No One Has To Believe in Your Dream

Recently I was asked to speak at a memorial service of a very close friend who passed away a couple of months ago.  When I was asked I didn’t hesitate to say yes, but in the days spent preparing my message I did have trepidation.  It had been several years at that point since I had spoken in front of a large group of people.  I was contemplating canceling but I wanted to honor my friend so I moved forward.  After giving my remarks at the memorial service a couple came up to me who I didn’t know and they told me I should be a motivational speaker.  Several others came and commented that my words were particularly moving.

One of the things that I commented on about my good friend’s life was the fact that he did what he wanted to do regardless of challenges.  I was very close to giving up public speaking because 8 years ago when I first started, some of my closest friends at the time were very dismissive of the endeavor.  People saw it as pointless cheerleading and self aggrandizing.  In the 5 years that I operated as a speaker in Tacoma, WA all of those same detractors never once came to see me give a speech nor did they ever sit with me to truly understand what I was doing.  The memorial service reminded me that I have a gift in my ability to communicate and I need to get back out into the world to spread my message of Personal Ownership.  My friend’s life reminded me that I love the challenge of encouraging people to take responsibility for their lives and shouldn’t let anyone’s negativity stop me from moving forward.

It’s taken 3 years for me to admit to myself that when the people closest to me doubted me, it shook my confidence in what I was doing.  I mean it really shook my confidence to the core.  When you throw in the pandemic and having major speaking engagements canceled, I was very close to deciding that I would never do a public speech again.  Recently, I was talking to my wife about it and she pointed out, “Travis, not only should you ignore criticism that has no basis but you should cut people off when they attempt to criticize what you’re doing without having knowledge of it.  They don’t get to give their opinion of what they don’t know about!”  She’s a good woman!

I didn’t want to admit that I was shaken because I thought I had passed this type of thing.  After the massive fallout I had with engineering, I thought I was impervious to being hurt by people close to me.  I know, that’s a ridiculous thought and I feel kind of silly writing it.  I think there are going to be many insights that reveal themselves in the next few weeks but my first task is to get confident in telling people that I am a Motivational Speaker.  This is going to be tough for me because in my experience, most of the time people scoff at it.  I have to remember in these moments, that literally every speech I’ve given, complete strangers have come to me afterwards and communicated how they were moved by my words in some way.  

It is not someone else’s job to believe in your dream, not even those closest to you.