Do You Dream Big?

21 December

Paula Morand | entrepreneurship, leadership, motivation, paula morand, Uncategorized, vision | No comment

When you close your eyes and imagine your average day, what comes to your mind?

Do you see yourself stuck in a stifling routine, overloaded with tasks in which you see no purpose, rising to demands in which you have no interest, and drowning in the stress of desperation?

Are you a pawn in someone else’s chess game? Are you a victim of your own past and circumstances?

Do you lie in bed at night wishing you could skip the next day because you dread a morning meeting or an encounter with your boss or that demanding customer you have to face?

Or are you calm and focused, doing work that matters and living a purposeful life?

Are you energetic and capable of diverting your power to accomplish what you care about? Do you own your life?

If you are the average Canadian or American, you answered “yes” to the first three questions.

Severe stress is crippling your ability to dream big and live the life you were meant to live.

According to Statistics Canada, 500,000 workers in the country are absent from work each day because of mental-health related issues. Depression is becoming the number one cause of disability among Canadian corporations. Severe stress is impacting one out of every five workers.

In the United States, the latest Work Stress Survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Everest College shows that eight out of 10 employed Americans are stressed out by something at their workplace.

How did we get this stressed and how badly is it impacting the way you personally dream about your life?

In our age of digital distraction, the average person every day has between 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts enter their mind. Yet at any given moment, our minds can only process between seven to 10 bits of information.

Is it any wonder that we feel so overwhelmed?

When we are mentally burdened, our brain responds by interpreting the overload as a physical threat and our stress response system goes into high gear.

For the millions of Canadians and Americans who live with that response on red alert day after day, inevitably our systems begin to break down. In fact, according to the University of Oxford, between 70 to 90 percent of all visits to the hospital are linked to stress.

I believe we all have a breaking point, and it occurs when we reach a point of despair.

In writing my newest book Bold Courage: How Owning Your Awesome Changes Everything, I talk about how getting to my breaking point happened and how it felt for me to move beyond that.

It’s when you lose hope for what could have been and for what isn’t happening in your life. It’s that place where you feel life is out of your control and you can’t seem to pull it all together or ‘manage’ your way through it.

It is what pushed me to support others in their vision of dreaming big and through this process to help others recognize how deep rooted stress and inner turmoil impacts their lives.

Know this… being at your breaking point is not necessarily a bad thing if you can use it for an impetus for positive change.

For me, I decided to take my triggers, patterns and behaviors that brought me to that breaking point and to work at reducing and even eliminating those things deemed negative in my life. It’s amazing how when allow our negative emotions, situations and even our own bad behaviours a place in our life it can wreak havoc in so many ways. It tears down relationships, impairs your confidence and disrupts decisions and dreams. If not tackled, one can easily stay in a place of acceptance of “what is”, resulting in a low self confidence, feelings of inferiority, loneliness and deep loss. I call this the cycle of our own choices as we alone have the power to make choices to move out of it… starting with the perspective of how we choose to see the situation.

I believe everyone can break the cycle and get back to dreaming big and being bold in their life. We all have the power to make the decision to let go of dreams not fulfilled, reframe them and take control of our pursuit of dreams not yet realized.

The first step is to stop holding yourself back. Let go of the stress that is debilitating your decisions and rather turn that overwhelm into the fuel that will propel you forward. The combination of dreaming plus action… and I mean massive action will keep you moving forward. It’s not one simple steps but many little things that add up to big results. Dream big and be bold! There is no other way but to just start!

Paula Morand, CSP is a leadership building, revenue boosting, strategy expanding keynote speaker, author and visionary. This dreaming big and being bold leadership expert ad brand strategist brings her vibrant energy, humor and wisdom to ignite individuals, organizations and communities to lead change, growth and bold impact. 23 years, 25,000 clients, 19 countries, 11 books, former radio personality, 10x award winning entrepreneur and humorous emcee.