When the dream changes…& how to reframe it

Isn’t it funny how, as kids, we dreamed of the “arrival”?
The degrees.
The job titles.
The shiny front door to the house with the matching mailbox.

We thought those things were the dream.

But really, they were just placeholders.
What we actually wanted was to feel “accomplished”.
To have a place we could call our own — a place to feel safe….and to belong.
To have a sense of identity and independence—to free and alive and wildly, unapologetically ourselves.

No one tells you this growing up, but so much of adulthood is realizing you never actually wanted the thing you thought you wanted—you wanted the feeling you thought it would give you.

In coaching, we call this the difference between the “outer goal” and the “inner goal.”
The outer goal is the surface level goal: the promotion, the bigger house, the perfect relationship.
The inner goal is what you’re really chasing underneath it all: safety, belonging, freedom, authenticity, joy, peace.

While your outer goals change and develop over time, your inner goals often remain unchanged. Which is why we might arrive at a place where we look at what we’ve accomplished—what we once wanted desperately—might now feel like trying to slip into an old outfit from your twenties. Nostalgic, maybe, but not quite “you” anymore.

And when that happens, the “sunk cost fallacy” creeps in. You start to think: But I’ve invested so much in this. What now? Did I waste all that time?

Here’s the truth: it’s never wasted.
It’s all part of the spiral—how we grow, change, and circle back to ourselves again and again. When we recognize the inner goal we realize that we’ve always been chasing the same thing at the core, just in different packaging.

Just today, I found myself watching some “vlog-style” videos my daughter filmed when we first moved here 10 months ago. She looked younger, she carried so much excitement and so many spoken and unspoken hopes and fears of what lay ahead of us. She had no idea how it would all unfold.

And now, looking back, I can see how beautifully it has.
Not because everything went “according to plan,” but because life unfolded in ways we couldn’t have scripted.

It made me think about how easy it is to miss the gradual shifts—the tiny moments of courage, the quiet changes in perspective, the skills slowly and painfully at times grown learned that build us into the people capable of having the inner goals we’re seeking.

That’s why pausing matters.
It’s not just about reflection—it’s about recalibration.
It’s about integrating the lessons and the wisdom from those small changes we didn’t notice at the time.

When we take the time to chart our course more with our hearts than our heads, something shifts. We let go of the image of what we think we need and FEEL into the goal that we’re actually chasing, and what will allow us to truly feel that. If we prioritize the inner goal—the feeling—there is no single arrival point, no one moment where we finally “make it.”
Instead, the goal becomes something we live into every single day.
A life where the measure of success is how often we feel connected, grounded, joyful, and free.

And I couldn’t help but wonder… what if the real arrival isn’t a destination at all, but the quiet moments of coming home to ourselves again and again. Because in the end, it’s not about getting to the dream—it’s about inhabiting it, piece by piece, as it becomes your reality.