Prepare to Believe in Your Dream When Others Don’t
For most of my life, I’ve experienced favour as a leader and creator, and I’ve had an incredibly supportive community.
At the same time, I’ve wrestled with deep discouragement when people haven’t understood my ideas or believed in my dreams.
As a young female leader, I was formed to be a people-pleaser, and one of the hardest parts of my leadership journey has been losing heart when others didn’t believe in what I could see. Those moments sent me back to the drawing board more times than I can count, and sometimes they led me to give up on ideas entirely.
Over time, here’s what I’ve learned: You are the only one who needs to believe in your dream.
It’s not because other people’s opinions don’t matter. It’s because the responsibility of the dreamer is to believe their own dream.
Why would we expect anyone else to believe in it? Why would we need someone else to believe in it? Your dream is your dream.
It isn’t your friend’s dream, or your partner’s dream, or your mentor’s dream, or your boss’s dream. The dream was not given to them, so they have no reason to carry it or believe in it the way you need to.
Other people are not responsible for seeing it, understanding it, or feeling conviction about it. It’s not their responsibility to embrace the dream or make it happen.
It’s your dream and you are responsible for it.
And that means you need to prepare for this reality: You are going to have to believe in your dream when no one else does.
There will be seasons where no one else believes in what you are building, and you will feel it. The lack of encouragement can be disorienting. Without shared belief, doubt creeps in, second-guessing gets louder, and it becomes very tempting to give up.
Prepare for it. Be ready to be your own believer and your own encourager.
“Be independent of the good opinion of other people.”
Other people’s responses to your ideas and dreams are not verdicts. They are simply a reflection of what they can see.
They cannot see what you see.
That does not make your dream wrong, unrealistic, or destined to fail. It simply means it sits outside their current frame of reference. That is all.
If you’re anything like other dreamers, pioneers, explorers, creators, inventors, or innovators, you will experience people not understanding or supporting your ideas.
Pioneers move into places that are not yet mapped. Inventors work on things that do not yet exist. Explorers imagine what others have not considered. These things rarely make sense to others.
Dreams become real and new ideas take shape when someone has the perseverance to pursue them whether others believe in them or not.
“Never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else’s blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work.”
You do not need others’ agreement for a project to work. You do not need people to understand for an idea to have value. You don’t need believers for your dream to be a gift to the world.
What you need is the brave willingness to believe in your own dream and keep going.
Over time, things may shift. Sometimes others begin to see it. Sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t really matter.
It can’t matter. Otherwise nothing new, meaningful, or life-changing would ever be created.
“People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Please prepare yourself to believe in your dream when others don’t.
Practically, it helps to have ways to steady yourself when discouragement comes.
For me, these have been helpful:
Remind myself that this is normal and expected.
Read books by innovators and creatives. They become mentors and role models from afar.
Work on clearly identifying my “who” and my “why” for each project, and returning to that when I feel discouraged.
Allow myself to grieve the lack of support I wish I had. This part matters more than we often admit. When I give myself space to process it, I find I have more energy to move forward.
Take one small step forward. Sometimes the step is almost invisible, but action matters for me, especially in difficult seasons.
So how will you prepare to believe in your dream when other’s don’t? What helps you stay steady? What strengthens and encourages you?
Have a plan in place before you need it.
With you in the journey,
Justine
P.S. One of my favourite books for encouragement is “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” by Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s about writing and creativity, but you can apply the encouragement to any project. Here’s my Amazon affiliate link for Big Magic.
Reflection:
When have you allowed discouragement to speak louder than your dreams? Do you have any ideas or dreams that need your belief again?