I have always dreamed of doing/becoming/seeing/meeting/going ________________.

What’s stopping you?

I ask this of friends and strangers all the time. Here’s a little story. I was having lunch with my good friend and Super Secret Squad member Sydney (how’s that for alliteration?) a few years ago and we were trading our “shoulda woulda coulda’s.” I was telling her about how I’ve always dreamed of going rock climbing. I talked about the images I had of rock climbing, the feelings I associated with rock climbing, the type of person who rock-climbed. . . I went on and on about it, but I thought I was too fat to rock climb. I actually whined.

“I’d love to do it, but I’m too fat, you know?”

I still remember the look on Sydney’s face. She had recently started photography and was beginning to get some buzz, and was now thinking about going for another dream–holding a writer’s retreat on her beautiful property in Ohio. She was eating something, and she didn’t even look at me. She took a bite of her food, and then said, “Well, why don’t you drop the weight and go rock climbing?”

Just like that? Easy for her to say.

We were quiet for a second, and then the conversation moved on, but I thought about what she said all summer.

Drop weight just like that? But she was thin and she didn’t know and she . . . blah blah blah. I talked myself out of it again. But it nagged at me, even after I made it back home to Los Angeles and to the concrete playground at my fingertips.

Could I? Could I actually drop the weight and then just go rock climbing? Could I do __________ after that? And then ______________? Was it possible to just make a list and go for it?

I’m here to tell you that it is just that easy–the decision, of course. All the rest is hard work, but many of us just keep spouting out our Coulda-Woulda-Shouldas and never make the decision of ACTION–to DO IT.

What are we all afraid of? Living extraordinary lives? And by the way, extraordinary could be having a baby and taking care of kids, or dropping your life for a year and traveling the world. Whatever your extraordinary life is, you’ve first got to speak the dream out loud.That’s what the Super Secret Squad is all about–tapping into our deepest dreams, writing them down, discovering them. Along the way, maybe in addition to changing our own lives, we’ll inspire a few others as well.