My Inner Child has been deserving this for 25 years.

As far back as I can remember, a safari journey and communing with wild African animals was a dream that kept me awake at nights. In kindergarten, I spent hours poring over picture books, and imagining what it would be like to be there.

Like most people in Poland at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, my parents could not afford the cost of us taking such a journey. In later years they concentrated on saving money to buy a flat, and then I started to make a living on my own and I had more important needs to pay for, for example, continuing education in my profession. Yet the dream persisted.

In later years, once I could finally afford such a trip, the birth of my daughter meant that traveling was not possible for several months at least. I became accustomed to seeing my dream as a part of the future, and I stopped looking for an opportunity to make it come true in the present. I saw my dream as something that would occur near the end of my lifeline, after all those more important things that a person must do first, and when I will finally have time to live the present. Until…

Until I asked myself a simple coaching question: What would have to happen for me to be able to go to Africa today?

I wrote down a few options:

Take my fiancée and young daughter on a ten-hour (or longer) flight to Africa, which can be arduous, but dreams require sacrifices, or… Find a nanny to stay with our daughter so that my fiancée and I could go to Africa without her, or… Contact a travel service that provides safari journeys, which can be closer and cheaper than traveling to the heart of Africa, or… Leave my fiancée behind with my daughter and go alone, explaining to her how important this is for me, but vowing to make it up to her with something equally important to her.

In short, within minutes I had four ready-made solutions – some better, some worse – but that completely altered my situation.



Making my dream come true

In my work with clients, I noticed that their dreams often take a very similar structure – their dreams get postponed for such a long time that they cease to look for ways to make them come true.

Sometimes the person is simply being realistic (e.g., a trip into outer space can be a very distant and unrealizable dream). But sometimes the person fails to notice that some aspects of the dream have been within reach for a long time, or that making the dream reachable is not difficult.

If you have a dream, this is what I suggest to you:

1) Write it down on a piece of paper.

2) Write down all the things that make your dream appear distant.

3) Write down all the possible solutions next to the things that make the dream appear distant.

You may be very surprised to find that many dreams can be fulfilled today 🙂 And every time you manage to accomplish to do something that you have been dreaming about for a long time, share your experience and strategy with other people.

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