198. The Power of Dreaming

Do you often have dreams and never tell anyone, and the even saying it out loud feels like you might get hit by lightning or something. You’re not alone. I remember the first time I said to myself out loud, “I want to be an international quilting instructor.” I had five kids. My youngest was still in diapers.

I lived in. I the middle of nowhere, Alberta, and I thought, who am I to have such big dreams? And that was 10 years ago. And look at how far I’ve come and I’m so glad I let myself dream. So if you also have dreams and. Also think that you might get in trouble by saying them aloud. I’m so glad you’re at this podcast.

My name is Dara Tomasson and this is episode 198, the Power of Dreaming, and it’s the Quilters Coach Podcast. 

So welcome. Today we’re gonna talk, we’re gonna have a combination of dreams, the power of dreams, the psychology behind dreams, the connecting power of our body with our dreams. And I’m gonna walk you through a visualization and some actual strategies.

And I also have a way to help you to unlock. The ability to dream again and giving you your power back. 

This, there’s we all have this innate ability to dream but some of us have forgotten, so this episode’s gonna be really helpful too. 

Before we go into it though, I do want to share, when she shared it with me, she was just like, how is this even me? She was working, she’s been working on this beautiful hand embroidered quilt and she loves hand embroidery and doing so much work, and she’s like trimming all the blocks after I think years of working on these.

So she’s working on it. She’s so excited. She’s finally got it all done and then she trims the first block too small. 

Now the old version of her would’ve thrown it away, would’ve been so mad at herself, would’ve given up and felt like definitely eaten a bunch of stuff and felt so bad about herself.

The past she would’ve just thrown it away. She’d been so mad, and then she would’ve retched it. Eventually, but it would just have gone to the bottom of her UFO pile and so frustrated and the most amazing thing happened. She made a mistake. She saw it, she realized it, and she didn’t beat herself up.

She just said, oh, that’s a bummer. That’s frustrating. Okay, so she allowed herself to feel that feeling and then. She called her husband and said, “Oh my gosh, you won’t believe what I just did. Can you believe I just did that?” And he said, “okay.” And then she said, “I have more linen.” And that’s what it was embroidered on. “I can just add to it. It’s no problem.” 

And it was so funny to have her husband just be like. Oh, okay. Like he was just like, oh, who is this new woman? Because that would not have been her story before, and I love that. And she even said to me I am so happy that I have spent this time learning how to redirect my brain in a way that I know is so much happier and healthier for me.

And I am like, it’s just, it was just, it’s awesome. It’s awesome and it’s available for all of you too. When you learn these tools, they just become new and automatic for you. So I love thinking about how the women in my membership they changed their lives and it’s so awesome. 

And they’re just like you. They just decided they were gonna learn some tools, right? It’s like someone who builds a house, they’re like, I built this house because I learned how to use these hammers and things. 

Alright, I’m gonna go into this dreaming I have, I took a class yesterday on dreaming and I really enjoyed it.

And how many of us were dreamers as kids? And how many of us aren’t anymore, or how many of us are like closet dreamers? Like we still like, will daydream and then you’re like, oh no, I can’t do this anymore. So there’s a ton of research, there’s a lot of great resources out there. You could do a Google search chat, GPT, and talk about all the benefits of dreaming and how awesome they are.

But I’m gonna just walk you through just like an exercise of and this is actually what my I did yesterday in the course and it was really awesome. So I thought, I’m gonna do this in my podcast. And I haven’t done a visualization like this in my podcast in a long time. I actually do this sometimes in my coaching.

So I want you, if you can. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, but I’m really glad that I did it. And it brought up a lot for me. And the funny part was here I am my boys as I’m recording this or taking the class my boys were in, They thought they had basketball and then they ended up not having basketball and so they wanted to go to, there’s like a drop-in gym at the First Nations reservation, not too far from the high school.

They’re like, mom, can you take us? I was like, sure. So I’m doing this dream class in the parking lot at the reservation and, and so wherever you are, you might be in also a parking lot waiting for your boys or your grandkids or whoever. So it doesn’t matter where you are, it’s gonna be really powerful. You just have to decide. 

Okay, so here we go. So I want you to close your eyes and when you’re in a safe place and so what I want you to do right now is I want you to take a deep breath in and as you’re breathing in, I want you to fill your lungs. And let your lungs just open up and then hold your breath. And then as soon as it feels that pressure, just release it nice and slow and let your body just expand. So maybe your shoulders might loosen a little, they might lower. You can feel that pressure leaving.

And now take another deep breath. Fill your lungs up with such beautiful oxygen and let your lungs open and fill them up. 

Let them be there and hold on, and then release it nice and slow. And I want you to do another big breath. As you’re taking it in, I want you to imagine you’re inside of a room, so as I’m talking, you’re listening to, you’re focusing on my voice, but I want you to be taking these nice, deep, slow, intentional breaths, and you find yourself in a room, a large, beautiful room with high ceilings. Big open space, some rich tapestries. it’s a very calm setting. You look at the walls, you take it in, it’s beautiful, but not overdone. And there’s a nice light streaming in smells clean. 

And as you look around the room and you see the textures of the curtains and the different textiles, you realize in front of you there are rows and rows of chairs all facing in the same direction, and all the chairs are facing to a wooden coffin.

And as you approach and you look around, that it’s you. Laying in that coffin, you realize that it is your funeral. And all of these people on all of these chairs are there to honor you. And as you look into their faces and as you realize that they are all there to honor your life. I want you to think, to reach inside of yourself and what are these people saying about you?

What are the ways that you’ve touched their lives? What are the ways that you have left them better than before they knew you?

So as you are in your body and as you look around, I want you to just pay attention to what thoughts and emotions are coming. What thoughts, what emotions.

So Stephen Covey talks about starting with the end in mind. So as you think about the end of your life, what are people saying about the end of your life? 

What impact, what are the things that you created, the legacy that you’re leaving? So when you think about this reflection on your funeral vision, how do I hope my life would feel? How do I hope others would have remembered me? And what will I have wished to experience and done? 

So I wonder about alignment. So are you living a life right now with alignment? 

Who was it? Oh, it was someone on Instagram or something talking about, it’s about alignment. And I think I’m like, really? Everyone’s saying the same thing in different ways, but really it’s are you being true to who you are? And it’s really hard to be true to who you are when you’re always worried about perfectionism and people pleasing and worrying about what other people say.

And so when we do this activity like. Dreaming and have this visualization, I want you to think about what are you doing every day. The actions, the ways you think, the things that you’re doing, and are they aligning with the person that you want to be? 

And even Brianna Weiss in “The Mountain Is You Book,” we actually did this activity about your your obituary and, writing that obituary.

It’s so fascinating. I like this idea of what do you really want? There’s a quote by, John Maxwell, he wrote this book, the Roadmap for Success, and he said, “Have you ever known a person who didn’t have a clue concerning what she wanted in life yet was highly successful?

I haven’t either. We all need something worthwhile to aim for. A dream provides us with that. It acts as a compass. Telling us the direction we should travel. And until we’ve identified that right direction, we’ll never know for sure that our movement is actual progress. Our actions are just as likely to take us backwards instead of forwards. If you move in any direction other than toward your dream, you’ll miss out in the opportunities necessary to be successful.” 

So I love this and I always say that our dreams are like the flashlight. They’re giving us that in the dark. Like we don’t, we can’t see it all.

The flashlight just shows us the next five steps, 10 steps. We can’t see the big picture, but it helps us to go in that direction. 

“A dream gives us hope for the future, and it also brings us power in the present. It makes it possible for us to prioritize everything we do. A person who has a dream knows what he or she is willing to give up in order to go up. He or she is able to measure everything they do according to whether or not it contributes to the dream. Concentrating this attention on the things that bring him closer to it and gives less attention to everything that doesn’t.”

So then he continues to say “a dream adds value to our work. It gives us perspective, it helps us predict our future.” 

And this, I love these examples of all these famous people that, dared to dream and then we see what happened. How many times was he rejected? It was like, that’s pie in the sky. That’s ridiculous. 

And so he gave examples of Charles Dickens dreamed of becoming a writer and became the most read novelist in Victorian England despite being born in poverty. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Noted. The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.

Walt Disney was rejected 302 times before securing funding for Disneyland. And how many times was JK Rowling rejected by publishers? 12. 

We all are unique and different, and we all have. Our own voice and if we aren’t using it, if we are not living our potential, we’re not happy.

I work with women on weight loss. I work on women with productivity. I work with women on like really trying to create the life that they want. And one of the reasons they don’t have the success is because they’re not actually allowing themselves. They’re not giving themselves permission to pursue what they really want. and so I call it circling the drain, right? You just keep going around and you don’t go, you don’t go anywhere. You just keep doing the same thing over and over. 

So I have this detailed sheet. What do you really want in relationships? What do you really want with your career?

What do you really want with travel or hobbies or goals or health or others? So you could say, what do you really want? What do you dream of? What are things that make you excited, that light you up? That sound exciting, that sound fun, that like you could get into that. So what are those things? 

And I actually think it’d be really helpful. To maybe put on some music, maybe go for a walk without anything in your music maybe, or just by yourself and just let your brain just ask these questions. It’s what do I like? What do I want in my relationships? What do I want in my career? Even if you retired, like maybe the way you’re telling the story about your career is terrible.

Maybe you’re only looking at the negative. I work with a lot of women that only look at the negative. They’ve lost 50 pounds, but then that they gained 10 pounds and then they think they’re such, but they’ve kept that off for a year, but they can’t look at the positive. 

So I’m curious about that for you. what is the value of letting yourself dream?

And when I was in this class yesterday with dreaming, one of the ladies said, is dreaming the opposite of fear. I thought that’s interesting. And so then the lady that was running it, who actually happens to Monica Parker. I talked about her in last week’s podcast, but she said, these are the three steps that we need to take.

And she actually used, she got these steps from Sharon Saysso. She has an amazing understanding of politics and government and American history and culture. And so she wrote this book about these people that have contributed into American history.

And this is, these are the three steps that she says, and I will indicate the resource in the show notes. 

The first thing you need to do is you need to believe. You need to believe in the future. 

The second thing is to choose faith over fear. 

And then the third thing is doing the next needed thing.

So what’s, how do you break this down? And one of the reasons I wanna do this podcast is, it was really helpful that I was sitting in my van in the I’d already gone for my walk. I just was happy just to be with this and, so I started, I asked myself this question, why does dreaming really matter? 

And I, last week I was feeling a little discouraged about a goal that I’d made. And so I thought, you know what? I’m gonna watch some testimonials from some of the women in my membership. And so I just so happened to watch a testimonial of Claudia.

And Claudia had she had come to. I think she came to every free training I did for two years. And then she finally decided to join and she, I think she was, I think when she joined, she was 71 maybe, and in the testimonial and it’s in here and the show notes. She said, before I joined this membership I stopped dreaming.

I stopped making goals because I thought I’m too old. And then she said, I don’t believe that anymore. I’m not settling anymore. I dream, I make goals. I do all sorts of things. And Claudia doesn’t come to all the calls because she’s doing lots of stuff. She’s creating so many cool experiences for her herself, for her husband, for her family, for her community, because she didn’t put herself out to pasture anymore.

And so then I thought to myself, that’s so cool, Dara. That’s awesome. And I’ve put to dream and to want more is not to settle and to make more of what could be to fully embrace the abundance and possibility. I said, there’s so much to discover. We are all created to learn from to, to yearn for more, to make more of what we have because it means we create more.

There’s so much beauty in this world. And then I said to myself, okay, what were my childhood desires? And I wrote a whole bunch. And then I did an inventory. I said, oh, how am I doing? How did I do with all of those other than writing a children’s book? I’ve actually accomplished pretty much everything, even down to wanting a redhead, marry a redhead, and have redheaded children and having more boys than girls and having a boy. 

I have four redheaded sons and I wanted tall kids, and I have four really tall boys. My daughter is above average. She’s 5’6 and a half.

 I accomplished things like getting a degree and being a teacher and getting married and having kids, and even fun things like being playful still and making my own clothes, owning a house like growing a garden.

Family history, painting my own walls, like owning my own house and car. So it was interesting. And then I was, I thought to myself, okay, so what are some of my goals? What are some of my dreams right now? And doing this exercise was really helpful because I saw how good I am at making my own dreams come true.

I also saw that it takes work and I also saw that it takes some time. I also saw that I actually have the skill of learning how to make my own dream come true. 

Now I’m gonna finish off with a weight loss example. And actually it’s really appropriate that, I have this on my screen, so if you’re watching the YouTube, you’ll be able to see.

So on my this is what we did in our coaching call today. So over here is the unintentional model. So this was me actually at 205 pounds. And I had a lot of thoughts like, “I’m a loser. No matter what I do, it doesn’t matter.” And it’s discouraged. So it’s like going to the pantry, going to food for comfort, not exercise, do a lot of scrolling, all that kind of thing. 

And then now this is me intentional model over here, 152 pounds. And I have thoughts like, I love my body, I appreciate my body, my, I know what to do. I don’t, I never have to worry about weight loss again. And I have different feelings like what was my feeling here?

Oh yeah, empowered. And then my actions are like all sorts of different things. And then result is I never, like my body is a tool for good. Something like that. 

And then I said to the ladies today, I said, okay, we need to bridge this gap. We don’t just immediately go from a hundred, 205 pounds to 152.

So this is at a hundred, 200 pounds, and this is a hundred ninety, a hundred eighty, a hundred seventy, a hundred sixty, a hundred and fifty. You get the point I said, but what do you have to do to become the person? Like how do you bridge your own gap? 

Remember I talked about the flashlight? And it has to start with dreaming. I cannot believe, and like sometimes I literally am folding my own laundry and I’m thinking, this needs to go in my daughter’s pile. This can’t fit me. I still do that sometimes, and it’s been since 2019. 

And in this podcast, I really wanted to teach you, help you see the power of it. It’s just, first of all, I’m just so glad you’re here. And second of all, if you like this podcast and if you get excited about it, that’s awesome. But guess what? Just listening to a podcast isn’t gonna help you change. I know. I wish you, I wish I could just give you a special pill.

But we, in order for us to create permanent change, we have to go into our brain. We have to rewire it. We have to rewire it with our body. We have to go into our nervous system. All that is required, but guess what? It’s all worth it. Just like when I was, I figured out how to drive a car.

I figured out how to make money, and I figured out how to finally go to a McDonald’s drive through and get a McChicken and a hot fudge sundae. I felt so good about myself. You can, whatever dream it is, international quilting instructor, author, mom a YouTuber I don’t know, make it happen. I have the tools to help you make it happen.

We weren’t taught coping strategies, we weren’t taught techniques and ways of overcoming fear and perfectionism and people pleasing. So that is why my membership is such a powerful investment in time, energy. This is the kind of stuff we do. It’s like going to the gym for your brain. It’s amazing. Because you actually change. You actually become the person you wanna be. So stop waiting. You got this.