The dream you keep filing away is trying to tell you something
You know that thing you do.
A thought floats up. Something you’d love to try. Something that excites you for about three seconds before your brain catches up and files it under “unrealistic.”
You don’t even argue with yourself anymore. The dismissal is automatic. It doesn’t work here. I have responsibilities. That’s not who I am at this point in my life.
The dream doesn’t die. It just gets quietly archived. Filed away somewhere between the quarterly targets and the weekly meal plans.
And you move on.
You didn’t stop dreaming because you grew up
Most of us believe we stopped dreaming because we matured. Because we traded fantasy for responsibility. Because at some point we learned to be sensible and that’s what sensible people do.
But that’s not what happened.
What happened is that you got really good at editing. Every desire, every pull, every “what if” now runs through a filter so efficient you barely notice it operating. The cost-benefit analysis kicks in before the thought has fully formed. The risk assessment is instant. And by the time you’ve processed it, the dream has been dismissed entirely. Not explored. Not tested. Just gone.
You didn’t lose the ability to dream. You automated the process of killing dreams before they become inconvenient.
What I filed away for twenty years
This is something most people don’t know about me.
When I was a kid, I joined a life saver club. Water rescue. Through that, I got to attend an ocean rescue summer camp, and it was the kind of experience that gets under your skin and never quite leaves. The water. The training. The sense of purpose that comes from learning to pull someone to safety.
It is one of my fondest memories. And since then, somewhere in the background of my life, there has been this quiet dream of becoming an ocean rescue swimmer.
It surfaces every now and then. I’ll see something on the news, or stumble across a documentary, and there it is again. That pull.
And every time, I run it through the filter.
I live in Finland. I have a family and I need to be here for them. The conversations I’ve had with rescue swimmers and volunteers have made the reality of that work very clear.
So I file it away. Again.
The desire underneath
But here’s what took me years to recognise. The dream of ocean rescue was never really about ocean rescue.
It was about service. The desire to help. To be useful in a way that matters. To show up for someone when they need it most.
That desire didn’t go away because I rationalised the dream. It just went underground. And when I finally stopped dismissing it and started asking what it was actually about, I found a way to act on it that fits my life as it is right now. Coaching. Writing. Building something that helps people navigate the storms they’re caught in, even when those storms are internal ones.
The water theme in Thrive Wave is not an accident.
I’m not living out what I dreamed of as a kid. But I’m acting on the desire that was always at the root of it. And I would never have found that if I’d kept filing the dream away without ever asking what it was trying to tell me.
Three seconds before the filter kicks in
Think about how quickly it happens for you.
You’re at your desk on a Tuesday afternoon. Something crosses your mind. Maybe it’s a career change. Maybe it’s a creative project you’ve been circling for years. Maybe it’s something you can’t even articulate yet, just a pull towards something that isn’t this.
And before the thought has fully formed, the filter kicks in.
That’s not realistic. I can’t afford to take that risk. What would people think? I have a mortgage. Kids. Responsibilities.
You don’t even give yourself the courtesy of sitting with it for five minutes before you shut it down.
We treat dreaming like it’s a luxury that responsible adults cannot afford. As if entertaining an idea commits you to quitting your job and dismantling everything you’ve built. As if wanting something different is reckless rather than human.
But look at what happens when you don’t allow yourself to dream. You keep going. You optimise what you already have. You hit the targets, collect the results, and feel that familiar flatness when they land. The quiet sense that something is missing, but you can’t name what. The emptiness that sits underneath a well-structured life. The thing that keeps you scrolling at midnight instead of sleeping.
The professionals I work with don’t lack ambition. They lack permission. Permission to want something they can’t yet justify with a spreadsheet.
The dream is not the destination
A friend of mine once said to me, “the sky is the limit.” It was years ago and I don’t remember the exact context. But the sentence stayed. Not because it’s original. Because of what I felt when I heard it. A kind of permission. As if someone had briefly lifted the lid on the box I’d been sitting in and said, you know this has edges, right? And you drew them yourself.
That’s what dreaming actually is. Not a five-year plan. Not a commitment. Just lifting the lid long enough to see what’s out there before you decide it’s not for you.
And here’s what I keep seeing, both in my own life and in the people I coach: the dream itself might not be the thing you end up doing. But the desire underneath it is always worth listening to.
If you keep imagining a life with more freedom, it might not be about the specific escape fantasy. It might be about autonomy.
If you keep imagining creating something, it might not be about becoming an artist or an entrepreneur. It might be about expression. About making something that didn’t exist before you made it.
If you keep imagining helping people in some way you can’t quite define, it might not be about the specific role. It might be about purpose.
The dream is the surface. The desire is the message. And if you keep rationalising the surface away, you never get to the message underneath.
What I’m actually asking you to do
I’m not asking you to hand in your resignation on Monday. I’m not asking you to blow up your life in pursuit of a vision you had at summer camp.
I’m asking you to stop editing so fast.
The next time a thought surfaces, a want, a pull, something that lights up for those three seconds before your brain steps in, let it stay a little longer. Don’t filter it. Don’t run the cost-benefit analysis. Just sit with it.
Ask yourself: what is this actually about? What’s the desire underneath the dream?
You don’t have to act on the dream itself. You don’t have to do anything dramatic. Just stop filing it away before you’ve heard what it’s trying to say.
Because the things we keep dismissing have a habit of being the things we regret never exploring. Bronnie Ware spent years working in palliative care and found the same regret at the top of the list, again and again: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
So what’s yours?
What’s the dream you keep archiving? Not the safe, sensible version. The real one. The one that still surfaces even though you’ve told yourself a hundred times it doesn’t make sense.
Maybe it’s time to stop making sense of it and start listening to what it actually wants from you.
If you’re ready to stop optimising and start asking the questions that matter, that’s exactly where coaching begins. And if you want to explore what those underlying desires actually point to, start with your core values.
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