You, my love, are a dreamer. You want to dream big and you want to chase those dreams. I know because you’re here right now.

Inside you are hundreds and hundreds of dreams that want to see the light, that want to be breathed into existence. But, often we put a cap on our dreams. We limit dreaming big, how we can dream, and what we can dream about.

If you’re ready to return to that free, fearless big dreamer you used to be, then this is the message for you.

P.S. If you know that you’re a dreamer who’s ready to work through your fear to go after your biggest, wildest dreams with ease and joy, I want to invite you to work with me in The Alchemy Collective - my 12-month membership to become your own healer & leader! Doors close April 29th!

Are you dreaming big or making practical plans?

Very early on in my coaching career, I noticed that so many people were coming to me with very “practical” dreams. They wanted to:

quit their jobs
leave their relationships
move to a different country

I saw it in one-on-one clients, group programs, and even in my workshops. Now listen, there is nothing wrong with practical dreams, but, as their coach, I could tell these things weren’t really what they wanted.

When they would go after these dreams and achieve them, they’d realize that — although things looked different, they felt the same.

That’s when it hit me: we as adults no longer know how to dream. We don’t know how to dream in the bold and limitless ways we once did when we were younger. We no longer understand why it’s good to dream big. Instead, we’ve learned how to make practical plans we think we actually can achieve.

Why is it good to dream big

Truth is, we mistake dreaming and planning. We think they’re one and the same and they’re not.

We’ve started creating dreams we know we can somehow get to. We’re going after dreams that would offer us some sort of “success.” Maybe that’s financial success, a new position or a new title.

One of the most common practical dreams I hear is to go back to school. And I’m not saying that this isn’t someone’s wildest dream. But, let me tell you about my experience as an example.

I once was living what I thought was my dream life. On the outside, I seemed to have it all! I was an opera singer, which I’d dreamed my entire life of doing, living in New York. But, although I dreamt of it and achieved it, I was getting tired of it. So, I thought “I’m just going to go back to school to get my masters in psychology, right?” Love, that was me creating a very practical dream.

It wasn’t what I truly desired deep inside. But, it was something that was outside of what I was doing. It was an exit. It was some sort of plan that offered freedom from the day to day life I was tired of. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted something different.

So you see, this is a dream I hear so often. Especially when the dreamer comes from historically marginalized communities.

While it is an amazing dream, is it actually the dream that you want or is it the dream that makes sense?

If it’s the dream that just makes sense or seems safe and secure, it’s not your biggest dream.

It’s not the dream that’s going to lead you to the unimaginable life that you desire deep down. What happens so often when we want different is we start dreaming with our planning mind, the mind that tries to figure things out, the mind that tries to create some sort of plan for us.

Because it’s trying to figure things out for us, it places a limit on how we can dream and what we can dream. It makes us come up with practical dreams that reflect what we see is possible in the world around us. It reflects what we see in our families and our communities.

Or it creates dreams with limits. Although our biggest, wildest dreams truly light us up, we pick the more practical option that’s not too bold, not too big, but just big enough for us to reach them.

Here’s a truth, love: your dreams are the gateway to possibility. They’re the gateway to the unimaginable and if you want the unimaginable, you have to get comfortable with dreaming again.

The true purpose of our dreams

For the longest time, I thought the purpose of my dreams was simply for them to come true.

But guess what, love? That’s not true.

When we dream, there’s no guarantee that that thing will actually happen. When we’re young, we’re such free dreamers. Our dreams inspire us and light us up. And we don’t have the slightest care if they actually come true or not.

But, as we become adults, we become attached to the outcome. We then start to associate dreaming with pain, failure, or disappointment. So, we start creating practical dreams (plans).

What our dreams actually do is give us momentum. They fuel us, propel us forward. The key is detaching from the outcome. Removing the attachment to our dreams coming true.

When we allow ourselves to dream in this way, we can start to see what it is we truly, deeply desire. We start to feel really good imagining and dreaming. And this is how we create unimaginable lives.

This great Mark Nepo quote totally reframed the relationship I have with dreaming today:

Now I think of a dream as a state of being and not a place to arrive at. We get so caught up in whether the dream comes true or falls away when it's purpose is to charge the circuit of life. When we can feel a dream moving through, it expands us. So, really any dream will do. It is the dreaming that is essential, not it's imagined real estate, but the places it lights along the way.

If this is really resonating with you and you’d love to have support from me just like this 3 times a month, I encourage you to join me in The Alchemy Collective. Doors close April 29th and you can find out more here.

Until next time, love.

After listening, you’re going to love these episodes!

106 | The key to creating your best life

So often we’re moving through life ticking off all the boxes of a dream life checklist. You know the one with the coveted full time job and the big house in a new city. It’s the one you’re told you should follow for true happiness. But the thing is, you’ve followed it to a T and now you feel empty. Listen to this week’s episode to learn the truth behind what you should do and what you actually need to do to live the life of YOUR dreams, love.

95 | The key to reaching your dreams

Tired of talking yourself out of your dreams? Listen to this episode to find out why you get so overwhelmed by your goals and how you can start to follow through on even your biggest desires.

84 | Leveling up for your Dreams

It’s scary to reach your dreams. This is the truth. So often we’re told that in order to break through this fear we need to “Level Up.” But what does that actually mean? Listen to this episode to learn about how to embrace the fear that comes along with realizing our dreams and how to level up the wholehearted way.

A quote to take with you:

“Your dreams are the gateway to possibility. They’re the gateway to the unimaginable and if you want the unimaginable, you have to get comfortable with dreaming again.”

Did you know that each episode comes with free guided journal prompts?

If you want to be in the know and get each Mindset Monday straight to your inbox complete with journal prompts to take you even further, get on my email list.

About your host, Shirin Eskandani

Hi, love! I’m Shirin.
Coach, speaker, writer, and ***life alchemist***.
**I teach you how to listen to your intuition again, tune out all the BS, and let your heart lead the way.**
Because once you strengthen your inner GPS, ***decisions become easier, boundaries become clearer, and belly laughs become a daily thing.***
**A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME:**
I’m a certified life coach (accredited through the International Coach Federation)
My husband and I met on Instagram and we live in Brooklyn, NY with our plant babies
I have a masters degree in Music and was a professional opera singer for twelve years. I worked all over the world singing on stage at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera (more on that later…).
I believe in the woo just as much as I do the work *(internal and external)*. No amount of crystals and affirmations will make up for a lack of a healthy mindset and aligned action.
I love all the Real Housewives franchises. Don’t make me choose one… seriously, don’t.

+ Read the episode transcript here

[00:00:00] Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. If you're looking for more purpose, more passion, more joy in your life, then you have come to the right place. I am your host, coach and Life Alchemist, Shirin Eskandani. And I have worked with thousands of people showing them how to create their dream lives while also living their dream.

This podcast is where mindset, mindfulness and manifestation meet together. We're going to release limiting beliefs. Put your dreams into motion all while prioritizing your ease, rest and joy. Let's do this love.

Hi love. Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. This is where we take a deeper dive into my Mindset Monday post, which you can read on Instagram at @wholeheartedcoaching.

Or if you want to go even deeper into this week's episode and get my free weekly journal prompts, sign up for my email list and you'll be able to explore the topics we're talking about in this episode. Even further, you can do that in the show notes or by heading to my website: wholehearted-coaching.com.

And if you're interested in working with me, whether that's one-on-one in one of my group programs or one of my transformational courses, you can head to my website, wholehearted-coaching.com/offerings to find out more. And of course you can also head to the show notes and all of this information.

[00:01:35] Will be waiting for you there. All right, love. Welcome to this week's episode. So today's episode is all about my favorite topic. My favorite thing to talk about: dreaming, dreams and dreamers. You, my love, are a dreamer. You are a dreamer at your core. I know this to be true inside. You are hundreds of dreams, hundreds of dreams that want to see the light of air that want to be breathed into existence.

[00:02:09] And so often we put a cap on our dreams. We limit our dreams, we limit how we can dream. We limit what we can dream about. And today's episode is about letting all of that go, letting all of the limitations, go releasing yourself and allowing yourself to dream in the most bold ways. Today's episode is all about how you, my love can start to dream again, dream in a way that allows you to create the unimaginable life that you truly desire.

[00:02:47] In this episode, I'm going to be sharing with you some of my favorite tools and ideas that are gonna allow you to unlock your ability to dream again, your ability to let that inner dreamer out. So dreaming is such a big part of wholehearted coaching, such a big part of what I believe in. I say that I specialize in working with dream.

[00:03:12] Dreamers with dreams so big that they get scared and excited. Just thinking about that dream dreamers who have maybe locked away their dreams for so long that they are tired of doing that and are ready. To tap into their deepest desires, dreamers who questioned themselves so much that they keep doubting the next step so much that they're just tired and they want to be able to do the damn thing.

[00:03:43] I help these amazing human. Breathe life into their dreams again. And my love, if you are listening to this episode live, you have one more week to sign up for the alchemy collective. The alchemy collective is my 12 month membership that I created for the dreamer. In the alchemy collective, you are given all of the tools, support, guidance, accountability, and community that you need to allow your dreams to fully thrive.

[00:04:17] As part of the collective, you get access to three live group coaching calls every month, a monthly private podcast, monthly somatic practices like breath, work meditation, and tapping. You get virtual retreats, every Equinox and solstice. And so much more and you also get me, you and me doing this work together, I will be offering you guidance and support and accountability.

[00:04:43] And also you're going to have this incredible community doing this work alongside of you. The alchemy collective is such an incredible community, a community of dreamers, dreamers who are ready. To do the damn thing, dreamers who are ready to work through the challenges, dreamers who are ready to step into their dream life with joy and ease.

[00:05:07] So love. If you are ready to join the alchemy collective to join our community, to really make your dreams come to life. This year had to whole hearted-coaching.com/. Alchemy or go to the show notes again, doors close on April 29th. So if you're listening live to this episode, you have one more week to join us in the collective.

[00:05:35] And today's episode on dreaming is an honor of the collective. You're going to get an idea, a taste, a sneak peek into the amazing work that we do inside of the alchemy collective. So let's get into this week's mindset Monday. It reads,

[00:05:57] remember love dreaming and planning are not one in the same. Both are needed, both are important, but so often we limit our dreams because we skip to the planning part. Dreaming is momentum. It's inspiration. It's the portal to possibility. When we mistake planning for dreaming, we create practical dreams, dreams, full of shoulds and supposed tos.

[00:06:25] Remember, we start by dreaming, dreaming, wildly and dreaming boldly. Allow the plan to come to you step by step moment. By moment. In this way, we create lives that are beyond what we can ever imagine. So something that I started to witness and see in my clients very early on in my coaching career was that they kept coming to me with very practical dreams and listen, there is nothing wrong with practical dreams, but as their coach, as I listened to them, talk about what they really wanted in their lives.

[00:07:05] I could tell that the things that they were naming weren't really what they wanted. And this is something that I kept witnessing, not just in my one-on-one clients and my group programs, even in my workshops that people wanted to quit their jobs, leave their relationships. They wanted to move to a different country, a different place, and sometimes they would do these things.

[00:07:30] And then when they'd start to dream about the next thing, it would seem very similar. To what they had just left or that they would get into that new job or that new relationship, or they'd go to that new place and things, even though they look different, felt the same. They felt very similar to how things used to feel in the past.

[00:07:55] And that's when I realized. That we as adults, as a grown ass adults, no longer know how to dream, dream in those bold and limitless ways that we used to. When we were young, we mistake dreaming and planning. We think they're one and the same. And they're not see what I was witnessing in my clients is that they were creating dreams that they knew in their minds they could somehow get to.

[00:08:25] And that would somehow offer them some sort of quote, unquote, success that success may be being financial, or maybe it was a new position or a title or an accolade. An example of a practical dream that I hear about often. And let me tell you, this was actually a practical dream that I had is to go back to school.

[00:08:47] The I'm not saying that for some of us going back to school, isn't our wildest dream. But I remember when I was really tired of singing, I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to go back to school. I'm going to, I'm going to go get my master's in psychology. That that's what I'm going to do. And that was me creating.

[00:09:07] A very practical dream. It wasn't really what I truly desired inside, but it was something that was outside of what I was doing. It was an exit, it was some sort of plan. And it offered me freedom from the day to day life that I was living. And that's all I wanted. I just wanted to be free of it. And I wanted something different.

[00:09:31] And so I started to create this very, very practical dream of going back to school. And this is a dream I hear about often I hear about it often, especially from people who come from historically marginalized communities, a lot of first-generation immigrant kids are like, okay, well, this didn't work out.

[00:09:51] So I'm just going to go get my masters or I'm going to go get my doctorate. And while yes, this is an amazing dream, but is it actually the dream that you want or is it the dream that makes sense. Is that the dream that seems safe is that the dream that seems secure and practical because love if that is what it is, that is not your wildest dream.

[00:10:14] That is not the dream that is going to lead you to the unimaginable life that maybe you desire deep down, but what happens so often when we want different, when we start dreaming of different, is that we start dreaming with our planning. The mind that tries to figure things out the mind that tries to create some sort of plan for us. [00:10:38] And so, because it's trying to figure things out for us, it places a limit on how we can dream and what we can dream. And it makes us come up with what I call these practical dreams, right? Dreams that reflect what we see in the world, what we see in our families and our communities. I see this often with relationships.

[00:11:00] Right. We dream of a relationship that we have seen growing up, not thinking that maybe something different is possible, or we create dreams that are reflection of what other people say are possible for us. Right. This is like going back to school. This is something that I felt was what I was supposed to do because in my family getting education and higher education was something that was really esteemed.

[00:11:28] So that's what I thought the next logical step was. Or we end up creating dreams that have like a limit on them. So let's say we do want to become a coach and we go to that coaching certification program. But the more practical option is maybe I don't know, working with another coach being on their team.

[00:11:47] And that's an amazing thing, but maybe deep down, you want to have your own damn. So we started to create these dreams that are like not too bold and not too big. And in the words of Goldilocks, they're just right. And y'all nobody liked Goldilocks. Okay. She literally went to those bear's house, ate their food, made a mask, slept on their beds.

[00:12:12] Don't be a Goldilocks when it comes to your damn dreams, tangent. But I think that that resonates. So, what we're really talking about today is that dreaming and planning are two very different things. And if you right now are allowing that planning mind to be part of your dreaming process, you're really putting a cap on what you are dreaming about and something I really want to underscore for all of us.

[00:12:39] It's something I've talked about before on this podcast is that we have to truly understand what the purpose of our dreams. So for the longest time, I thought the purpose of my dreams was for them to come true, right. That you're supposed to dream a thing and then it's supposed to happen. But. Y'all we know that this is not true, that when we dream there is no guarantee that that thing is going to happen.

[00:13:07] And so as we grow up as adults, we start to associate dreaming with pain or failure or disappointment, right. We start to realize that not everything we dream about is going to happen. But what I really believe what I really believe the purpose of our dreams is, is that it gives us momentum now, liveliness it's that feeling of inspiration and electricity for me, dreaming in my life is the same as when I was really young, when I was really young and I dreamed so boldly and limitlessly.

[00:13:47] I didn't have an attachment to my dreams coming true. Then it just felt really, really good to dream. And when we allow ourselves to dream in this way, we can start to see what it is. We truly desire. We can start to just feel really good in the process of imagining and dreaming. And this, my love is how we create these unimaginable lives.

[00:14:12] This is how we create momentum towards what it is that we truly, truly desire. There's a great mark NIPPO quote. I have quoted it on this podcast so many times, but this quote for me, totally reframed the relationship I have with dreaming today, the quote reads. Now I think of a dream as a state of being and not a place to arrive at.

[00:14:38] We get so caught up in whether the dream comes true or falls away when its purpose is to charge the circuit of life. When we can feel a dream moving through, it expands us. So really any dream will do it is the dreaming that is essential, not it's imagined realistic. But the places at lights along the way.

[00:15:06] So this quote is really a beautiful way of saying, you know, reach for the stars and you'll land on the. Oh, wait, I think it's the other way around reach for the moon and you'll land for the stars, but you get what I'm saying. What mark NIPPO is reminding us is love. You are a dreamer. Allow yourself to dream in that bold way, in that wild way, in that limitless way, without the plans or the dues or the, how do I figure it out?

[00:15:36] That is momentum and inspiration. And I understand it can be so hard to do this. Dreaming is scary because it's all about us. It's all about you, the individual it's about your needs, your wants your desires. So if you speak this dream into existence, if you even think about it and it doesn't happen, if you fail at it, then it's almost like you have failed yourself.

[00:16:04] Dreaming requires us to be vulnerable and honest with ourselves. It requires hope. It requires us to trust in things beyond our control. And this is especially difficult. If you have grown up in a household that didn't feel safe, that didn't feel secure. If you have experienced any trauma dreaming at first feels really scary.

[00:16:26] And I get this. I grew up in a household where I always had to put a cap on my dreams because of what we experienced growing up during the war and then immigrating, I just thought, okay, I gotta be a practical dreamer. And let me tell you that practical dreamer life got me really far. You all know this? I say this all the time.

[00:16:46] You know, I was an opera singer living in New York, right. This looked like a dream life. But to me in my mind that those things were actually practical dreams. They really were applied to this school, move to that city, get that apartment, do this thing. Kind of like very robotic, but it wasn't the life of my wildest dreams.

[00:17:08] And as I say this, I have a feeling that this is resonating for you. I work with so many people who have lives that look like dream lives. That should be dream lives. Right. We've talked about this ticking off all the boxes. But love the key to creating the unimaginable is in your dreams. My husband is the unimaginable.

[00:17:35] This business for me is the unimaginable the life I got to live today. Is the unimaginable. And that's because all of this, the foundation of it was in that dream state of allowing myself to dream boldly, not allowing the plans, the, how tos to get in the way, but just allowing myself to dream. And let me tell you, some of my dreams have not come true.

[00:18:02] Some of my dreams I'm like, actually I don't really want that. And some of my dreams, you know what, maybe their timeline is a little bit longer than I thought they were. But what I am asking of you, my love, what I am hoping that you lean into and embrace and embody. Is to dream to dream like a young kid on their birthday.

[00:18:25] You know, like those kids in the movies on Christmas morning, I don't celebrate Christmas, but like anytime I see those scenes, y'all that energy that is dreaming boldly, hope, faith, vulnerability, opening up to and trusting in something bigger than you. My love you were born with something within you that was meant to be brought into existence.

[00:18:51] A dream that is as unique, incredible, and special as you are. And unlocking that dream is contingent on you, allowing yourself to dream and imagining. My love, this is the work that we are going to be doing in the alchemy collective. How can we name our dreams? How can we open ourselves up to our dreams and how can we then make our dreams a reality in a way where there is ease and where there is joy.

[00:19:27] My love your dreams are the gateway to possibility. They're the gateway to the unimaginable. And if you want the unimaginable, you have to get comfortable with dreaming again. So love, I want you to think of one thing that is really resonating with you from today's podcast episode. And as you reflect on that one thing.

[00:19:53] We're going to take a deep breath in, hold it at the top and breathe out. So breathing in hold and breathing out

[00:20:09] Doris to the alchemy collective close on April 29th. If you're ready to make your dreams, your wildest dreams, a reality love. I hope you'll join us. You can find more information in the show notes or had to whole hearted-coaching.com/alchemy until next week, I'll talk to you then.

[00:20:33] Thank you so much for joining me this week. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend subscribe or follow where you love listening most. And if you haven't yet leave a review, you can do this on apple podcast, cast box pod, chaser, or podcast addict until next week. Love.