Everyone’s got a dream … what’s your dream?

Pretty Woman is one of my all time favourite movies. I don’t know if it’s the rags to riches story, the finding love in the most unorthodox places or the unbridled sass of Julia Roberts that has drawn me in over and over again (it’s pretty much the only movie I’ve seen more than 3 times - a stat only trumped by the Ted Lasso series - but that’s for another time).

There are so many great one liners from the movie but I reckon this one is the most underrated:

"Everyone’s got a dream … what’s your dream?”

The leaders I work with have a dream.

Actually, they have multiple dreams

Of course, there is a business dream - the vision that drives the business they are creating, a vision that came from them - that only they can truly see, and a vision that continues to grow and evolve year on year.

But there's another dream, and it's maybe more important.

It's the dream of how they want to experience work and life. How they want their business journey to feel, how they want to experience wealth, relationships, their health and wellbeing, and their own success.

It’s both the realising and the expanding of that dream that I come in.

Because the sad thing is, we can't seem to help but trip ourselves up on the path to our dreams.

With stories.

Beliefs.

Letting others stand in our way.

But ultimately we are responsible for the delivery of our dreams.

Not in some kind of “accountability “ kind of way, but in the way of - if we give up on them, if we don’t relentlessly pursue them, no-one else will and they too easily become yesterdays news, a dream once held then abandoned.

I encourage my clients to engage in a process I call "Unrestricted dreaming."

Creating space just to imagine what they would love life and business to be like. What they would love to create. How they would like that to feel. The things that seem too wild, or ambitious, or hard to achieve ... just to create space to entertain and expand on these crazy ideas.

Most resist it with surprising intent.

"Don’t have time for it"

"Don't want to"

"Seems like a waste of time"

But those who don't resist discover something essential and even a little terrifying:

They want more than they realised.

Their imagination, when let run wild, is surprisingly vivid … and once they let themselves see what they really want - their enthusiasm and motivation multiplies.

It's only scary when you realise how much you actually want it, and how afraid you are of being disappointed (which is the subconscious reason most will go to some lengths to avoid this easy homework).

Everything ever created was created first here, in the imagination, in the vision that only one person had, and in the moment they dared to believe it just might be possible.

I have a dream.

My dream is about leaders who transforms everyone who they come into contact with. Leadership that actually changes the leader by allowing them to experience the power dormant inside them to create remarkable change towards that which they dreamt was possible.

I know the power of leadership. I believe it's available to anyone that wants it.

But it has to start with a dream ... a place visited first only in the imagination.

The only real starting point for anything valuable and yet the one equally dismissed by all but the dreamers who change the world.

So, in the infamous words of some random person on the street in Pretty Woman:

"What’s your dream?”

Nothing inspires me more than hearing the bold dreams of true leaders.

And, you just might find, in your expression of it, a dream you didn’t totally realise you held dear to you.