All of us have hopes and dreams. You and I look at our lives and see things we wish were there, or things we want to be different. It could be for your career, your family, a relationship with a friend, sibling, spouse, parent or child.

This vision, the difference between what is and what could be in many ways keeps us moving forward in life. This dream gets us up in the morning and gives us hope that things will change and get better, even when it seems hopeless.

Sadly though, many of our dreams stay like that. Dreams. They don’t get out of our heads and hearts. We don’t tell anyone the world that we see, the hope that we have.

Why don’t we go public with our dreams and goals?

There are a few reasons:

1. We have a lot of self-doubts. These doubts could come from your family of origin or somewhere else, but we believe all kinds of messages about our dreams that aren’t true. Things like, we aren’t smart enough, we aren’t a good enough parent, boss or leader; we’re too late to get started, we aren’t old enough or have enough experience.

Whatever message we carry around and we all have a tape that plays in our head.

Mine is often centered around not being smart enough or not belonging in a room that I find myself in. I’ll sit with other leaders and think, “I don’t belong here.” This will cause me to clam up and not bring my whole self to a situation. I miss out, and so do others.

With our self-doubts, the moment we go public with a dream and someone tells us why that can’t happen; they confirm our self-doubts. So why put ourselves through that?

So we stay quiet, and our dreams die a slow death in our heart.

2. We like the idea of a dream more than the work of a dream. Many people love the idea of starting a business, church, going back to school, getting out of debt, but not the work it will take. I see this a lot in church planting circles. A potential church planter has gone to some conferences, listened to the podcasts, read the books, can tell you the strategy for his plant, the name and even has a logo, but no people. Why? It is just in his head. Now, a dream has to start there. But if it never moves, it will never move anyone.

And honestly, if you aren’t willing to do the work of your dream, it won’t happen and it wasn’t yours anyway.

How do you know if you should go public with your dream?

Andy Stanley says an effective vision shares the problem, the solution, the reason something must be done and the reason something must be done now.

Just because a problem exists, doesn’t mean you need to solve it or that the time is right. There are lots of things you can point out as a problem, but don’t have a solution to.

Does it need to be solved now? The answer to that question is, not always. It might be nice, but it might not be yet.

At the intersection of that statement: a problem, a solution and a reason that something must be done and done now is the answer to whether your dream is right, the timing is right, and it is time to go public with it.