Engage this to ignite your dreams

A person can have access, privilege, smarts, and all of the things we automatically believe it takes to be successful, but without tenacity, it won’t happen.  No matter what the goal, you have to do the work to get there. 

If we “succeed” for other reasons, that false success will have us fighting imposter syndrome. We’ve all seen how that feeling can spiral us into unhealthy or destructive places.

Want to know the key to making Dreams come true?  Stick with it. 

An educated friend of mine told me, “You don’t earn a Ph.D., you become one.”  No matter what field of study, a doctorate degree is an acknowledgment that you have discovered or created something that has never been done before. 

It requires original research and the findings are then summarized in the dissertation.  That document is usually bound into book form and placed on the library shelf.  Ideally, other researchers use that original research to further the field. 

Pretty intimidating, right?

Any academic advisor can tell you that when a student is facing the final draft of their dissertation, they are most at risk of abandoning their goal.  There are many who leave academia with the designation ABD (All But Dissertation) rather than Ph. D. because it’s just too much. 

They were sooooo close…. 

What stops us

 No matter what the Dream is, the closer we come to reaching our end goal, the louder the Dreamkillers will be.  They delude us by flooding our brains with messages of despair. They have such creative ways to make us avoid doing what needs to be done. Their clever weapons are avoidance and distraction. 

Know why dissertations don’t get to their final published state?  The formatting.  This is where brilliant students flail and abandon ship. It’s the final distraction that makes the years of research seem like child’s play.

Every discipline and every university has incredibly specific requirements on how that final document is put together. Each citation has to have the commas in the right place, the correct sequence of information in precisely the same way.  Nitpicking librarians return draft after draft to the prospective graduate until It Is Perfect.

Dreamkillers love this! What a great way to delude someone into thinking their work wasn’t important after all. Plus its a great distraction!

To get past the Dreamkillers requires tenacity, pure and simple.  It’s often the muscle we most need to strengthen in every area of our lives.

Why do the work?

Besides thwarting the Dreamkillers, there are other ways that tenacity can serve us:

• Skill building.  You know the old saw, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice Practice Practice.  Tenacity is that inner voice that sends us to the rehearsal space even when other things pull us in a different direction. We get better when we stick with it.
• Joy of the work itself.  Tenacity allows us to engage with the thing we love on a regular basis.  The more we engage, the more we’re pulled toward doing more, and the more we fall in love again with our Dream.
• Confidence. As we engage with our devoted task, we get better at what we do and we become stronger in our belief that we have what it takes.  Engaging tenacity to build skills and focus our effort gives us grounded certainty that we can succeed.
• Bragging rights.  It feels really good to look back on a difficult task and know that it was accomplished through our effort alone.  Tenacity pulls us to the finish line where we can bask in the glow of completion.

What’s the secret to engaging tenacity? 

Dream bigger.

Get lost in the final goal. Let the fantasy of success pull you to the workbench. Absolutely nothing will substitute for muscling through the hard parts.

Tenacity is the secret sauce to completion. 

Tenacity gets us past the Dreamkillers.

Tenacity will never let us down.