Yesterday, my friend Jodie Brooks allowed me to present her as my guest blogger and share with you her ecstatic email after launching her Jodie Brooks Photography business and website. Is she an absolute delight, or what? Her photography is absolutely technically sound and she communicates uniquely with each photo as art.
I met Jodie, already an incredibly talented, vivacious and dynamic young leader, when she attended the ISAE Leadership Institute (I am a faculty member) a couple of years ago. Then, at her invitation, I had the great pleasure to provide her with some additional coaching following the Institute series completion. She was (and still is) succeeding with her professional role in association work as a communications specialist, but she wanted more…
So Jodie’s fieldwork from me after that first coaching session was to answer the question, “More of what?” I suggested she do this in the form of a Dream Inventory, and she immediately set to work at listing at least 100 dreams. Jodie was, and had been, quite a dreamer so this activity came easy.
Two of the dreams she wrote down early on were:
- to attend a red carpet event
- to own a square cut ruby ring
I saw Jodie shortly after that and she could barely contain herself, excited to tell me a story. Within days of recording those two dreams – they came true!
Now, hold on for a second… I am not proposing that writing down your dreams will magically cause them to be granted. No fairy dust involved here, no secret formula, no magic pumpkins. However, writing down your dreams and, more specifically your goals, creates focus among other benefits. And this new focus sometimes, indeed, can work something like a giant electromagnet.
Here is how Jodie retells her story:
“Within two weeks of making my list I received an invite to an event the Peoria Convention and Visitors Bureau was hosting where they were rolling out the red carpet (literally) for a group invited to go to Peoria to have a star experience. Then I was visiting my sister and in one of her famous spend and purge moments she was going through some jewelry and had “gotten tired” of a square cut ruby ring. She said she saw me looking at one similar at a jewelry store and I could have hers if I wanted it. It wasn’t a similar ring – it was the EXACT ring I was looking at and continue to wear today. I wrote those dreams down never thinking I’d go to a red carpet event and would have to wait on my ruby ring until I bought it for myself.”
Please understand that these were not the most important or significant dreams Jodie had at the time. I am not sure she would even have turned them into goals eventually, but she never had the opportunity to do; they “came true”.
Obviously, living her dream by starting her own photography business was much more important. Of course, she had to make that dream specific. She had to consider the rewards of succeeding and the consequences is she failed to pursue or achieve the dream. And, as she explains quite well, she had to consider all the potential obstacles to her success so she could solve those obstacles if they arose in pursuit of her goal – or prevent them from occurring in the first place, which she did.
Dreams are critically important and can be powerful forces in our lives. They are necessary fuel for our most important life goals. Ultimately, it is our goals, our goal planning and the problem-solving, decision-making and risk-taking that it takes to achieve our goals, which determines whether we will live full, happy lives of significance, or if we will simply endure the life we have.
Intersection of Purpose and Now 