When I was little, all of my friends wanted to be doctors, lawyers, firefighters or police officers when they grew up. I wanted to be a unicorn. Literally. I was convinced that if I wished hard enough, a horn might actually grow out of my forehead. I would regularly feel my forehead to see if there was a bump forming. There wasn’t. But I kept checking. 

Clearly, the unicorn thing didn’t work out, but I don’t think I ever lost the part of me that believes almost anything is possible. I’ve always been a dreamer, and my dreams have rarely been small or particularly practical. I left corporate America as a single mom without some perfectly mapped-out plan for what came next. I’ve started businesses, closed businesses, written a book, built programs that didn’t exist before, pursued opportunities I wasn’t remotely qualified for on paper and said yes to things before I knew exactly how I was going to pull them off. 

I genuinely believe we are capable of creating lives that are bigger than what we can currently see. That doesn’t mean I believe we can manifest anything we want simply by thinking positively about it. Some things don’t work out. Some dreams change. Some take YEARS longer than we think they should. There is usually a tremendous amount of work, disappointment, uncertainty and rejection between the dream and the reality. I know that part really well, too. 

But I have never had much trouble believing in possibility. 

Which is why something that happened a few weeks ago really surprised me. 

I posted that Vitale & Company was expanding and that we needed to grow our bench of consultants. I thought we might get 10 or 12 applications. Instead, 73 people from all over the world applied to work with us. 

Seventy-three. 

I was emotional about the response for a lot of reasons. It meant something to me that so many talented people saw what we’re building and wanted to be part of it. One of my greatest motivations for growing Vitale & Company has always been creating livelihood for other people. I want to build a company where incredibly talented people can do meaningful work, make an impact, support their families and have opportunities they may not have somewhere else. So seeing 73 people raise their hands felt like an enormous responsibility, but also an incredible privilege. 

But the applications did something else. They changed the picture in my head of what this company could become. 

For years, when I thought about Vitale & Company becoming a really big company, I imagined maybe 30 or 40 consultants. That was my big dream. We would work with organizations across the country, have an incredible team and do really meaningful work. I thought that was ambitious. 

Then 73 people applied for a company that isn’t remotely that size yet, and I realized something: I had put a ceiling on my own dream without even knowing I had done it. 

Now I can see 100+ consultants. I can see us working with organizations all over the world. I can see Vitale & Company becoming a global advisory firm with incredibly smart people doing transformational work inside organizations. And once I allowed myself to see that version of the company, I couldn’t unsee it. 

It made me wonder: If someone who literally wanted to grow up to be a unicorn can accidentally stop dreaming big enough, how often are the rest of us doing it? 

I don’t think most of us intentionally stop dreaming. I think we just get really, really busy living. 

Our days are consumed by what is directly in front of us. We have meetings to attend, kids to pick up, clients to serve, employees who need us, bills to pay, dinners to figure out, emails we haven’t answered and approximately 47 things on the to-do list that were supposed to be done yesterday. We spend our lives moving from one responsibility to the next, and because we’re responsible adults, most of our thinking becomes focused on execution. 

What needs to happen today? What needs to happen this week? What problem needs to be solved? What decision needs to be made? 

Those questions are necessary. But they’re very different questions from: What do I want my life to look like? What am I building toward? What would I do if I weren’t so concerned about whether it was practical? What has changed about me since I last answered those questions? 

I don’t think we ask ourselves those questions nearly enough. 

And I actually think this can get harder as we get older and more successful. When you’re young, you’re allowed to imagine anything. Nobody expects a seven-year-old to provide a business plan for becoming a unicorn. But adulthood teaches us to immediately follow desire with logistics. The minute we think, “I would love to…” another part of our brain jumps in with all the reasons it would be difficult, expensive, irresponsible, inconvenient or impossible. 

We become really good at editing our dreams before we’ve even had a chance to dream them. 

And sometimes we don’t even realize that the dream we’re working so hard toward is based on an older version of ourselves. Maybe you decided five years ago that you wanted to run a $10 million company, and now you realize you don’t want the life required to run it. Maybe you spent years trying to reach the next level in your career and have finally admitted you want to do something completely different. Maybe the life you once thought was “too small” suddenly sounds wonderful. Or maybe, like me, you realize that the thing you thought was wildly ambitious was actually just the biggest thing you could see from where you were standing at the time. 

Our dreams are allowed to change because WE change. 

They can change in size. They can change in direction. They can become more ambitious or less ambitious. We can decide we want more money and less travel. More impact and fewer obligations. A bigger company or a simpler life. We can want things at 43 that would have made absolutely no sense to us at 33. 

There isn’t some contract we signed with an earlier version of ourselves that says we have to keep wanting the same things forever. 

But changing the dream requires enough space to realize it needs to change. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we move into fall and the final stretch of 2026. I’m someone who loves the idea of a reset, and I don’t think we need to wait until January 1 to decide that we want to do something differently. Fall naturally feels like a transition anyway. Our schedules change. The weather changes. The pace changes. And I’ve been asking myself what I want this particular season of my life to look like instead of just barreling through the next four months and waking up in January wondering where they went. 

Part of that has meant being willing to look at what’s getting in the way. 

For me, one of those things is limits. I’ve realized recently that I have some work to do around worthiness and receiving — around believing that everything good has to be earned through more work, more effort, more proving. That’s a hard thing for me to even write because I have built so much of my identity around being someone who works incredibly hard. Hard work has served me really well. But there is a difference between working hard because you care deeply about something and believing you’re only worthy of receiving something if you’ve exhausted yourself earning it. 

I’m ready to release some of that. 

I’m also ready to release the habit of making myself the easiest thing to remove from my own calendar. Working out gets bumped. Time to think gets bumped. Things that fill me up get bumped because there is always something more urgent that I could be doing. And the irony is that the things I remove first are often the exact things that give me the energy and clarity to do everything else better. 

And maybe that’s part of dreaming, too. We tend to think dreams are about what we’re going to ADD to our lives. A bigger business. A new house. A different career. More travel. More money. More impact. But sometimes creating the life we want requires deciding what we’re no longer willing to carry into it. 

So as I think about the final months of this year, I’m thinking about both. 

I want expansion. I want to see what happens when I stop deciding in advance how big Vitale & Company is allowed to become. I want to build something that creates opportunities and livelihood for a lot of people and makes a meaningful impact on organizations all over the world. 

I want family. Not just saying my family is my priority, but actually making decisions with that priority in mind and protecting time with the people I love. 

I want connection. I want more time with friends and more time around other entrepreneurs and big thinkers who challenge me, inspire me and understand how exciting and completely insane it can feel to build something. 

And I want space. 

Maybe that’s the one I’ve been missing most. 

Space without an agenda. Space to think about something other than what needs to happen next. Space to write, imagine, be creative and ask myself what I actually want before I immediately start figuring out how to accomplish it. 

Because I think we need white space in our lives to dream. And most of us have optimized every bit of white space right out of them. 

So maybe that’s my challenge for this fall — and maybe yours, too. Not to create another list of goals for the fourth quarter. Not to immediately decide what needs to be accomplished before December 31. But to create enough space to check in with the person you are right now. 

What do you want now? What are you ready to release? What matters enough that you want to intentionally make room for it? And where have you quietly decided what’s possible without ever stopping to question whether that limit still belongs there? 

A few weeks ago, my big dream was 30 or 40 consultants. 

Today it’s 100+ and a global advisory firm. 

And I have no idea what it will be five years from now. 

I think that’s the point. 

Our dreams aren’t supposed to stay still. 

Neither are we. 

And while I did eventually give up on becoming a unicorn, I’m really glad no one ever convinced that little girl to stop believing in seemingly impossible things. 

Make space for your dreams,  

Vitale 

 

Hi! I’m Vitale Buford Hardin – workplace performance expert, keynote, and CEO of leadership consulting firm, Vitale & Company. We help organizations drive performance through trust.