Dream

Last week I was invited to address a group of students to discuss my diplomatic career with them. My objective was to share my forty-seven years of experience as they prepare to pursue their own future.

I began by quoting a professor of mine from my MBA days who repeatedly told us to “dream, for the dreams of today are the realities of tomorrow”.

From the time I was young, I dreamt of travelling the world, living in exotic places, composing and recording songs, writing books and articles and, as I grew older, sharing my experience with younger audiences by teaching at university and giving conferences.

In his book The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho says that when you feel something deeply enough, the universe conspires to make it happen.

In my case, it did.

But it underscored that along with dreams come hard work, a capacity to adjust our course with the changes that life brings and an ability to reinvent ourselves in order to meet the challenges of the day. As a wise man once said, “if you want your dreams to come true, first you have to wake up!”

Luck also plays a part, but through will, discipline and determination, we can often shape our own luck and make things happen.

By defining our dreams early on, we can take decisions and create behaviors that will move us in the right direction.

By being in contact with ourselves, we can fight off the negativity of others as they try to influence our decisions and define our goals for us. But we must as well be prepared to seek and accept advice from those whom we know have our best interests at hand. This has served me well as I learned how to navigate throughout my career and my life.

Throughout my presentation, I strove to encourage my audience to work hard to really know themselves, define their own goals and create their own path towards success.

Absent this sense of direction, we simply drift from one situation to another, seemingly with little control over our own destinies, and with few if any concrete goals to guide our course.

In my experience throughout my career, I made sure that the choices I made were important to me rather than taken to simply meet the expectations of others.

In some cases, the paths at times seemed unconventional, but I chose them with appreciation for what they had to offer.

My career included consular work, political reporting, trade promotion, public diplomacy, strategic communications management, teaching, writing, and public speaking.

I was fortunate to serve with the Canadian diplomatic service, the Organization of American States, the Commonwealth, and the United Nations.

Today as you can see, I write for La Jornada Maya, teach at the Universidad del Valle de Mexico in Merida, and give conferences. I have written seven books and I continue to look for ways to contribute to younger generations in their quest for their own personal dreams.

I have committed myself to constant reinvention, always conscious that everything is temporary and that we live in an era of constant change. 

If we are to thrive rather than simply survive, we must adapt to change and allow ourselves to grow in multiple directions – each leading us forward towards our ultimate objective: to live as fulsome a life as possible and make as good a contribution as possible to current and future generations.

This is my message to the students and to my readers: try to make a difference.

Make a difference and know that, whether large or small, you are leaving something worthwhile behind for others to build upon.

Edición: Laura Espejo