Dare to DREAM

Life

Mar 17

Date

3.17.2021

time

Late evening

Place

A moment of reflection

There are many life lessons my mom instilled in my sisters and myself. I hold nearly every one of those lessons dear to my heart. But there is one lesson in particular that I am incredibly thankful for and that was her constant encouragement for us to DREAM BIG. She often reminded my sisters and me that we could do anything we set our minds to you. She infused and cultivated that mindset in everything we did…from school to extracurriculars, anything was possible if we dared to dream wildly and put action behind the dream to make it possible.

I want to share my Little Miss Community Care experience with you. I could not have been older than 5 and I was determined to win this community pageant. With my darling ivory dress with pearls (that I still have) and bright white lace socks that folded over, I told my mom while en route to the pageant in our burgundy Buick that I needed to take a beauty nap because I was going to win. And guess what? I won the pageant. This is perhaps my earliest memory of dreaming of something and it coming to pass. While I don’t remember everything about 5-year-old Candace, I am confident that my Little Miss Community Care experience was a dream launching pad for me.

Since that experience nearly 27 years ago, I have dreamed and longed for many things to come to pass. When I look back on my life and really begin to take inventory of the things I desired to do at various moments in my life and realize that nearly all have come to pass in some capacity, I find myself overwhelmed with emotions.

In the early years of college, I adopted a quote that I lived by and continue to live by.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their DREAMS.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

Call it cliche if you want to, but this quote has fueled me for over a decade. In moments that I have felt less than, worthless, incapable, frustrated, unmotivated, I have always found myself back to this quote and remember that if I believe and powered that belief with action, I can achieve anything I put my mind to…ANYTHING! Let’s go back to high school Candace for a quick moment, a time in my life when I had yet discovered the powerful words above. Math was not my best subject…always been a struggle for me since the 3rd grade. So many moments of feeling worthless and frustrated over MATH. I believe it was 9th or 10th grade and I was taking Geometry and it was spiraling into an academic disaster for me. Being the person that I am, I decided to brainstorm on ways to overcome my math trauma. And you guys, I came up with an idea…join Math League! haha. I know, crazy. But I made this dream/goal a priority and joined the team. I went to our weekly meetings each and every Tuesday at 7:30 AM without the slightest clue of what I was doing half the time. I even went to a math competition. ha. Even though I was not 100% sure of what I was doing, I BELIEVED THAT I COULD DO IT. And beyond believing I could do it, I put ACTION BEHIND IT.

As I shared on Instagram last week, we are talking about dreams this month, because I feel strongly that it is important for women to not only have dreams, but understand that when we couple action with our wildest dreams we can make magic happen. The idea of dreaming isn’t just for certain people, but for all. We just have to position our mindsets and hearts to dare to dream and couple those dreams with action. So I guess this post is for every dream your heart desires…from finding your person to launching your own business to starting a family to paying off credit card debit to applying to your dream college to finding joy, that future is indeed possible, as long as YOU believe.

Here’s to daring to dream. May we dream wildy dear ones and understand that we are truly capable of anything we set our mind, heart and intentions to.