Secrets to making your dreams come true

A dream, according to Laurie Gottlieb and Deanna Rosenswig in their book, Dreams Have No Expiry Date, is a vision that is larger than a goal and more achievable than a fantasy or an aspiration. Dreams give life purpose, direction and meaning. They shape lifestyle choices, help you focus on the future and give you a sense of control and hope. They're an expression of your potential and give voice to your talents. Dreams are a source of pleasure and help develop the self. Everyone has a dream.

To get in touch with your dream you need to create the best conditions for making this happen. One essential condition is relying on your inner strengths. In this book excerpt, Gottlieb and Rosenswig explain why capitalizing on your strengths is critical to living your dream.

What are strengths and why is it necessary to know them?
The 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote of a woman who lifted a calf every day and was still able to lift it as it grew to be a cow. This woman achieved the "impossible" because she worked on her strengths day by day and because she believed she could do it. This woman called on her physical and mental powers to lift the cow.

As you get older, your diminishing physical strength is more than offset by your accumulated mental, social, emotional and moral strengths. Strengths are those special qualities that in their combination and methods of expression give you your unique signature -- your "strength DNA." You have accumulated the ABCs of strengths. These include: A for attitude (ways of thinking); B for building blocks (valuable qualities); and C for competencies (skills). Think of strengths as your ABCs -- the best qualities within you. Click here to see examples of the ABCs of Strengths

Genevieve has always lived with the strength of a spirited attitude toward life: "The choices I made in my youth, I made spontaneously. I was visiting friends and there was a bean crock made of pottery. I fell in love with the pot and decided to be a potter. I became a potter. When I decided to go back to library school, that decision was neither impulsive nor emotional. It was very rational. At this age I feel the finiteness of things. I feel I want to be a little bit crazy again."

Among the building blocks on which Melanie has called are the invaluable qualities of courage and confidence: "Basically I have the belief that I can do it, I have what it takes. I have the guts... It's going to work out. I have to believe in myself."

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Helene told us, "I remember sitting in the car in front of the kids' ballet school waiting to pick them up and reading my school notes on the steering wheel so I could maximize the use of my time." A competency that many women have is the ability to multitask.

Women often fail to appreciate the worth of their inner strengths. How often have you heard a woman discount or devalue a compliment about one of her strengths -- "You are such a capable homemaker." Response (with a wave of the hand and a lowering of the eyes): "Tsch, it's nothing."

Most skills are transferrable
Women also fail to realize that their strengths are transferrable from one situation to another that is seemingly unconnected from the personal to the work environment, for example. As Kathleen Brown, former managing director of Goldman Sachs and a one-time California state treasurer, said: "The skills I learned in playgroups, trust me, I use in politics and in the boardroom."

Take such skills as multitasking, organizing, going with the flow, supervising, negotiating, planning and so on. Many women are experts at them. When Deanna taught a supervisory training course for women, she discovered most of the attendees had been out of the workforce for many years. They were nervous and lacked confidence. They did not believe they could manage or supervise others. But eventually they came to realize that many of the skills that they had developed at home could be used in a work environment. A mother of six children didn't think she possessed "system-design" skills. Yet these were the very skills she employed when she gave each of her children their own laundry basket to be delivered to the washing machine. She then did the laundry and returned the clean clothes to each child's basket for pickup. This saved her endless hours of picking up and sorting laundry.

Imagine, each child actually wore his or her own socks! Here is a woman who was an efficiency expert, who had taken this strength for granted and was unaware of its significance.

Focus on the positive
Women often focus on their weaknesses rather than on their strengths. This is hardly surprising given our overcritical society in which we spend much of our time looking for deficiencies, looking for what is missing rather than for what is there.

Focusing on deficiencies, on what is missing, on what you don't have or comparing yourself to another person whom you consider more successful, can be paralyzing and inevitably leads to a sense of inertia and despair -- an "I can't do it" attitude. It is a surefire way of slapping a very short expiry date on a dream. Strengths, on the other hand, serve to anchor and buoy you up. Your outlook on events affects how you behave, and how you behave affects how you think and feel. In fact, research has shown that when people focus on their strengths, they feel better about themselves and are more likely to take charge of their life.

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How do I identify and assess my strengths?
Think of strengths as the wide range of building materials you have acquired through a lifetime of experience, practice and learning. These are the materials that you are now going to use to create and fulfill your dream. Different dreams require different strengths.

The most efficient and effective way to get started on your dream is to build upon qualities you already have. None of you would have gotten to this phase of your life without developing a large basket of strengths and skills. It is your task now to look inside your basket and to appreciate how you can use your existing strengths to achieve your dream.

Identify areas to work on
When you have assessed your strengths, you will know which you can use to implement your dream and which others you need to develop. Naming or labelling makes strengths real, gives them value and helps you to understand them better. When you name a strength you are making the invisible visible, the implicit explicit, both to yourself and to others. If you want the dream to happen, you can't rely on serendipity or chance. You have to make it happen.

Excercise: assessing your strengths
A good place to start is with these nine strenghts, selected from the ABCs of strengths, that we believe are useful for all dreams. As you go over this list, jot down if you need to work on this strength, of you have it. Keeping a diary with examples may help you sort it out.

The nine strengths:
• Self-acceptance
• Tenacity
• Regulation
• Efficacy
• Navigational skills (your ability to make, and follow through, with a plan)
• Goodness-of-fit (is your personality suited to your dream?)
• Timing
• Humour
• Spiritedness

While we recognize and acknowledge that everyone has weaknesses or deficiencies, we focus on capitalizing and strengthening existing attitudes, building blocks and competencies. You have to be aware of your weaknesses and alert to how these may sabotage, limit and undermine your efforts to move forward. One important strength is learning to manage them.

Everything in context
Each of the strengths in the table is present in every person, but in varying degrees. A particular strength may vary depending on what you are doing and what is important to you at a given time. Some of you will be more tenacious than others -- and some of you are more tenacious in certain activities than others. Consider the two of us authors: one of us (Laurie) can cook for hours but has little patience for reading a business plan. The other of us (that'd be Deanna) is the first to admit her patience for cooking is limited to minutes, but she can spend hours analysing a business plan. We are both tenacious, but our tenacity varies according to our interests.

So how can you work on your strengths to realize your dreams? There are four basic routes to follow: educate yourself, observe others, allow yourself to be coached and practise your strengths. As Henry David Thoreau said, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

"Live the life you've imagined.”

Adapted from Dreams Have No Expiry Date: A Practical and Inspirational Way for Women to Take Charge of Their Futures by Laurie Gottlieb, PhD, and Deanna Rosenswig, MBA. Copyright 2005 Laurie Gottlieb and Deanna Rosenswig. Published by Random House Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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