In the Wholehearted Coaching community, we talk a lot about dreams. Just last week, we talked all about 5 truths about your dreams. Today, we’re going to look at sustaining the journey toward your dreams because, honestly, this journey is a really hard one.

The journey to pursue your dreams requires so much of you: so much time, so much effort, so many challenges.

Being a dreamer means having to choose the hard thing each and every day. While the path of pursuing your dreams may not be an easy one, that doesn’t mean it can’t be one that’s filled with ease.

We can go on this journey in a way that is kind to ourselves and in a way that we can thrive alongside our dreams.

Today, I’m sharing with you my 4 pathways to ease. These are the 4 elements that can bring much more ease into your life while you’re on this challenging path to pursue your dreams that mean so much to you.

4 Pathways to Pursue Your Dreams with More Ease

The Meaning You Make

I want to share a story with you that very clearly demonstrates our first pathway to ease.

Every Monday, I send out an email to the Wholehearted Community. If you’re reading this right now, it’s a good chance you’re on that email list (and if you aren’t, join us here, love!). Every Monday, this email goes out to the community that’s also connected to the podcast. It shares a Mindset Monday and free guided journal prompts to take you even deeper into that week’s topic.

And every Monday morning after this email went out, I would check my email platform to see how many people unsubscribed from my list.

That’s right. At the very start of every single workweek, this was the first thing I would do. Now, within that platform, I can see TONS of stats for these emails: how many people opened it, how many times they opened it, what links they clicked on. I could have looked at so many things! But, I would go and look at how many people left my email list.

And the meaning I would give to this led me to saying the worst things — about myself, about my business, about my content. I would go into this spiral of negative thoughts every single Monday.

When you face a challenge on the journey to pursue your dreams, what kind of meaning are you going to make of it?

We can choose to make it mean that we’re failures and a mess or we can make it mean that mistakes happen, that not everyone is for our community (in my example). We can ask ourselves, “What can I learn here? How can I pivot?”

Now, we don’t have to be blindly optimistic about everything that happens. No, love. We need to be really intentional about the meaning we make out of the things that happen to us.

If I make those unsubscribes mean that I’m a mess and not a good coach, then I’m making this path a lot more difficult than it needs to be.

It’s important to understand the difference between a circumstance and our perception of a circumstance. We often think it is our circumstance that is making us feel less than awesome, but it’s really how we’re perceiving it that’s causing those feelings.

If you’d like to dive deeper into the difference between your circumstance and your perception of a circumstance, check out Mindset: Circumstance vs Perception | ep85

The Boundaries You Have

Listen, we could spend an ENTIRE podcast on boundaries (and I have — listen here!), but boundaries are how we protect our energy and our time.

So, when I think of ease, I think of just that — energy and time.

What are you putting your energy towards?

What are you spending time on?

Are those things things that allow you to thrive and to feel really nourished?

If you are a dreamer, you need to have some really clear boundaries and those aren’t just boundaries with others. That’s right, love. More often than now, the boundaries you need most are with yourself.

I honestly believe the person who breaks the most boundaries in our lives is ourselves. For example, I can’t tell you how many days I start off the morning saying, “Shirin, you’re going to go on a walk later today. You’re going to stop what you’re doing around three or four and go for a walk.” Then, three or four rolls around and I’m still working the day away.

I know this walk is going to make me feel better and yet… I won’t do it.

We betray ourselves so often when it comes to the things that we know are best for us. So, when it it comes to ease, it’s really about being clear of what your boundaries are. Then, upholding those boundaries.

At the end of the day, the only person responsible for you is you, love.

When I struggle with boundaries, I think of them in terms of Yes and No. If I say “Yes” to this, then what am I saying “No” to? This has helped me to create so much clarity in my life.

Ask yourself this:

• Am I saying “yes” to the things that really are best for me?

• Am I saying “yes” to the things I think I’m supposed to do? That I should do? That I feel guilted into doing?

If you’d like to dive deeper into what boundaries are and learn my 4-step process for setting boundaries for yourself, check out Boundaries 101 | ep111.

The Celebrations You Create

Here’s a truth for you, love:

We do not celebrate ourselves, our lives, and our accomplishments enough.

As dreamers, we are constantly moving on to that next thing that needs to be done. In doing so, we gloss over and move past moments in our lives that actually need to be celebrated. Each and every day, we need to be celebrating!

Now, that doesn’t have to be going to a fancy restaurant or splurging on something pretty expensive. When I say celebrating, it’s all about you acknowledging and saying how proud you are of yourself.

This can look like:

• patting yourself on the back

• having a dance break in the middle of the day

• singing at the top of your lungs to your favorite 90s track!

I call these Micro-Celebrations. They’re moments we can have every single day where we acknowledge the “ordinary” things that we accomplish. If we want ease, we need to bring celebration back into our lives.

What’s something you did today, love, that you thought, “I should’ve just done this earlier”? Take a moment and acknowledge that thing that you did. Now, take a moment to congratulate and celebrate yourself for doing it.

Another practice I really love to have my coaching clients do is what I call Stop, Pause, and Savor.

This is one of my favorite, simple mindfulness practices to do. Here’s how it works:

• Stop what you’re doing.

• Pause.

• Savor this moment.

That’s it, love. And savoring the moment is whatever that means for you. If you’re on a walk, maybe you savor the trees around you, the sounds of the birds chirping, the wind blowing over your skin. No matter where we are, there is always something to savor.

I often give my clients the practice of setting a Stop, Pause, and Savor alarm. You set an alarm that goes off 3 times every day and when it does, you stop, you pause, and you savor the moment.

This simple exercise is so incredibly rewarding. It infuses this sense of celebration and joy which is such an integral part of creating ease.

You don’t have to wait until you accomplish your big dream to celebrate.

Celebrate now. Celebrate often.

That is how we sustain.

The Words You Say

If we want a journey to pursuing our dreams that is filled with ease, it is imperative that we learn how to speak to ourselves.

The words you say to yourself matter.

The way you speak to yourself matters.

We need to become our own inner cheerleader. This is all about breaking up with that self-critical side of ourselves and knowing that it’s not going to serve us if we want to sustain.

This is about leaning into grace, kindness, and compassion.

When you find yourself speaking to yourself not so kindly, pause, take a moment, and reframe.

And love, this isn’t about just saying positive affirmations to yourself like “You got this! You know what you’re doing! Keep going, buddy!”

This is about saying words and phrases to yourself that allow you to feel supported and empowered, whatever that means for you.

Perhaps that sounds like:

“Even thought I doubt myself, deep down I know what I’m doing.”

“I accept that this is really hard and I am so incredibly proud of myself.”

Be kind to yourself, love.

Be so incredibly supportive of you because the person you spend the most time with on this path to your incredible, amazing dream is yourself.

So nurture that loving, supportive relationship. Make it a relationshp that you would want with a good friend, a loving family member, or an ideal romantic partner. That is the same type of relationship you need to create and cultivate with yourself if you want to make this path more easeful, love.

I cannot tell you how happy I am that you are on this path toward your dream. Your dream is going to change lives. Your dream is going to change communities.

The ripple effect that your dream is going to have on folks is going to be incredible. So love, thank you for dreaming this dream. Thank you for embarking on this dream.

Now, all you have to do is just sustain. And I know that’s not an easy task. But, if you can incorporate these 4 pathways of ease into this not so easy journey, you can and will sustain.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll also love these episodes:

111 | Boundaries 101

Most of us have heard of boundaries, but we may not truly understand what boundaries mean and often we struggle in setting boundaries for ourselves that prioritize our wants, needs, and desires. Listen to this episode to learn what boundaries really mean, why boundaries are important, and my go-to 4 steps to setting boundaries for yourself so you can ask for what you really need.

85 | Mindset: Circumstance vs Perception

So often we think it’s our circumstances that are dictating how we feel. But mindset work teaches us that it’s not what’s happening in our lives that’s affecting our emotions but how we perceive it instead. In this episode, I share my most powerful tools to help you shift your mindset in a healthy and genuine way.

Did you know that each podcast 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