I originally wrote this post some years ago in response to an old friend of mine who ran a fabulous bakery and coffee shop who asked me to do an event. He’d seen that Mistaking Her Character and Remember the Past had won BRAG Medallions and wanted to help celebrate. We got talking and one thing led to another. Before I knew it, we’d planned an afternoon tea during which he wanted me to speak on the subject of Following Your Dreams.

Just this week, he called me out of the blue to ask for some publishing advice. He told me that the event had made such an impact on him that he decided to pursue his own dreams of writing, and now as on the cusp of seeing them fulfilled. So it seemed like a really good time to revisit this post series about making dreams reality.

The first of these is simply: Say Yes.

Say Yes 

Back in graduate school, I was fortunate enough to have professors who sought to give us advice for our professional lives, not just our academic ones. I remember one mentoring session when Dr. A. talked about her own career.

She recalled how when she graduated she was inundated with requests to speak on this topic or that, or run a training or workshop on some specific interest. She hardly felt prepared for any of it and was reluctant to accept. But as she accepted the offers, she came to realize she was far better prepared and more capable than she had realized. Thus, she told us to let our default answer be ‘yes’ and only resort to ‘no’ when there were overwhelming reasons to say so.

That stuck with me.

I had been raised in a setting where the automatic answer to everything was no: no you can’t; no you aren’t capable; no you won’t like it; no, don’t do that.

The idea of saying yes was intoxicating and terrifying.

Really terrifying.

Even so, I changed my basic setting from ‘no’ to ‘yes’. I started saying ‘yes’ to opportunities as they came up, even if they scared me a little witless.

Granted, there are some things I’m not sure I’d say yes to again; heading a church nursery turned out not to be my thing. And I haven’t quite gotten over my discomfort with heights or seasickness, but I’m glad I tried the things that challenged those barriers.

What’s more, I’ve gotten to do some really cool stuff. I’ve planned and executed meals for 300; run television cameras for live recorded programs; created a two year long workshop series for a major medical school; earned two black belts with my sons; designed half a dozen websites; published forty books and spoken across the country on them.

Every single one of those things challenged me and scared the spit out of me. But every notch I put in my belt doing one of them gave me confidence and a few skills, to apply to the next challenge.

Early on, I had to fight not to say ‘no’. Daring to face something I might fail at was not in my upbringing. But the ‘yes’ became easier and maybe a mite less frightening as I practiced it.

All of those experiences gave me the strength to say ‘yes’ when the opportunity to write full-time knocked at my door. It was difficult and frightening to say ‘yes’ (and it’s difficult and frightening to keep at it…just saying…). But I’m grateful for my professor who helped me change my default ‘no’ into ‘yes’.

It takes a lot to follow your dreams, but it starts with ‘yes’.