Congratulations! You’ve made it to your final week of The STRETCH! WOW. What a journey! It’s been a pleasure for me to travel with you these 12 weeks. And it is with great pleasure that I now share some thoughts from the man I consider to have a Ph.D. in Dreaming. His books have had an extraordinary influence on my life; in fact, when I moved to New York, I traveled with two suitcases, the Bible and Dr. Bruce’s bestseller, The Prayer of Jabez. His words have inspired me every day since I first opened the book. Get ready to be inspired.
Dream All-Star Training Session #10 with Dr. Bruce Wilkinson
- Dreamer All-Star: Dr. Bruce Wilkinson
- Dreamer Type: Make it Happen and Activist Dreamer
- Dreamer Title: New York Times Best Selling Author, Christian Teacher, Philanthropist, Entrepreneur
Dr. Bruce Wilkinson is a Christian teacher, speaker, and best-selling author of several books including The Prayer of Jabez and A Life God Rewards. He has coached thousands of people toward the realization of their Dreams and has delivered keynote addresses at national and international events with audiences of 80,000 or more. Dr. Bruce is the author or more than 60 books, several of which reached the number one spot on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Bruce’s book, The Prayer of Jabez, remains the fastest-selling book in history, with worldwide sales exceeding 20 million.
The Dream is Inside You
“People don’t understand that they’re on earth to achieve their dream. I believe that there is a dream is already in your heart when you are born. It’s not that you need to go and invent a dream. Instead, a dream is put inside of you in a seed.”
Dreaming With Childlike Wonder
“I’ve been all over the world and whenever I ask children what they want to be when they grow up, they all have an answer and it’s exciting to them. If they’re young they’ll dance around and they’ll tell you, ‘I want to be a princess.’ ‘I want to be a famous basketball player.’ ‘I want to do this and this and this.’ And none of those children’s dreams are ever small. They want to be more than they are.”
Stop Downsizing Your Dreams
“We say, ‘I can’t do this. I’ve never done this. This is too big for me. If I told somebody I want to this, they would think that I’m crazy. So I know what I’ll do, I’ll make it smaller and smaller and smaller until I can know I can do it.’ And then they wonder why they no longer want to do it.
“When you don’t know what to do and you’re uncomfortable and people say about you, ‘You can’t possibly succeed at that,’ then you can become more than you are today. It’s not trying to be safe. It’s trying to live the dream which never is safe in the early days. If you value being safe over living your dream, you can forget ever doing your dream. It’s got to be okay to be afraid.”
Rather Than Running From Fear, Run Toward it
“Stop running away from the four-letter word ‘fear.’ Run to it. It’s alright to say, ‘I don’t know how.’ It’s alright to fall down. Get back up. You didn’t fail, you fell down. So what? I’ve fallen down many times. So what? It’s not whether you’ve tripped over your own feet. It’s when you get back up again and again and again until you learn how to walk the new dream.
“People are so afraid of failing. And I say, ‘I love to fail.’ That’s where I learn the most. I learn the most when it didn’t work. That thing failed but that’s not me. I’m here. I’m going to try this and if that works, that still isn’t me. That’s something that I did, and I’m going to keep on going.”
Making it Through Dark Times
“Everybody has dark days and dark weeks and dark months and they’re maybe even more than a year. There’s no magic to get out of that. But it is the dark times in which you doubt everything. You doubt yourself, you doubt the dream, you doubt if it will ever work, you doubt you made the right decisions, you doubt God. If he’s really good, where on earth is he? You doubt all of those things.
“You start digging a hole, and you sit there for the day and you look down the hill and say, ‘Look where I have come from. Man, that’s a steep mountain. I’m not sure.’ And you dig further the next day and the next day until you have your own little dark but comfortable cave. Then you get yourself a little refrigerator and you bring your iPhone in and you get come candy bars and you start living halfway in and you stall.
“Mediocrity is staying there. That’s what most people do. Most people stop halfway up their dream and they settle in mediocrity. When I’m in the dark season, I ask for a little more understanding from my wife as I work through this and I keep a journal. You make up your mind ahead of time, this has a beginning, and a middle, and an end. And sometimes you can end your wasteland and sometimes you can’t because other things are going on that are outside of your control. What you cannot do is to permit yourself to sit down and cover up.
“Many times life brings you through a very painful and confusing season of life that will not work outright. It just won’t. And we misunderstand that those seasons are to prepare us for this. And the only way to get here is to learn the lessons here which did not include succeeding. If it did not include succeeding. It’s because of what’s coming in the future.”
Dreams & Money
“A misunderstanding about money is the number one reason why people don’t go forward on their dream. Some people have the misconception that God will provide the money and if he doesn’t, then it’s the wrong time to move ahead. That’s a false view. Go find the money. Go get it. Ask God to help you, but if you believe in your dream, go get the money. And if you can’t get the money, go do the dream anyway.”
Our Dreams are Meant to STRETCH us
“A dream pulls you in this direction because you’re not there yet. And whenever God puts a dream in your life and starts clarifying it, it’s always overwhelming. That’s what people don’t understand. They think this can’t be right because it scares them. No, it’s going to scare you and that proves it is right. You have to be called to do something beyond what you think you can do to become the person you wish you could be.”
