship? Why are you watching me in the middle of a church service? People knew every detail of my life. It would be put forward in sermons. I couldn't hide from the time I was little, but I tried. And I tried to make myself smaller. And that wasn't even possible. And I also developed just a lot of perfectionism and a really kind of horrible weight that I carried. And I would really criticize myself and say really negative things to myself all of the time. And one day, a woman who had been at the church for a while, she was moving out of town. She was retiring, and it was her last Sunday. And she came up to me and we didn't really have a whole lot of conversations. And she looked me dead in the eye and she put her hands on my shoulders and she said, God told me to tell you that you don't think you're beautiful, and that he knows that you tell yourself that every single day. And he told me to tell you that you are to never say that again. And my eyes filled with tears, and I looked down at my feet in shame. I felt so exposed because God had told her the truth. She was right. Every day I stood in front of the mirror and I just absolutely tore myself apart. I did not feel beautiful, I did not feel worthy of being seen. I felt so unworthy. I felt so ugly. And I told myself horrible things every day. But apparently God had gotten so sick of listening to my negative chatter every single day, picking on myself in front of the mirror, that he sent a random woman at my church to deliver the message. Never say that to yourself again. This was the first time that God sent a messenger to confront my self-erasure. Not my appearance, my belief that it wasn't safe for me to shine, that it wasn't okay for me to embrace who he had created me to be and to be proud of that. And that belief would follow me for years. Fast forward, and I'm now in my new life as the real estate kind of lady. I'm not exactly a realtor, but I'm I'm running everything behind the scenes. And I had my husband's VIP badge, and I went into the VIP room, and where you get special little snacks and little massages, and everybody is dressed to the nines. They're dressed like money, and everyone is just performing, their confidence. And this woman, she just turns to me and asks, So who are you? And I just panic because I know there's two answers, and I picked the one that fits the room, and I was joking, sort of, and I was like, Oh, I'm just a trophy wife. And she looked me up and down from head to toe, and she just shook her head and she said, You're no trophy wife. And I just awesome. And she she proceeded to tell me that it was clear that I had some more substance than that, but it was the look up and down of my body, where she she looked at at my appearance and she determined that no, I didn't meet the scale standard of beauty for being a trophy wife. She wasn't really intentionally insulting me, she was just naming the dissonance that she saw because she could see that I wasn't ornamental, she could see I wasn't decorative or arm candy, which is a little painful to hear. Like, sorry, you don't meet the arm candy standard. She could see that I was a grounded hustler, and she also knew that I wasn't stepping into the identity that the room required, which was this fancier, polished, more attention to the exterior kind of thing that's needed in sales. And so the issue was that I was still crawling like a caterpillar in a place where for the success, success of my business, I needed to fly. I needed to be my more butterfly self. There was another time where it was a night, I was hosting a party at my farmhouse, and we had over 200 people just pouring in. It was for teenagers. And this was my land, it was my farm, it was my dream, the whole thing that I put together hours and hours. But I was helping with parking, and I was still in my dirty barn clothes, and I was hustling to make pathways and make sure that all the cars were in the right field and everything. And this first-time guest comes to the door and he's like, Hi, is this where the party is? And I said, Yes, I'll go inside. And then he said, So are you the person who takes care of all the horses in the neighborhood? And he was dead serious. And I was like, it was like one of those Hallmark movies where the landscaper is really the prince. And I was like, No, this is my home. This is my party. Welcome. And the person was shocked, like that because I didn't belong. I didn't look like the identity associated with the ownership of the property. I had hidden so well in my own kingdom that people mistook me for the help. And that's how deep the hiding went. And to be honest, I didn't really mind. I wanted to be in the background. But a big shift of this happened when I was being my more fancy self or living my more fancy life in Cabo with a bunch of friends. And it wasn't the first time I've been to Cabo. So I should have been more comfortable being a butterfly, but I really wasn't. And I was on the boat, I was living the life I've built and earned and the friendships I'd prayed for. And but I have I had my hair all pulled back. I didn't really have a lot of makeup on. I was wearing muted tones. There was no glam, there was no shine. I was just hiding in the background. And I really admired my one friend who lives very boldly and lets herself be seen. And I admitted to her, I don't want to be seen. And she said, Why don't you want to be seen? And just as I was about to answer, the boat got loud and people interrupted, and that question was never answered, and it was left unfinished, but it was meant to be left unfinished. I carried that question for a year. And the answer was, I knew the answer. I did know the answer. The answer was I didn't want to be seen because I didn't want every move criticized. I didn't want the judgment. I didn't want the spotlight that I had grown up in. I didn't want to be the target, the topic of conversation. I didn't want to be the spectacle. And if I'm honest, I also didn't want to attract people who wanted something from me because shining doesn't just attract admiration. There's a phrase that I was taught as a pastor's daughter, which is if you're in that public figure type role, you will get unmerited love and you'll get unmerited hatred. So there's there's got a middle. Either people really love you or they really hate you. And so you you it comes with admiration, but also can come with a third thing, which is like taker, where people see your wings, they see see your resources, and they say, How can I use that gift for myself? Or how can I harness her wings down so she no longer has the strength to fly and I can outshine her, right? And I didn't like any of that, and I I like to keep things neutral and make everybody feel comfortable. So I hid. But hiding has a cost. People started treating me less than the guests to my home who thought that I was the person in charge of scooping the horse poop, which I was, but I was also in charge of other things. And as they started treating me less than, then slowly I started believing that myself. And my self-talk just got so negative and so dark. But I remember after wrestling with that question, I wasn't in Cabo, I wasn't in a VIP room or a luxury event. I was mucking stalls and covered in just sweat and hay and horse poo. And I finally said, you know what? It's been 10 years. It was the 10-year anniversary of when I had started this new phase of my life. I had been a butterfly hiding the fact, trying to hide the fact that I was a butterfly for 10 years for my lifetime, right? And I said, you know what? You do know how to shine. And your life won't let you not be seen. So it's been 10 years. It's time to shine. It's time to shine again. And you have new tools now. You're brave enough to handle the shining. You're brave enough to show the world your wings and be okay. And this was the dream pivot for me. This was my flight school. I wasn't even necessarily becoming someone new, I was remembering who I was before I hid and also acknowledging that I was stronger than the caterpillar that was cute and everybody still liked watching. I'm a butterfly now. And maybe you are too. Maybe you've been holding on to that old identity of the caterpillar, or even worse, just identifying as the goo, because that's what happened to me. I began to just identify as the goo. I forgot that I was a caterpillar at all. I was just goo. And that's what I told myself every day. And the reality was I was a butterfly. In the book, The Boy, the Mole, The Fox, and the Horse. Again, my favorite book, Charlie MacKesee writes The Confession of the Horse. The horse tells the boy, I can fly. But I stopped because it made the other horses jealous. And the boy says, We love you, whether you can fly or not. And because the horse feels safe with his friendship with the boy in the drawings, the horse opens up his wings and flies. And it turns out he was a Pegasus, a flying horse all along. And we had thought this whole time, according to the drawings, that the horse had no wings. I stopped flying to make others feel comfortable. On purpose, I worked hard to elevate everyone else around me. I knew I could fly. I knew that. So it didn't bother me when I was treated like I couldn't fly, because that was a choice I was making. But I thought that everybody remembered that I could fly. But when I hid my wings for so long, everyone, including my husband, including my children, including those closest to me, everyone started to forget that I had wings. And eventually, this is the tragic part. I forgot too. But Jesus says a city on a hill cannot be hidden. You cannot. You're a city, a whole city on a hill. You can't hide. You can't put a city under a bowl. And you shouldn't. And you just can't. Your calling won't let you hide. Your life won't let you shrink. Your assignment won't let you dim. Your wings won't let you just walk. For many of us, especially in this social media world, it can seem like visibility is only vanity. And we can definitely feel it from other people when we sense that their visibility is from a self-centered motive. But for most of us, visibility isn't vanity. Visibility is a responsibility because we have things and hope and light to share. And sometimes we're not sharing it with anyone at all. We're just keeping it to ourselves. So if you are blessed with a pair of wings, understand to whom much is given, much is required. Your wings are not just for a decoration, they were for direction, hope, power, strength, and generosity. Butterflies, if you recall, have fly from flower to flower to multiply and bear fruit. If they're just crawling on the ground, they can't do that. And we all rely on the fruit and the pollination that the butterflies bring. So here's your call to action today. Where are you hiding your wings? Where are you dimming yourself to make others feel comfortable? Where are you shrinking because you're afraid of judgment? Where are you pretending to be smaller than you really are? Where are you letting old beliefs define a new season? Where are you afraid that shining will attract criticism or takers or expectations that you don't feel ready for? You know what? You're tougher than you think. You're a butterfly. You're not goo. So your call to action is simple. To answer the question, where are you hiding your wings? By naming one place where you've been hiding and asking God for the courage to take one small step into the light. One small step towards flight, towards unfurling the beautiful gifts and talents that you alone possess. Not a leap, not a transformation, just a step. Because a city on a hill cannot be hidden, and neither can you. I stopped flying to make others comfortable. But then everyone forgot that I had wings. And eventually I forgot to. Episode 10 is the story of how I remembered and how a dream and a dreamer is resurrected. I'll see you there.