Permission to Dream BIG with Mitch Matthews Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Dream Job Redefined BIG Dream Gathering BIG Dream Gathering Facebook Page INTERVIEW: I'm going to share some stories I've never shared before. How about that? I’ll be sharing some stories connected with The BIG Dream Gathering, an event that you may have attended, maybe not. If you haven't, I'm going to get you information so that you can attend one in the future. We're doing them all across the country this fall and would love to see you at an event. But I want to share with you three stories that I've not shared before. Each one is going to have something that I've realized has been so important to me over the last few years. These stories will help you go after your dreams, get more clear on your dreams, stay with it on your dreams. Maybe just as importantly, they’ll help you to help someone else do that. Because if you're a DREAM THINK DO-er, you're all about dreaming bigger, thinking better, and doing more of the stuff you were put on the planet to do. By the way, I'll just put it out there, one of the stories is kind of embarrassing for me to tell you. That's why I've not shared it before. It's something my wife knows about. It's a business story, you can probably put it in the “embarrassing disasters” category, but I learned something that's guided me now and helped me grow my own business. But more importantly, what I learned from it, I've taught others. I'm excited about sharing these stories for a couple of reasons. Recently I've been doing a bunch of podcast interviews. Not for DREAM THINK DO, but on other podcasts around the world. People have found out about Dream Job Redefined my newest book. If you haven't gotten it, go grab it. It's available on Amazon. Because of that, I've been doing a bunch of interviews with some great podcasts; I love it. But in that book, Dream Job Redefined, I share about The BIG Dream Gathering. The event that we do around the country. The event that got started in my living room as a happy accident. I didn't mean for it to happen, but I'm very glad it did, and that's turned into something much bigger than I could've imagined. In doing these interviews for the book, I talk a good bit about The BIG Dream Gathering. I realized, as I was thinking back, here at DREAM THINK DO we're on our 187th episode, and I know I've mentioned The BIG Dream Gathering in passing sometimes. But I don't know that I've ever actually told the origin story of how it got started. I don't spend a lot of time talking about it on the podcast. So with this episode, I want to tell a little of the origin story of The BIG Dream Gathering. What it is, how it got started, all of that, but also three stories, again, that I haven't shared before. Some of the kind of timeless truth that I needed to learn, or at least be reminded of, as a part of those experiences. I want to share those with you now. Because I want to inspire you. I want to encourage you to get clear on your dreams and start to go after those at new levels. I think we all need encouragement to take a second and to permit ourselves to dream, and that's what The BIG Dream Gathering is all about. That's what this podcast is all about. You may be familiar with The BIG Dream Gathering. If you are, fantastic, I hope you've attended an event. If not, here’s what it’s about: The BIG Dream Gathering is an event that we do all across the country, it kicks off with a little keynote from me. I'm a storyteller, so I tell some stories on the front-end to get people thinking and get them a little encouraged. All of those things. Then we cut them loose to think about some of their dreams, write them down on sheets of paper; we call those dream sheets. Then we put them up on the walls, and go around and look at each other's dreams. We write on each other's dream sheets - words of encouragement, ideas, suggestions,