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 the gift of a supportive community around me. And still, there have been many moments where people haven’t understood my ideas or believed in my dreams.
As a young female leader, I was shaped to be a people-pleaser, and I often lost heart when others couldn’t see what I could see. A lack of belief and confirmation from others sent me back to the drawing board more times than I can count, and sometimes it led me to walk away from ideas entirely.
After all, isn’t feedback important to listen to? We’ve all seen leaders run with bad ideas that waste money, time and team energy.
But here’s the truth: Great innovative, creative, world changing ideas are rarely support by others at first. Pioneers are the ones with the courage to go off the beaten path into the unknown. Successful innovators are outliers.
In a world where women leaders are often met with less support than our male counterparts, we need this encouragement:
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 it is the responsibility of the dreamer is to believe their own 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 will need 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 the encouragement of others, doubt creeps in and it becomes very tempting to give up.
Prepare for it. Be ready to be your own believer and your own encourager.
Don’t place too much weight on whether others believe in what you see. Don’t waiting for others to believe in something that is yours to carry.
“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 currently see.
They cannot see what you see.
That does not make your dream bad or destined to fail. It just means the concept sits outside their current comprehension.
If you’re anything like other dreamers, pioneers, explorers, creators, inventors or innovators, you will likely 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 possibilities others have not yet considered. These things rarely make sense to others, at first.
World changing things like Disneyland, Airbnb and Canva exist because someone chose to keep building an idea that was initially met with skepticism from experts, investors, and even those close to them.
New things exist because someone chose to keep believing in what they could see before others could see it too.
“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 to believe in your dream when others don’t. The dream you have could be life changing for the very people who don’t yet understand it!
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 now to believe in your dream when other’s don’t?
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?