What about all the dreams that didn't come true?

What happened when I finally admitted that a lot of the big dreams in my 'Goodbye, Hello' journals hadn't turned into reality. And why I'm so glad they didn't.

If you’re new to me, hi there, I’m Selina, a Career and Life Design Coach, author and podcaster. I’ve been helping people design lives and careers they love for almost two decades. My ‘Goodbye 2024, Hello 2025’ journal is now out - available in the UK, USA, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. ORDER YOURS NOW!

This time last year I made a public confession:

My Goodbye Hello journals were full of dreams that hadn’t come true.

OK, there were plenty of dreams in there that had come true, but a lot of the big dreams, particularly in the ‘Your Dream Life 5 years From Now’ exercise in the journals that hadn’t.

And from 2023 this was made all the more obvious as I could now look at the 2023 life I had dreamed up for myself back n 2018 and compare it to the life I was actually living.

And it was not an exact match.

In fact, in many aspects, it was nowhere near.

I didn’t dare to admit it at first. Instead I carried around this secret with a growing sense of shame. After all wasn’t I the person teaching everyone how to go after their dreams and make those dreams come true!?

Not wanting to deal with the shame and disappointment and admit that I had failed, I avoided looking back through my journals and felt pangs of shame every time someone told me that the dream life they had written into their Goodbye Hello journals in 2017 and 2018 was now the exact life they were living.

Until one cold winter weekend, I finally decided enough was enough. I might not have made all my wildest dreams come true, but I certainly wasn’t going to allow myself to sit around in shame about it.

And so, I ceremoniously took my collection of journals down from the shelf, snuggled down on my bed and started to read back through seven years of hopes, dreams and desires.

And wow, was it a powerful exercise.

I took a few days to go slowly through the journals, answering these four questions:

1. Of the dreams you've written down in the past, what dreams have come true?

2. What dreams haven’t come true exactly as you’d imagined/hoped but in ESSENCE they have (e.g. you might not have the lavish home you had dreamed up but you do have a home that you love and that you love to spend time in and that is the most important thing)

3. Which of your dreams that didn’t come true are you glad didn't come true. And why?

4. Of the dreams that didn’t come true, what do you want to recommit to now?

By the end of the exercise I felt such an incredible sense of peace and gratitude, with a whole new perspective and sense of pride for what I had achieved in that time and with the wonderful realisation that a lot of the dreams I had written into those journals in the early days were ego dreams of fame and fortune and if anything I was relieved that they hadn’t come true.

A year on and I am still so incredibly grateful that I faced my shame and secret feelings of failure and did this exercise. It liberated me, setting me free from the belief that my inner Shitty Committee was busy trapping me in that said I was useless at making my dreams come true.

I’m not, I’m actually pretty good at it and have realised that the game is not to make every single one of your dreams come true.

As

Penny Wincer

writes in her latest Substack post about her own reflections as she looks back on five years of using the Goodbye Hello journals (a real pinch-me moment to have someone I admire so much dedicating an entire Substack post to my journals!):

“Not every one of these projects panned out exactly as I imagined they would, but each of them helped me to create a life I am proud of”

And that is what this is all about.

To allow ourselves to dream and then take those dreams and have a go at bringing them to life - playing, experimenting, planting them in reality, like seeds in the earth and seeing which ones take root.

That’s what it is to be the artist of your own life.

So, if you’ve been feeling any sense of disappointment, failure or shame at the dreams you once had for your life that didn’t happen, then please have a go at this exercise and let that shame dissolve.

And if you’re a paid subscriber to Another Way, then you’ll be getting a whole Monday Pep-Talk episode on the topic and guidance on what to do when your dreams don’t come true.

Going after your dreams and designing a life you love, isn’t about getting it right all the time. In fact over recent weeks a lot of my Monday Pep-Talks have been about the importance of embracing failure as an essential part of the journey and the joy of allowing yourself to do things imperfectly.

Creating a life that you love - or as

Penny Wincer

so beautifully puts it: ‘a life that you feel proud of’ - comes about by being willing to play, experiment, make mistakes, take wrong turns and feel your way.

So order your ‘Goodbye 2024, Hello 2025’ journal here if you haven’t already and get ready to dream, play and create a life that you love and feel proud of in 2025.

x Selina