“There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, ‘Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course I’ve got dreams.’ Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they’re still there.” – Erma Bombeck
This quote makes me want to burst into tears with the memory of all the years I’ve done this in my own life.
Looking around my office, I realize that I also hide my dreams in stacks of papers.
In between the paid bills I need to file (or the unpaid ones I need to deal with), are the great ideas I’ve had and still not acted on.
I have to admit to myself that if I have a dream or an idea, the best course of action is to jump on it and make it happen. Once it goes into that pile, or becomes a business plan, I suck all the joy and inspiration right out of it.
Then my dream never takes flight and eventually it even gets lost from my memory!
A great example of this is that 2 years after I became a home stager, I was diving through an old pile of paper and stumbled on a newspaper article about home staging that I had cut out of a newspaper 4 years earlier.
In other words, I had:
- read about home staging and realized “that thing I did” naturally to my own houses before selling them had an actual name
- discovered it was an actual career that could make money and that it would use my creative talents and interest in real estate
- cut the article out, knowing it was something to explore further and scribbled some notes in the margin
And, that’s where it died. I put the home staging article, that represented a dream and a new possibility for my life, onto a corner of my desk to think about later!
No doubt, real life kept going on around me as I stayed busy parenting, running my other business, keeping my house clean, planning our next meals, running errands, etc.
I didn’t know how I could start a home staging business and do what the other stagers I was reading about had done. Being stuck on that “where do I start?” question became too painful.
I think that was my unconscious reason for literally burying the whole idea. The story about successful home stagers lay forgotten as more and more “to do”, “to read” or “to pay” options got dumped on top of it, eventually forming a new mountain of paper I would never look at.
Fortunately, two years later something else put “home staging” back on my radar and I rediscovered that dream and turned it into a successful career when I started my staging business Six Elements Inc.
A big part of what inspires me to teach other home stagers how the make money doing what they love is I know how painful it is living with dreams that you take out and look at, and put back on a shelf because you don’t know how to take action on them.
I hope you’ll share your own story by adding a comment to this post. It will inspire others and help me write more articles that can help you. After all, without the wonderful comments from my readers, it’s hard to come up with what to write about 2 to 3 times a week!
Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging
Debra Gould knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.
Related posts:
- Summer escape can also be life changing for HGTV addicts
- Aspiring stagers, are you willing to act on your dream?
- Dream home staging job with a catch…
- Career in home staging lets working mother of three live her dream
- Holiday gift a chance for spouse to support dream of becoming a home stager
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