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BE THE HERO OF YOUR STORY

Having established that it is essential to dream, you may be thinking, “I’m ready to dream. But I have no idea what my dream is!” Some of us know exactly what we want; some of us don’t. More of us have a nascent sense, but the dream remains vague or amorphous and will require concerted effort on our part to give it definition. In asking ourselves the following questions, we can help our dreams take shape:

As we answer these questions, the contours of our dream will emerge. We can then begin to explore our possibilities and try out different dreams.

PREPARING TO DREAM

Before we dive deep into questions about the details of our dreams, which we’ll do in this section, it is important to do a little prep work, a pregame warm-up, as it were, of figuratively throwing down our pom-poms, so we can get our head and heart in the game. When we have become accustomed to sidelining ourselves, getting in the game and casting ourselves as a key player in our story will not be easy.

So let’s start by talking about reality TV. I’ll admit here, without embarrassment, that I’m a fan. It began with American Idol, and more recently I’ve become hooked on So You Think You Can Dance, Project Runway, and The Next Food Network Star. The mythologist Joseph Campbell, while not writing about reality TV directly, provides an explanation for this genre’s success when he says: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Isn’t this what happens on reality TV? Right before our eyes we see people who are hoping to be called to adventure, to be chosen for a hero’s journey, and to obtain the boon. As we watch and vote for our favorites, we find pieces of ourselves mirrored in the contestants, feeling as if we, too, are on the hero’s journey.

While it’s true that all of the finalists can sing or dance, sew or cook, the contestants often move us simply because they don’t seem to know how talented they are. As we watch contestants with self-doubt and raw talent acknowledged by the judges and the voters, we muse to ourselves, “Maybe I don’t know how magnificent I am, either.” If that contestant has been discovered—or chosen—perhaps we can be, too. Even though, in the end, there is only one winner, we are inspired by seeing so many heroes move to the center of their lives, conquering fear and insecurity.

CASTING OURSELVES AS THE HERO

As we begin to claim a central place in our lives, we can begin to discover our dreams. If we tend to move ourselves to the sidelines and live through the dreams of others, dreaming our own dreams will require a paradigm shift. We can trigger this shift, preparing for our possibilities, by telling stories about ourselves, stories in which we are the central character. We can also immerse ourselves in stories about women, real or fictional, who dare to follow their dreams.

One of the places I practice telling stories in which I’m at the center is on my blog. I started Dare to Dream because I believed I had something to say, but also because I wanted to find my voice. In finding myself and becoming the hero of my story, I hope to encourage other women to do the same.

Being the hero will look very different for you than it does for me. Although each of our journeys will have the same central elements, the details will differ. As we begin to tell stories in which we see ourselves as the hero, we begin to believe that what we do matters. Take the story of Athelia “CK” LeSueur, the cofounder of Shabby Apple (shabbyapple.com). Upon graduation from college, she had intended to work in international development. Athelia’s opportunity to move to the center of her life ironically came when significant health problems curtailed her plan to work abroad and she had to move home for a time.

Athelia LeSueur: Fortunate Frustrations

Splat. I looked up at a laughing audience and a stunned dance partner. Falling in the middle of a performance? I could get over it. But dancing through my senior project with a hurt leg? How?

“Work with what you have; utilize your limitations,” Professor Moses told me. Yeech! Trite advice. But, now that I couldn’t jump, I decided to do the entire piece with a part of my body connected to the wall. The dance remains my favorite.

In high school, I put in writing that I wanted to be a fashion designer; unfortunately, I couldn’t sew. I tried. Once. I designed and sewed costumes for my high school dance concert. To the chagrin of one dancer . . . and the delight of the boys in the audience . . . her costume fell apart mid-performance! That, I thought, ended my fashion career.

Work with what you have: three years ago, I had finished graduate school, but health problems forced me to move home to live with my parents. I had studied women’s rights and international development, but I couldn’t find a relevant project in Utah . . . Frustration. Nor could I work for long hours at a time. This limitation forced me to focus and work efficiently.

My co-founder Emily McCormick had her own set of frustrations. With a new baby, she no longer wanted to pursue a full-time career in marketing, but still wanted to keep a hand in marketing. As we brainstormed possibilities, reminiscing about how we enjoyed dressing our high school friends in cute clothes, we decided to start a line of clothing, focusing on dresses.

Utilize your limitations: because we had limited experience, we did research, and lots of it (our two favorite books were The McGraw-Hill Guide to Starting Your Own Business by Stephen Harper and The Fashion Designer Survival Guide by Mary Gehlhar), but there was still so much we didn’t know, industry jargon, for instance. I remember listening carefully to what store owners said at retail shows, but one factory owner later asked me where I had received my training because my “phrasing was so unique!”

Our limited experience also meant we didn’t understand all of the fashion business protocol; this actually worked to our advantage. For example, we didn’t know we were supposed to hire an expensive wholesaler to represent us to buyers, a task that most wholesalers do not do well, causing many companies to fail. And because we knew we bought our own clothes online, we simply bypassed the wholesalers and opened a dot-com store.

Another limitation that accrued to our benefit was lack of funds. As a small, undercapitalized start-up, the one manufacturer who would help us gave us only two fabric choices: cotton poplin and poly/spandex jersey. Because each seam, pleat, button, or pin tuck in a dress cost extra money to produce, and we didn’t have money, out of necessity, we kept our designs simple, making the design process easier, faster, and better.

We experienced many “blips” in manufacturing before we perfected our process. One such blip involved Emily and me personally ripping the buttons off five hundred incorrectly sewn dresses. Another involved a manufacturer who “changed its mind” about producing dresses two days before it was supposed to ship hundreds of dresses we’d presold. Not all frustrations are fortunate.

As for limitations around design, Emily and I agreed easily, but convincing the manufacturers we really did want our dresses to have sleeves, higher necklines, and hemlines at least to the knee was not easy. As frustrating as this was, it helped us define our brand and eventually get more publicity for Shabby Apple.

Everyone has frustrations in life. Some frustrations and limitations can’t be overcome. But even with these constraints, and quite possibly because of them, I have been fortunate to do something that I love.

When Athelia couldn’t pursue her original dream of working in international development, she discovered a new dream, a new adventure, and though the road she and her partner traveled in creating their business was often bumpy, she has certainly achieved the hero’s boon—Athelia’s passion for simple, beautiful clothes has been rewarded in the tremendous success of Shabby Apple. The opportunity for Madeleine Walburger, a mother of four and a health care consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, to move to the center of her story came as a college freshman. Her goal: to beat Stanford’s triple-jump record.

Madeleine Walburger: Perchance to Dream

Hop-skip-and-a-jump. For more than half of my undergraduate experience, I spent countless hours developing my abilities as a triple-jumper on the Stanford University track and field team. As an incoming freshman, school was my top priority, but I was also eager to see what I could achieve with collegiate coaching and year-round training. In high school I had a fantastic coach, but I could only devote about three months a year to the sport. I leapt at the chance to accelerate both my intellectual and athletic abilities.

I started practice a week after school began and soon learned of a long-standing Stanford record for a freshman triple jump: 39’ 1". The mark was further than I had ever jumped, but I considered it within the realm of possibility. I remember peddling home from practice that day, ice bags wrapped around my shins. I ran up the two flights of concrete stairs to my dorm room, where I emblazoned the distance in pen and highlighter on an index card. I posted the card facing my desk and my bed. Here was a soaring dream to spur on my hours of running, jumping, lifting, and competing.

I enjoyed the training, the competing, and the camaraderie, but with few personal successes among us, it was a long eight months for me and for my jumper teammates. More than once I was tempted to pull down my index card before the season was over, but I never did.

I’m not a natural dreamer and with this realization, a question formed: “Why? Why is it hard for me to dream?” I believe I found an answer, or rather two answers.

I’m an analytical decision maker. I aim high and think big with one foot firmly grounded in faith and the other in reality. I consider the variables involved in my decision, seek providential guidance, and then I try and make the best choice, assume the best attitude, and/or map out the best course of action for myself and my family. I seldom weigh personal likes or interests as variables. My approach is not perfect, but it has produced many strong and happy results.

I don’t like to fail. When I identify a dream, there is a possibility I may not accomplish it. So I sometimes hedge my bets. I stay in my comfort zone by aiming high only in those areas where I know I’m strong or where I have a solid infrastructure of support. Otherwise, I don’t even make an attempt.

I want to learn how to dream. I want to listen to my instincts and learn to consider what I love doing regardless of its practicality. I want to learn to value the process and not simply the end. This may not be the season to fully realize many of my aspirations, but I can play with the concept and dream dabble.

Three weeks ago I posted a card on my wall to remind me of my new aspiration. It reads, “Perchance to Dream—I dare you.” I put it by my bedroom door, where it fell to the floor twice. I moved it to my bathroom mirror, where it fell onto the counter, behind the toothbrushes.

The metaphor does not escape me. Like gravity’s attack on my homemade sign, life’s rapid pace, its unexpected diversions, and my insecurities may doggedly attempt to thwart my efforts to see beyond the practical and immediate. Nevertheless, I’m determined to try. I have identified a few personal interests in which I will dabble in the coming year. Here are two.

• Write four unique essays and share them with my “inner circle” of friends. Identify three to five new teaching techniques to develop and apply to my educating responsibilities at my congregation and in my Summer Academy for my children.

My prompt is now duct-taped to the wall.

Back in my college days, after my final meet of the outdoor season, I took down my highlighted triple-jumping goal. I hadn’t hit my mark. After devoting so many waking hours to its accomplishment, it stung to not meet such a publicly posted goal. It felt like failure, although in hindsight, I know it wasn’t. I had allowed myself to dream.

I still have my 39’; 1" index card from my freshman year. It’s in a trunk in the garage. I may post it again, next to my new prompt, “Perchance to Dream—I dare you.”

As Madeleine and Athelia experienced, each of us has the opportunity to become the hero of our story, an opportunity often precipitated by a crisis. We can choose to accept or decline the call. As we embark on our journey we will travel a road fraught with trials, which, if we are to become a hero, we’ll struggle through and survive. When we dare to be the hero of our own story, we begin to grow up, to define our dreams, to become more ourselves than ever.

HEARING A WOMAN’S POINT OF VIEW

We can also learn to take the stage by listening to the stories of those who already have. And if you believe, as I do, that women are fundamentally different from men, it’s important that we hear women’s voices. Unfortunately, so many women, even successful women, refuse to claim a central place in their lives and in their own stories that finding self-assured women within our circle of loved ones can be difficult. It is equally problematic, if not more so, to find strong women’s stories within the annals of literature. The Psyche myth and the biblical passages in Proverbs are notable exceptions. Ironically, these stories were written thousands of years ago.

The popular press skews male as well. According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, only 3 percent of the top positions in mainstream media are held by women. And bylines in the nation’s top intellectual and political magazines are heavily male. Meanwhile, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, in an analysis of eleven magazines published between October 2003 and May 2005, male-to-female byline ratios ranged from thirteen to one at the National Review to seven to one at Harper’s.

When we become aware of just how many of the media stories we ingest are from a man’s point of view, it becomes much easier to understand why we struggle to believe that we as women can dream—and therefore dreaming does require that we dare.

GAINING INSPIRATION FROM LITERATURE AND FILM

There are some books and films that help me move to the center of my life and, most importantly, inspire me to dream when surrounded by naysayers (including myself). They include:

For girls, I’m fond of these titles:

CLAIMING A CENTRAL PLACE IN STORIES OF BIRTH

One of the best places to mine for stories in which we are central characters is in stories about birth, whether our own or the births of our children. Under what circumstances did we come into the world? What hope was born into the world the day that you and I were born? On the day of our birth, we were the hero. Perhaps that’s why birthdays are so important. They remind us that we are heroes of our own stories.

Debra Bingham, DrPH, RN, is a perinatal consultant with more than thirty years of experience. Bingham works with hospital leaders to improve care for mothers and babies and is the president of Lamaze International. Her thoughts on how to improve maternal mortality rates in the United States are quite intriguing, and I believe they have far-reaching implications, which include helping women move to the center of their own stories.

She writes on the Dare to Dream blog: “The rates of maternal death and maternal childbirth-related injuries are rising in the United States. In fact, we have not seen maternal mortality rates this high since the early 1970s. In addition, in 2007 the United States was ranked forty-first among developed countries for maternal mortality rates. These negative trends and worsening outcomes do not make sense in a country with so many resources. Why has maternity care become less mother- and newborn-centric, and more hospital-, nurse-, and physician-centric? Why is maternity care costing so much and resulting in such poor outcomes?”

Bingham argues that our beliefs affect behavior: “How women and men discuss the process of pregnancy and birth can have a negative or positive effect on the women that are involved in the discussion. Our words are powerful and either reinforce or undermine the power of women and their bodies.”

Bingham suggests we ask ourselves the following questions the next time we talk about childbirth.

Debra Bingham’s words are revelatory. As I reflect on her remarks, I see that I shifted much of the locus of control away from me when I had my two children. Her observations are a stark reminder of how deep-seated our inclination is to deflect, to redirect resources away from ourselves. Even when engaged in something that is uniquely a woman’s job, we somehow give away our place at the center.

So why not retell the stories of our birth, and of the birth or adoption of our children, in a way that moves us to the center of our story? Why not tell stories in which we claim our power as givers of life, recognizing that our bodies are ingeniously built-to-spec for this precise purpose? Can we, in turn, tell similar stories about giving birth to our dreams? I believe we can. In fact, I know we can. As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said, “If you want to get something done, ask a woman.”

Discovering and “doing” our dreams requires that we claim a central place in our lives, to accept not only a supporting role but also a leading role. As we practice telling and listening to stories in which we are the lead player or are encouraged to be, we begin to discover who we are and who we want to be. We discover clues to our dreams, and we start to believe that the resources needed to achieve our dreams are ours to have and that, as heroes, they are our birthright.

BECOMING THE MAIN CHARACTER

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

—Joseph Campbell, American folklorist and mythologist

You have something that IT has not. This something is your only weapon. But you must find it for yourself.

—Mrs. Which in A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind, and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born.

—Diane Setterfield, American author