On Friday I told you all that it’s not anyone else’s job to believe in your dream. Well it’s also no one else’s job to protect your dream.
As I shared Friday, my confidence in my efforts as a Motivational Speaker were shaken pretty severely when the pandemic canceled some major events I had coming up and when close friends were dismissive of my efforts as being silly and arrogant. I almost gave up public speaking totally but a friend’s funeral turned me around. In the last 3 years, I’ve sort of been in hibernation from public speaking. However, I’ve still been creating content and thinking about personal growth.
In the hiatus I used blogging to continue synthesizing my ideas about ownership. Eventually, I decided to write a book, and then I started posting videos to YouTube. Now, over 3 years after the pandemic canceled my biggest speaking gig, I’ve got 1 presentation scheduled that will be a synopsis of my book on personal ownership. It occurs to me that the last 3 years have been an opportunity to let my dream heal from all the arrows of criticism I drew when I was speaking for the 5 years before the pandemic started. Now, I’m a better communicator than ever, I have a concrete base philosophy and strategies to share, and I’m more confident in my abilities than ever.
Sometimes we need to share our dreams and other times we need to incubate and hide our dreams. If you do something that puts you in front of lots of people, inevitably you will be criticized. Some of it will be helpful but some will be hateful. Some will come from perfect strangers and some will come from people you love. ‘Incubating your dream’ could be another phase for ‘building your confidence’. In silence I’ve built my communication skills to a point where I now believe in what I’m doing and I’ve learned to be ready for unfounded attacks from my blindside.
At some point, if we’re truly committed to positively impacting others, we’ll have to be vulnerable but we should also know when to pull back in conservation of our own strength and self-preservation… to keep the dream alive.
Travis Daigle 