How to Decide Who to Trust with Your Career Dreams
You tell someone about a dream you have been holding onto for a while, maybe over dinner, maybe in the car on the way home, and instead of cheering you on they just look at you and ask, can you do it, and the whole room goes a little quiet, and the excitement you walked in with quietly slips out of you. It sounds like a small question, it even sounds fair, but you can feel what is really sitting underneath it, the part that is saying they do not think you can, and before you know it a voice in your own head has picked up the same words. One little question from the wrong person, and suddenly you are doubting the very thing you were so sure of an hour ago.
What took me years to understand is that the problem was almost never the dream itself, it was who I kept choosing to tell it to. I would carry my biggest goals straight to the wrong people, sit there hopeful, and walk away carrying their doubt as if it were my own, over and over, until something finally clicked and I learned how to tell who was safe to open up to before I ever said a word.
There are two things I check now before I trust anyone with a dream...