Dreams! When done together can make your life wonderful!

I love “It’s a Wonderful Life”. I use to watch it every December during the Christmas Holidays. The great thing about the film is that it helps you to appreciate what you have as opposed to what you don’t.

The clip here is great theme for our next intimacy level on sharing our dreams with our partner.

In the last intimacy level #3 we talked about the importance of being accepted by our partners in order to share our opinions. This acceptance by our partner helps bridge the gap to this next intimacy level which is the ability to share our dreams.

According to Matthew Kelly’s Seven Levels of Intimacy, dreams are the hopes, fantasies, and our deepest desires that we have for our future. In today’s environment it takes a great degree of vulnerability to be able to share our dreams with our partners because we often don’t receive the acknowledgement and support we expect or need in order to work towards fulfilling them.

To avoid that result, we often don’t reveal our dreams and try to make a go at it alone. This procedure can diminish your effectiveness as a couple because you wind up traveling on different paths. You often see this happen to celebrity couples’ as their own individual dreams take precedent over their dreams as a couple i.e. Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony or Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Acknowledging and accepting your partner’s individual dreams and creating mutual dreams not only can energize you as a couple, but it can also be instrumental in achieving the dreams you have envisioned. It will also the direction your lives may go. This level of intimacy can be very satisfying and exciting, but your mastery to achieve this level of intimacy won’t be achieved until you have mastered the other three levels.

So what are the components needed to have mutually shared dreams.

• Knowing each other’s dreams is crucial. If you are working toward one dream and your partner is working toward another, it will cause conflict because how they view the direction of their life is different from yours.
• Delayed gratification – understanding this and practicing takes a certain discipline and a degree of communication. If you have mutually shared dreams, you will have to put some of your own personal dreams and aspirations on hold for the good of the relationship. That may mean
  you delay purchasing that car in order to place the money into your house fund, or putting off the dream vacation you can’t afford now and save it in order to travel after retirement.
• Write your dreams down. There are seven areas in which you could dream about: physical, emotional, intellectual, professional, financial and adventurous.  After you have written them down in a journal, or on the computer, set goals around them with a timetable. Preferably one year. Revisit your dreams once a year and remind your spouse of the dreams the both of you have envisioned for your future.
• If you can plan a getaway to work on this, do it today, or set some time over the course of several weeks to get this done.

STRIVERS, get to dreaming and writing! Have a good weekend.

Coach Keith