Excerpt from 90 Days to Expand Your Dreams, Crush Your Goals, and Create Your Own Success. (McGraw-Hill November 22, 2019).

Eliminate Dream Bullies

Remember when I told you that your Stretch journey includes interruptions of your comfort? These interruptions also affect the people who have been happily comfortable along with you—your friends, relatives, coworkers, and more, for example. What happens when you choose to change the status quo by STRETCHING into your goals? You’re not only interrupting your comfortable world, you’re shaking up the comfort zone of those around you. So if your favorite aunt fiercely challenges your decision to leave your safe career, it’s likely that her own experiences and fears are coming to light. Strange as it may sound, your courageous leap into the unknown can often make other people fearful, and these people become your Dream Bullies.

When you hear the word bully, you probably think of a person who knowingly intends someone else harm. That’s not a Dream Bully. More often than not, your Dream Bullies are people who care about you but who—sometimes unknowingly—try to derail your Dreams. Dream Bullies will often try to keep you stuck as you are, confined to their limited possibilities because what you’re doing makes them uncomfortable.

They say things like, “This isn’t like you,” or “Why would you want to go through all that?” They often treat you like a static human being and discourage you from exploring multiple versions of yourself. They’re probably scared of what’s going to happen when you shake it up. Be prepared: The Stretch may cost you friends, lovers, coworkers, and employees. You might have to completely restructure major elements of your life, but only you should be the one to decide if the changes are worth the costs. Even though the intentions of your Dream Bullies might be loving, you must protect your Dream from these Bullies, and that protection will take many forms.

One of my greatest heroes and inspirations is my grandmother. She is my best friend and one of the people I love most in this world. She’s also my number one Dream Bully. Yes, you read that correctly. The idea of my taking professional risks gives her terrible anxiety and fear, so if I’m not careful, her issues about risk and change will seep into my Dreams, potentially stall my momentum, and maybe even derail my success. She was so pleased with and comforted by my having chosen a “secure” career path that when I decided to leave my “good, good job” as an executive at IBM Global Services, I simply chose not to tell her.

I know that she’d worry herself ragged over why I was choosing the risky unknown over what appeared to be a secure career position, and I didn’t want my progress or my optimism derailed by the Dream Bullying that my beloved grandmother would surely bring to my process. So, I made the tough choice at that time to leave her out of my Dream circle. After I was able to secure a stable income, I shared my full professional vision with my grandmother.

Your Dream Bullies don’t mean harm, nor do they want you unhappy. They simply share their concerns from their point of view. But you mustn’t let other people’s willingness to change or risk dictate your course.

Careerpreneur Dreamer and former White House social secretary Desirée Rogers say that to be successful, sometimes you have to be a warrior. She says, “That means that you’ve got to do everything you can to be successful. Some of these things include making hard decisions. You’ve got to get rid of the negativity.” When battling cancer, Desirée had to get rid of negativity by setting an unexpected Dream Bully straight. “My mother kept saying to me, ‘I remember when your father had cancer. He did this. He had that.’ I said, ‘Mommy, he didn’t make it. Stop it. Otherwise, you can’t come back.’ You’ve got to command your space. Sometimes that means you can’t be around people close to you right then—unless they change their behavior. You’ve got to be a warrior.”

Yvonne Orji, one of the stars of HBO’s hit Insecure and the “yes!” comedian I mentioned in Chapter 2, was raised by parents who taught her that accomplishment meant things like straight A’s and traditional career choices. There was no chance that her parents were going to support her choosing a career in comedy, so, lucky for Yvonne, she heard the voice of God guiding her to be strong and stand up to the Dream Bullies in her family. “I was raised by Nigerian parents whose only reason to come to this country was for us to get a good education,” Yvonne recalls. “I’m their only girl. I was the straight-A student. I did everything right. And then God was like, ‘Cool, cool, cool. Let me holler at you for a second.’ He steered me in a totally different direction, and it literally felt like I was standing between two different directions: African parents and Jesus.” She chose comedy, and with that choice came the truth that she needed to create some boundaries to protect her Dream from those who would squash it. It wasn’t easy to protect her Dream from Bullies, but she did, and because of that her Dream is alive and thriving today.

EXERCISE 3.1:

IDENTIFYING DREAM BULLIES

Consider your closest circle of relatives, friends, and colleagues. Now think about your most recent interactions with them, and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Does this person believe in me?

2. Does this person support my vision or Dream?

3. Does this person speak affirmative words about my life?

4. Can I trust this person to support my vision even if it’s beyond his or her understanding?

5. When I leave this person’s presence, do I feel better or worse?

6. Do I enjoy the activities that I typically share with this person?

7. Has this person introduced me to other influential people who can advance my vision?

8. Will this relationship be a good fit for who I want to be six months from now? A year from now? Five years from now?

9. Is this person open to challenging his or her perspectives and try- ing new experiences?

10. Does this person bring new ideas and thoughts to the conversation?

11. Would I trust this person to make essential life choices on my behalf?

This exercise is designed to help you build your awareness. By being more mindful of the feelings and communication styles of the people in your close circle, you’ll be able to see who will help or hurt your Dream. Dream Supporters are those you’ll want to reach to for support and advice. Dream Bullies will resist and even try to sabotage you. And, there some are neutral observers too.

Knowing who’s who will show you where to draw boundary lines when it comes to your goals. These boundaries aren’t about causing catastrophic change to your relationships; they’re about being the protector of this Dream Baby of yours and making sure it has the chance to grow and thrive. If it takes a village, make sure that you’re the one to decide who lives there.

Time Busters

As you move through this detoxification process, it is also important to pay attention to how you’re spending your time. In my early days of The Stretch, I had a weakness for binging on seasons of Sex and the City. It was lots of fun, but was this activity moving me closer to my vision? No. So when I moved to New York, I made the radical decision not to have a television in my apartment. At first, I felt withdrawal. Those first two months without that familiar TV friend were rough! But I wanted to start being honest with myself, so I’d ask myself questions like, “How can you productively use the time that you used to spend watching reality shows?” and “Sarah Jessica Parker has already manifested her dreams; who’s working on yours?”

Without the TV lineup to turn to, I began to read business and inspirational books. I took in as much information as I could about building a successful business, strengthening my mind, feeding my spirit, and developing the kind of relationships that would help me reach my goals. I also made the choice to stop going to clubs. My mother used to joke that I went clubbing like it was a second job. Yes, club life was a lot of fun, but the morning after a big night out, what did I have to show for my time? During this same period, I also chose to give up alcohol. Before I knew it, I’d gone almost three years without those activities in my life, and I didn’t miss them.

I’m not suggesting that you give up all social activities or even all your vices, but during that phase in my life, I saw a correlation between my detoxing from those elements and the explosive results I began to experience in my career. Within a year of my starting at RUSH Communications, a leading entertainment, media, and lifestyle company, I went from the position of unpaid apprentice to general manager of a global company. In corporate work, that kind of leap is almost unheard of. It was during this climb I learned that discipline, work, focus, and efficient use of time are what deliver remarkable results.

But before you overhaul any portion of your life, let’s do a Time Audit to examine how you currently spend your time.

Reclaiming Your Time

When Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin avoided House Rep Maxine Waters’s question by lobbing compliments her way, she interrupted him with the now-infamous phrase, “I’m reclaiming my time.” You, too, have the right—and probably the need—to reclaim your time. I want you to monitor how you spend all your waking and sleeping hours for the next seven days and enter the data into the table in Exercise 3.2. Include everything you do: eating meals, working, commuting, exercising, resting, watching television, talking on the phone, surfing the Internet—everything. Each part of this table is divided into half-hour sections so you can clearly see how you’re spending your minutes and hours. When you can observe a week of your time as a whole, you’ll be able to see where your time can be better spent toward the goals of your Stretch.

Love what you’ve read? Want to eliminate those dream bullies of yours? Shop the book below and you’ll be one step closer: