Are your self-conscious thoughts blocking your subconscious dreams?
I started my own business this COVID summer. Even writing that sentence makes me light up and also startles me: Hold up - I did that? Yep, I did that. It took 31 years to work up the courage to do that and to write this.
I’m writing this because I don’t think I’m alone when I say my self-conscious thoughts block my subconscious thoughts. Your self-consciousness is supposed to be a form of your heightened self-awareness. However, my self-conscious thoughts tell me: “You are not ready! You are not smart enough! You are not experienced enough!” Through that noise, I can’t hear my subconscious whispering “But maybe you are enough.”
Even worse, my self-conscious thoughts used to stop me from dreaming. I couldn’t imagine what this entrepreneur version of me might look like, or what my business would be because some pretty harsh self-conscious talk told me it was out of my reach, and dumb to consider.
I told my husband yesterday about this crazy dream I had when I was leaving a position with Bloomberg to go to film school: I wanted to be a development executive at a studio. A producer who got to be the one at the table picking scripts, working with my friends and brilliant artists who I knew could bring that vision to life in the most spectacular way.
But I live in Austin, TX. And let’s just say in the film industry, you don’t get to be a studio producer unless you’re in Los Angeles or New York. Or that’s what my self-conscious told me.
So I stopped dreaming. I laid that to rest because my self-conscious talk told me: “I can be happy without that, I don’t really need that big dream.”
What the hell, right? I told my subconscious to stop dreaming. I told my whisper to go away because at 26 I decided it wasn’t possible for me.
The thing is, I would NEVER say that to one of my friends or sisters. I would never tell them to give up on their big idea. If I did, I would expect to lose that person. And rightly so.
I now write down my list of big dreams every day even though I still don’t know if it’s possible to achieve any of them. It’s definitely not going to be easy. But I’ve already run through the list of easy dreams I made for my career because I put the big ones away.
We approach what we deem as “simple dreams” with far more confidence than the difficult ones. In fact, I think it’s our self-conscious beliefs that choose the easy dreams. It’s our subconscious that dares to look at the challenging ones.
So I’ve decided at 31, as we are looking to plan our family and build our forever home here, that I’m going to say “what the hell” and take that dream, and all the other outlandish and possibly delusional dreams I have for myself off the shelf - and get to work.
Because sometimes your self-conscious thoughts aren’t actually looking out for you, sometimes they’re wrong.
For me, and I think maybe for others out there, the way to get your subconscious out into the world is by sharing and collaborating with other women who are dreaming big and encouraging each other.
When you finally share that dream with another person, you are accountable for it. If you share it with the right person, they’ll help you get there.