Inconvenient Dreams

Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life Podcast where it’s all about designing your life on your terms and now your host, Natalie Bacon.

Hey there. Welcome to the podcast. It is a few days before Christmas. How fun is that? I have to say that so much of the inner work that I have done has really paid off in terms of the holidays. I have had seasons in the past where the holidays are not something that I looked forward to or enjoyed. If that’s you, I see you. Know that you are so loved anyways, and you don’t have to love the holidays. That’s totally fine. That if you don’t love the holidays right now, it doesn’t mean that you have to not love the holidays forever.

For me, I really just did this work so much and have created a life that now affords me so many blessings, and I love the holidays. Specifically Christmas. It’s so fun. It’s so magical. I love getting into the spirit of it. I love giving gifts on purpose. I love kind of the magic of the season. It’s just so much fun for me.

So that brings me to what I want to talk with you first before we get into today’s episode, which is the Grow You Holiday annual pass. I want you to consider giving this gift to yourself or to a woman in your life. It is something that is going to be purposeful and meaningful and really going to impact your life forever. If you give it to someone else, it will impact their life forever.

It’s not something that you will open and it will create more stuff in your house that in a few months you want to get rid of. It will not be something that somebody else already has. It will be something that is so much more meaningful and deeper.

Because the truth is, that’s what we really all want. When we think about the holidays and we think about what makes them so special, it’s our relationships and our families and the lives that we’ve created. It’s like this season of pause and reflection and connection. If you don’t have that right now in a place where you want it to be, Grow You can absolutely help you.

 As we head into the next season, which is typically full of dreams and goals and productivity and all of those New Year’s resolutions, Grow You is going to be the place for you to come and get that help as well. In January I’m teaching a new course called Dream Bigger. You’ll get the course and the workbook. In February I’m teaching self-compassion, and there will be a new course on self-compassion and a new workbook on self-compassion.

Then every single month for an entire year you will continue to get a new course and a new workbook on a different topic. I don’t repeat topics. I make sure to grow myself, and that’s always what I want to be an example of for you. Then I bring what I’ve learned and what I’m going through and what I think will be most valuable to you and all of the members in a way that is different and unique every single month.

Aside from the new class and the new workbook every month, which is totally worth more than the price of one year, you also get calls. Weekly calls on a variety of different topics where you can come and get support and get help. You might need help on a goal or a relationship, maybe with your in-laws or parenting your little ones or feeling like this is a really tough season or having a negative mindset. Whatever it is, there will be a call for you to attend if you want to.

If you don’t want to, you can listen to the calls. You can watch the calls. We have a private podcast that you can listen to. Really there is something for everyone and everyone’s type of learning.

There’s also this 24/7 support forum where you can come and write in with any challenge that you are facing. This is a member favorite because it’s always accessible to you and it’s completely anonymous. So what’s awesome about this is we publish the answers publicly in the private forum. So any member can see the question and answer, but no one not even us on the backend, we can’t see who it’s from.

So why this is helpful is because you’ll get this complete forum with a search bar where you can search whatever challenges that you’re going through and see if it’s already been discussed and see what other people are going through and see how they resolved it. You can also type in anything and not be worried about judgement or anything like that. It’s really there for you.

I think written support is the best support sometimes because you can screenshot it and take it with you and reread it. It’s going to feel differently as you process that. So I like personally, this is just my preference, to do a little bit of both. So, for you, you might like just the written or just the live going on video support and help and coaching. If you’re like me, maybe you like both. So that’s in there.

Then on top of that what really makes Grow You different from any other program that I’ve seen is the vast amount of content and on demand courses in the bonus value. I know there are some other programs out there that have a couple bonuses, but I’m telling you. In Grow You I just keep adding bonus course and the price doesn’t change.

So there is a course on how to do thought work and the inner work. There is a course on processing feelings and becoming more mindful. There’s a course on how to coach yourself. There is a course, this is one of my favorites, where there’s over 23 inner work tools that are bite sized.

So if you want a refresher or you’re not really sure what goal fuel is or what self-validation is or what the next believable thought is or the four stages of belief. You can go in here and watch a five or ten minute video, and it gives you a refresher on what it is and an example. I just love that bonus.

There are journal prompts. There’s a journaling course in there. There’s a course on changing your eating habits forever. So many of our members have taken advantage of this course and lost so much weight. Like I’m thinking of a few who have come on and talking about how they lost 25 pounds and 50 pounds.

It’s just one course that is recently something I redid. So it’s even better than it was when I first created it a couple years ago. It’s just awesome. So if you want to change your eating habits, this is something that will help you do it.

That’s another point I want to make is I’m consistently updating the content. So it’s not going to be outdated. I found that in some other programs, they just have a few things in there from 10 years ago. I don’t know. From me, I want you to have the best and most useful and helpful content and classes and courses so that everything is so relatable and helpful for exactly what you’re going through.

There’s also a marriage and relationship tool kit in the bonus value as well as a money mindset course. Then after you’ve been in Grow You for six months, which you automatically will have happen if you get the Grow You holiday annual pass. You get the bonus course letting go of busy. This is another member favorite. Along with that you get the bonus course How to Teach Your Kids About Thoughts and Feelings.

So VIP members love these courses. They also get another call with me. So after you’ve been in Grow You for six months, we add in a VIP call that you can come to once a month anytime. You can also get access to all the replays. So if you can’t make it, you can always watch the replay.

Then the same is true after you’ve been inside Grow You for over a year. You get another call as a platinum member. So as you do this work, you will grow and you will deepen your understanding of yourself and you will learn how to manage your mind and overcome challenges. Really you notice yourself being able to process your emotions. So you have less anxiety. You feel like you’re not as reactive and you’re not snapping as much. You know that when you are, you can see what’s going on and know how to solve it.

One thing that is so awesome about the holiday annual pass is that it’s a year in the program and you get so many added on bonuses because of that. So you get immediate access to all of the content archives, which includes over 15 additional personal development classes and workbooks.

So those are on topics like setting extraordinary goals, emotional wellbeing, decluttering your surroundings, succeeding with money, time management and calendaring. Living from abundance. How to enjoy your life more. Self-confidence, loving your body. Minding your money. We’re always adding more to the archives.

So, again, I can’t think of a better gift for yourself to really honor yourself in this next year or for a woman or mom in your life who you know just absolutely deserves this more than anyone.

So that’s what you get normally if you join the one year pass, but we’ve made it a holiday annual pass. So you get a holiday bonus, which includes the inner work bundle. You get Self-care For The Soul, which is an eBook. You get Dream Year, which is another e-book. You get a download that shows you 50 thoughts that you can you teach your kids to become more mindful. You get the calming your mind worksheet, and you get 365 journal prompts in an eBook. All of these are downloads that you can have and save forever.

So really I think you will find that the value you are getting is thousands and thousands of dollars. I’ve broken it out for you on the page and added it up, and it’s $15,021 worth of value for a single year in there. That’s what it would cost if you bought all of this separately. Instead what I’ve done is made it so affordable and something that I really want to make as accessible as possible while still being something that you value and need to invest in to get that return on your investment.

So for you, you’re going to get it for under $1,000. You can get all of the details over at nataliebacon.com/gift. I know a lot of you are going to take advantage of this, and I’m so glad because it’s going to make this next year one of the best years of your life. I know that because so many women share that with me. Also not because it has anything to do with me, but because of the tools that I’m teaching of how this work really works. I’ve seen it in my own life as well. Every year just keeps getting better than the last.

That brings us to what I want to talk with you about today, which is inconvenient dreams. Inconvenient dreams is a concept that I came up with based on the coursework that I am teaching in January. So if you are in Grow You on January 1^st, you will get the Dream Bigger curriculum. If you get the annual pass as well, you will also get this.

What inconvenient dreams are, an inconvenient dream is a dream that you desire in your heart that requires so much growth it’s uncomfortable given your current life. Because of the discomfort and the growth required, this dream is incredibly inconvenient. So I want to back up and talk with you about where this comes into play as you think about this upcoming season and New Year’s resolutions and dreaming and setting goals and all of those things we love to do at the year end and beginning of the new year.

So often our initial dreams are based on what society or our social circles or families want for us. So the example that I’ll give you from a friend of mine is that his mother said to him at one point don’t be a teacher. Go to law school and become a lawyer. So the true desire underneath is to become a teacher.

We see this at lots of different phases of our lives. Our families, our social circles, society, they have this idea of what our dreams should be. So our initial dreams are typically based on what other people outside of us want. If we follow those dreams, we end up in hustle energy because what we’re chasing and what we’re following is something that isn’t really coming from within. It’s coming from something external. So we end up chasing to be validated and looking for that external validation.

So you have to get past the false dreams because they’re not your truth. They’re not coming from your heart. Once you get past them, you can access what your true dreams are.

So if you don’t know what your dreams are, I recommend you do two things. First, slow down and start to pay attention to what interests you. Two, stop all of your external false pleasures. All of your methods of escaping.

So part one is you’re going to slow down and pay attention to anything that piques your curiosity and start asking yourself questions like what do I like? What do I like to do? What did I use to like to do that I don’t like to do anymore or that I want to do more of? Start poking around and getting to know yourself.

I think part two is where a lot of us have desires and dreams that are covered up with pleasures. So these pleasures are external pleasures. They’re not true and natural pleasures. They are the things that we do in order to feel better because we don’t like our current lives. So it’s drinking. It’s Netflixing. It’s having too much sugar. It’s overing.

Anytime you are overworking, overspending. It could be anything. Over fill in the blank. You’re escaping your current life to get this external pleasure, and you consistently need more of it to tolerate your current life because you’re not on a path to following your dreams. So I’ll give you an example from my life.

I used to drink and I used to go out. I drank socially. I never had a problem with drinking. Never got into trouble with drinking. Didn’t see myself as a problem drinker or an alcoholic, but I learned this concept and I applied it to my life. So when I started dating Steve, I stopped drinking. Probably I think it was a month or two after we had met. The reason I had stopped was because I was thinking about my future self and how my future self was a mom who didn’t drink. So I gave up drinking.

That was a huge escape for me. Because at the time, I was just starting to date Steve at the very beginning of our relationship. So still very much in my single city girl lifestyle. Going out socially to bars or even clubs sometimes. That was my identity.

I knew that my future self did not have that identity. My future self was a wife and a mom in a house probably in the suburbs, right. Somewhere not living in the city going to bars and clubs and drinking. That was just what was true for me. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with doing those things. It’s just when I tapped into my desire from my heart, that’s what I found.

So ahead of time, ahead of getting married, ahead of becoming a mom, ahead of getting the puppies and moving to the burbs. I gave up the pleasure of drinking. And it was incredibly uncomfortable for me to shed this identity. Not so much stop drinking. It actually wasn’t that challenging for me to stop the drinking, but it was the social life that came with it. It was the going out late. It was the going out to different clubs in Chicago. It was kind of the lifestyle that I had around drinking that was so hard for me to give up.

I did this head of time knowing where I was going in my future. Gosh less than two and a half years later, I’ve created that. I’ve followed that dream. That dream is now manifested. So the idea is that you stop the external pleasures and discover or uncover the truth of your life and what you truly desire.

Because a lot of people will say, just going back to the drinking example, “Yeah I’m drinking and I’m going out, but I really don’t want to be doing that. I want to get married or have kids or something.” The thought is, “Well, I’ll just wait until that happens until I make those changes.”

But the opposite is what it takes. It takes becoming the person ahead of time for you to really attract that result and have it happen so much faster than if you do it the other way and not in a rushed sort of place. In a very much sort of place where your energy shifts and you just step into this new person through the discomfort, but also because of the desire that’s on your heart.

So whatever it is for you. It might not be drinking. It may be shopping. It may be sweets. Whatever that external pleasure is. If you stop it, if you reduce it significantly, you will discover your life and the truth about your life. Then you can ask yourself what do you really, really, really want. Like if anything was possible, what is it that you want for your life? Allow your dreams to come up through your heart.

Here’s how you know if this dream is really a true dream that is on your heart. Think about the dream playing out into the future. So go to the place in your mind where you’ve manifested and created the result of the dream. Does that make you more of who you actually want to be? If no, then it’s not a dream worth following. It’s not truly on your heart.

Like when I played out the future of I’m not drinking. I want to get married and have kids, that lit me up. That was totally something that was on my heart that I’ve always wanted that I knew made me more of who I wanted to be. So I followed it. So if the answer is yes and you go to the place where you’ve created that dream in your mind and it makes you more of who you are, then you must follow this desire.

I’ll tell you what. When you access the desire and the dream that is on your heart, there will be so much clarity and peace. It’s almost like a groundedness. It won’t be grapsy or forced. It will really feel like truth and certainty.

Yet at the same time, coming back to the title of this episode, inconvenient dreams, it will be incredibly inconvenient given your current life. I think this is because your true dreams and desires requires so much of you. So it required so much of me to give up my identity as someone who was a single girl going out in the city to become this wife and mom in the way that I wanted to become it.

So for someone else, this may not have been a transformation at all. I can relate to this on the other side when I think about career. It didn’t really take a lot of transformation for me to become a lawyer or a financial planner or a business owner. There were smaller changes and different evolutions that I kind of grew through, but the biggest identity shifts that I have had have been from the dreams that have been on my heart to create and grow my family.

I think of this as like the dream you have when no one is looking, when no one is asking, when no one is watching. It’s the dream that you want most. You have to ask yourself are you willing to allow space for it? Are you willing to follow it? Are you willing to be judged for it? That survival brain is so real.

So when you follow a dream that people don’t understand, it takes courage and self-assurance and self-confidence to do it anyways, right. Not from a place of defensiveness or I’m going to prove something to you, but from a place of this is my dream on my heart. I know that when I check in with myself, it’s what’s true for me. So I must follow it.

I think of one of my dear friends who is also a Grow You member. She couldn’t be more opposite from me in terms of wanting to get married and have kids. It’s just not something that she wants. It’s so fascinating because I love her for that. I love that we have such different desires on her heart. I love that we’re both very tapped into that.

I share that because I want you to know that there’s no dream that you should have or shouldn’t have. If your best friend or your sister or your sister-in-law or someone else has a completely different dream or they don’t understand your dream, it’s okay. If you check in with your body and you feel it on your heart and there is that calm and that peace and that certainty, that is your truest dream. And yet, here’s the part where we’re going to talk about how it’s incredibly inconvenient. Yet it will be incredibly inconvenient given your current life.

So it doesn’t have to be something like going from being single to being married. It can be so many different things. I have some examples from my life and from my friend’s lives and from my clients lives as well. I was talking to one of my girlfriends. She’s also in Grow You. She has a little one and she’s married.

She came up with the idea to move up north to be closer to her family. This is something that prior to accessing this dream wasn’t even something that she and her husband were considering. She got the opportunity to do it. There was a job opening, and she was offered that position. She said for like three days while she was making this decision her brain was freaking out.

I thought this was just so normal. Like yes, of course it was freaking out. It’s fascinating because when it’s happening, it’s hard to step outside yourself and see, “Oh, of course my brain is freaking out. This is an incredibly inconvenient dream.”

She thought she was going to stay in this home that she had with her husband and baby forever. She thought that she was going to grow with the company that she was currently at. Tapping into this dream on her heart to move, even though it was exactly what she wanted and she discovered that, it was so incredibly inconvenient given her current life.

So it took so much courage and strength. I was just so impressed with her, and I told her that. Because it’s easier to ignore it. It’s easier to escape that dream. It’s easier to shop it away or eat it away or drink it away or just stay busy so you ignore that dream. And she didn’t. She allowed space for it. She followed it. She moved up north to be closer to family. It’s such an example of tapping into the dream on her heart and how inconvenient it was and doing it anyway to grow and to create her future from her future.

There was another example from one of my friends and her husband and their little one as well. They moved from up north down to Charleston. They did this when she was 35 weeks pregnant. She didn’t yet have a job down here, and it was very inconvenient to do that given her current life. Yet she did it because that was the desire.

There are other examples that have come up that I’ve coached on. So a common one is you’re a mom. You have a family at home. Your kids are little and they need your support. Husband works, and you want to go back to school because you have a dream on your heart to become something else. Some other thing that requires going back to school.

I’ve coached on this as it relates to becoming a coach. I’ve coached on this as it relates to going back to nursing school. I’ve coached on this as it relates to getting your real estate license and a few others. So I think that it’s a common one because it would be so much easier to just continue with life as is. But when you tap into your dreams, and they’re there for a reason. They’re there for you. You tap into them, and you will find that there’s the peace and the certainty, and yet the inconvenience due to the growth required.

So I want you to check in with yourself and ask yourself what’s on your heart for this next season of your life. What dreams do you have? If you’re having trouble accessing them, remember to do the two steps. Which is to get really curious so you can increase that awareness but also to stop any of those escapes.

So I think of myself right now if I was doing this, my biggest escape would be sugar, right. For me, that’s pretty much the only one I have left. I’m pretty good with the others. Sometimes I let myself escape. I think when you do it with intention and you don’t beat yourself up about it, it’s totally fine.

What you want to do here though is if you’re having trouble accessing a dream because you don’t know what it’s like to not escape then you definitely want to stop escaping and see what comes up for you. You will be left with your life and the discomfort of that, which is why you have the escape. Then you can tap into what it is that you really want.

Then when you know, you don’t have to take action right away, but you can allow space for it. You can just be with it. That in and of itself takes some courage, right. Takes some self-confidence. I want to let you know that it is so worth it because I don’t think that there is anything on your heart that you truly desire that you can’t have. It may not look like what you thought it would look like. It may look like something totally different, but you will create the desire if it is a true desire on your heart.

Now is the best time for you to do that. I invite you to join me inside Grow You. Grab your holiday pass so you can do this work with me and the amazing community of moms inside Grow You as we start on January 1^st. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas. I will talk with you next week. Take care.

If you loved this podcast, you’re going to love Grow You. Grow You is my virtual life coaching program where I take everything on the podcast to the next level. I invite you to join our amazing community of women and moms and deepen your own personal development. Head on over to nataliebacon.com/coaching to learn more.  

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