'Dream Big' by Lisa Nichols

You know, I have a message for you, a very important message. We live in a world where, you know, limiting beliefs and limited thinking is accepted. And in some environments, it's actually encouraged not to put anyone down or any institution down. But look at our educational system. It's bound by who you can be, who you can't be. We're taught that, you know, as an academic excellence student, you are expected to achieve more pressure, but yet even inside that more that higher achievement, there's still a limiting belief there. You know, I look at my life today and it's barely recognizable. I'm grateful to say I have six bestsellers. I sat with Oprah, with Larry King on cnn, Good Day la. I've traveled all over the world, did work in Taipei and Africa and Kazakhstan. But that wasn't where I started. I started struggling for 12 years in the educational system, not thinking I was good enough. The word fail or pass was threaded through every year in school in some area or another. And so I graduated or got out. I mean, I graduated, but what did I graduate to? I graduated more of who to. More of who I think I might be able to be or who I couldn't be, but not my possibility. I look up and for the first 10, 15 years of my adulthood, I struggled. I struggled because I didn't dream big enough at that time. I didn't know. I felt like my dreams were covered and smothered with the cultural limitations were defined by who our parents were, what our culture can do, what our community can do. So you look at all the areas of our lives, financially, mentally, emotionally, family, geographically, and all of those things kind of put us in a box. And some of our boxes are this big, so we think they're amazing. Some of them are this big, and we know they're choking the life out of us. The reality is we're trained to be realistic, to be logical, to stay practical. And there's nothing realistic and logical about Steve Jobs and his journey. There's nothing realistical and logical about Dr. Martin Luther King and his willingness to be radical for a change that none of us saw coming. There's nothing realistic about Nelson Mandela leaving prison after 27 years and leading the largest forgiveness movement ever. There's nothing realistic and logical about even my journey. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, having three fights a week just to get home from school, you know, being told that I was the weakest writer my teacher had ever met and that I should never speak in public by my speech teacher to looking at my life today. And going on and having a child before I got married and getting on government's assistance just to feed my baby, not having money to buy him Pampers and wrapping my son in a towel for three days until I can afford to get money to buy him Pampers. I look at my life and I wasn't supposed to be who I am today. Something turned, but it didn't come from outside. It didn't come from my culture or my community. It came from within. Who I was committed to transforming my life into. Just didn't fit. It didn't fit realistic, it didn't fit practical and it didn't fit logical. I didn't know how I was going to get there. There were no examples of how I would get there. There was no instructions, there was no gps and there wasn't even anyone around me that had an idea of how to help me. All there was was my intuition, my internal gps, my internal God placement system and the will and the desire and the big dream inside my belly. And I was willing to keep at it until I burst something greater than myself. In order to live the life you love and love the life you live, you have to be willing to step on the other side of normal. On the other side of where people give you permission to step, you have to be willing to step on the other side of realistic. You have to be willing to dream big and give yourself a radical chance for a radical future and a breathtaking possibility. It's not starts with you, I promise. I'm so excited because I'm putting together a video for you that's going to help you stay on track, stay on course, get back on track if ever you need to and really push past any limitations you've ever had before and soar. Soar. And ultimately dream big dream huge dream. Ginormous. I can't wait to serve you.