He went through a set of very public challenges and had to spend a lot of time reconsidering and rebuilding. And now, Dave Hollis is ready to share that journey. Dave joins AllMomDoes host Julie Lyles Carr and talks about what it means to dream and how to learn to dream again when things go sideways.
Interview Links:
Find Dave: Online | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube
- Dave’s book: Here’s to Your Dreams
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AllMomDoes: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
Transcription:
Purposely your life, God’s purpose. Listen at onpurposely.com.
Julie Lyles Carr: I am so excited to welcome somebody who is practically a neighbor, just right down the road. Dave Hollis is in the house today. Dave, thanks so much for coming.by.
Dave Hollis: Thank you Julie for having me. I wish you were doing this in person.
Julie Lyles Carr: I know. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was thinking efficiency in technology, not yeah, we should have done this in person.
We’ll do another round. How about that? We’ll make a date. We’ll do another round. We’ll figure it out. Thanks so much for being here. I am so excited for you because you have a new little story to tell, but before we get to that, inform the listener who you are, where you live, what you do, all the stuff.
Dave Hollis: So my name is Dave Hollis. I work as an author, a podcaster. I’m working in business consulting coming alongside some nonprofits and small business entrepreneurs to help them break through some of the plateaus that they may have hit. I am the father of four kids. I have a 15 year old, a 14 year old, a 10 year old trio of boys and a five-year-old daughter named Noah.
I have been a foster parent to four little foster humans, and I live in Dripping Springs, Texas. Not far from where you are right now. Where I’ve lived since I moved with my fam back in 2018, after having had a life in California and a career in entertainment. And trying to put some good things out into the world, help people live themselves a little bit of a better life. And with this book, encourage people to dream, especially little people.
Julie Lyles Carr: Dream, dream, dream. We have a little bit of a crossover episode because my youngest are 15. Your oldest is 15, so I feel like you just picked back up and continued to carry the torch after I went yeah we tired over here at the Carr household.
You have had this time with your youngest, your only girl, Noah, where you have engaged in what you guys call tea time. And I can remember watching back in the day when she was a little bit younger. That this was something that was coming up a lot on your socials, and you guys would do this little moment, and I always thought it was so sweet.
This moment of a daughter and a dad sitting down and talking about life topics and things that were going on. How did that originally start this time with Noah that you dedicated toward this? Because I have to assume that there were times that weren’t on camera. It was just something that started to evolve in your household and that it was something that ultimately became a feature of how you were living your life and how you were parent.
Dave Hollis: Yeah, It was born bizarrely out of writing my first book, which lives inside of the quote unquote personal development world, where I acknowledge all of these ways that I’d gotten in my own way. And what I realized that so many of the things that were keeping me in my way came out of programming that went way back to my family of origin or the way that society had trained me to quote unquote be a real man or a host of other things.
And what I, what I came to was, is there the possibility that if you were to attack that programming at its core, at its youngest level, that maybe some of the work that I’m doing in real time for adults, would be irrelevant because the programming of the Capital T, Truths of what it means to believe in yourself or to believe in your dreams, or to change the way you think about failure were just so ingrained that maybe you didn’t need to read a personal development book when you became an adult because you just were brought up in a different kind of a way.
And the challenge is like I had at the time when we first started the series a three-year-old, and so condensing these higher level concepts for grownups into vernacular and vocabulary that a three-year-old could understand was part of the challenge, but also, of course, part of what made it so fun because half of the time she had no idea what I was saying. And half of the time she got it just enough to become inquisitive and ask some more questions or allow it to become a conversation that would extend beyond us sitting at the tea table. And I’d pick a pretty simple topic, Hey, this is gonna be about change and the way we think about change, and this is gonna be about health and the way we think about health, or whatever it might be.
And it just became something that, yeah, in part because my daughter is the cutest, stinking thing on the planet, but also because I was in effect condensing these higher level adults personal development topics in a way that could be digested yet by a three-year-old, but also by a 33 year old who maybe hadn’t thought about it in that way before that I think people just started to gravitate toward it. They liked it. It was fun, it was funny, but it was also, I think, challenging people to think differently. And so a couple years of these weekly rituals in.
I had a conversation with the publisher and I was like, Hey, this feels like there could be something fun for us to do for kids that if we could take like a software update or a hardware update, whatever you call it. Take the programming that may already exist and just apply it now such that they don’t end up having that hardwiring that leaves them stuck or in their own way as adults. Because we’re just downloading the right kind of message or the right kind of truth early on.
Is there a way that we could do it in a kid’s book that maybe makes it digestible, that makes it make sense, that makes it fun and also meaningful? And so the idea was born and it became this awesome adventure for the two of us to get to work on something together that now that it’s getting ready to come out has us super excited.
Julie Lyles Carr: That’s so fun. My brother lives in Bloomington, Indiana and lives next door to a family who has four little bitties, and he said it’s this amazing moment to sit in the backyard and overhear how they’re doing is he’s launching his kids to overhear this next generation of parents, and they’re lovely people.
They love God. They’re teaching their kids about following Jesus, and he’s also getting to hear them really infuse into them. To your point, this idea about how to think and how to see yourself and how to challenge yourself and how to get up and dust your knees off. And he’s going dang it, I feel like I need to call my adult kids and go, you need to, we gotta cover some more stuff.
Actually. I feel like we got you the good starter kit. You have the way you’ve got the gospel. But boy, I feel like we need to give you a few more little tips as I sit in the backyard and listen to this young family talk through some different topics. It’s really a powerful way to think about of course, we want our kids to know how to think ethically and morally, and what are we also telling them about how to move forward in life for the things that they’re destined and purposed to do. I love that this came up in a way that you were able to access and bring it down to a place where she could, if not understand all of it, start getting some of it, see it down into her heart.
How did you choose the topic of dreams? Because the book is called Here’s To Your Dreams. Dreams to me, Dave is such a broad concept because we’ve got everything from examples of dreams that we can read about in scripture that were prophetic dreams to the idea of dreams being an aspiration or an intention or a fantasy.
So how did you begin to think about this whole concept of dreams and how to put that in a way that a younger kid and even somebody like me can take a look at this messaging and go, oh, okay, I, I know what kind of dream we’re talking about here.
Dave Hollis: Yeah there were plenty of topics we could have started with. I have every hope that this book, it connects and allows for some additional conversations to happen beyond dreams. But when I was looking at what were the most consistent conversations that were coming up and the work that I was doing, or the feedback that I was having, or the coaching conversations, A lot of times I would hear from people that they lost themselves, that they, like they used to be someone, and then in becoming a mother or a wife or a husband or a dad or the employee of this person, that somehow, this person that they once knew was no longer accessible.
They just didn’t feel as connected to that version of who they once were. And the question that I would often ask people is, who did you want to be before you became who you’ve become? Who was that? What were the dreams? What was the like passion of the heart of that 19 year old version, or that 23 year old version, or that 26 year old version of you before?
The world told you a certain way to be, or you assumed a role where the description that you give yourself, the identity that you hold, had a modifier that was associated to someone else. I’m the mother of this person or the wife, husband of this person. And a lot of times that relationship shift from being who you were before you became who you are comes at the expense of feeling like we have permission to hold onto the dreams that we had then because of the responsibilities that we now have. And reminding my daughter and reminding anyone who reads this, that your dreams are important, that they have purpose. I believe that man, you were put here for very specific reason by a creator who hoped in every single way that you would maximize all of what was given to you in dreaming. That sometimes when life challenges us, it chips away at believing that we still have permission to chase our dreams. And so at a young age, I want to teach my five year old now daughter. , you have to always stay connected to the dreams of your heart.
Yep. Life is gonna come at you in different ways, and yep, you’re gonna have new responsibilities. And yes, your identity’s gonna shift as you become a mom or a wife, or a anything else. And also those dreams are still important, and the idea that you can still pursue those things and not, or, but, and be everything that you are also meant to be in relationship to others is in a really important fundamental foundational concept that I’d hope for anyone to attach to because the pursuit of your dream doesn’t disqualify you from also being an amazing mom or also being an amazing partner, or also being an amazing employee.
But those dreams matter. They’re there in part because I believe they were put there by our creator, and that in some ways we have a responsibility of mandate to honor the intention of a creator who wants us to pursue and fulfill the dreams that were placed there on purpose.
Julie Lyles Carr: I love that you bring this up, that they don’t have to be in competition. You’re so right. I think we live in a culture in which we have mythologized or expanded the idea that in order to go after your dream, you have to dump all of the things that supposedly are holding you back or shackling you. And so I think we often see people in our heroes journeys and our individual heroes journeys, if you will, where we have this moment where we feel like , I’m gonna sacrifice and not go after the dream so that I can fulfill all these responsibilities behind me, or I’m going to shrug it all off and run this direction.
The idea of reminding our kids that you can be a responsible human being to do the stuff you’re supposed to do and still pursue those things that are in your heart. Really powerful. Now, David, it’s not lost on me that in the timing that which you were working on this project about dreaming, you had a lot of dreams that were blowing up or things that were going sideways for you.
How did that feel as you were trying to put out a message that I know you believe in and I know to be true, and yet at the same time you were having to adjust, if you will your own dream-o-meter? Because there were some things that were happening in your personal life and your business life that weren’t aligning potentially with what and with how you thought things were gonna be.
Dave Hollis: Yeah, for anyone who doesn’t know my story, I, yep. We moved from California to Texas back in 2018. At the time, I was pursuing, building something with my then wife that we built in the hopeful service of others, and about two years into the journey our marriage ended and my time working at the company ended.
And what was interesting in the change that was happening inside of my life is I don’t know that I appreciated at the time that some of the pursuit of that dream of building something was my desire to assist someone else in the fulfillment of their dream, without asking if it was in fact my dream too.
And so I think part of what I would encourage people to, spend time with is, hey, are the dreams that you have, dreams that are the thing that have always been inside of your heart, that light you up, that connect and tap into the things that you have great competency for that can help others because of the fulfillment of those dreams.
Or are they dreams that are in service of making other people happy or in service of helping other people achieve their dreams. It’s not to say that those, there isn’t a time for those things. , but the gift of the end of my marriage or the transition away from the business was that it really did force me to come back and ask the question of, okay, what do I dream?
What am I here for? If it’s not for this thing that I thought it would be for the rest of time, what now do I fill out on this blank piece of paper that I’ve been handed? To ultimately actualize something that is meaningful and placed here for me. And to be honest, I’m still somewhat in a season of really confirming that the things I believe are the dreams of my heart are the dreams of my heart.
I’ve just started working now inside of some small business consulting, and I’m really enjoying. it. And I’m enjoying it in a way that is affirming that, hey, this thing that you thought you had skill for, there’s actually something here. But to be honest, it’s taken a little bit of a toe dip confirmed that the curiosity is actually backed up by something meaningful, and over time it’s revealing.
But yep. This thing that you were dreaming for, It is actually here, it just was hiding behind something that you were distracted by in a season where you were doing something that was more about the pursuit of someone else’s dream than your own. And I think, again, I wouldn’t undo or redo things necessarily.
I, I’ve come to really have a peaceful appreciation of man. Everything really has worked in a way that it’s revealed what it’s needed to in the time that it was meant to reveal. And also I think I’m more connected today to the dreams that I have and the pursuit of those, Hey, God’s put me here for a reason, and I have this, this mandate to honor the intention of why I’ve been placed here than I probably had in the two or three years prior to where I sit today.
Julie Lyles Carr: Dave unpack for us because so many of us, I think, have been there where we’re heading towards something and we really think it’s the dream we’re heading toward, and then something comes and T-bones us that we didn’t realize was going to be part of the story, or the business shuts down or the ministry goes a different direction, or the marriage goes south, whatever the thing is that we thought we were heading toward.
One of the questions I want you to help us process is how do we get to the core of why we may have had a certain dream in terms of determining if it’s what really is meant for us. And by that I mean we can have certain dreams that we adopt as our own because we’re doing it in the service of someone else.
And you’re right. There are times and seasons for that. I think we all have times we’re called to be selfless and to come alongside. I also think there are those dreams where what we’re really after is not the thing that we have outlined as the dream. It’s the feeling that we hope we’re going to have when we get there.
And sometimes we can actually go through all of the machinations and activities of the dream only to arrive at that place and go. Huh, . This does not look like what I thought. So how do we distill down and really get clear? Because so often when we talk about dreams, I think we think about activities or achievements and not about the feeling we’re going for.
How do you process all of that now with this wealth of experience that you’ve gained in a rough way over the last few years?
Dave Hollis: Yeah. I’ll go back even just a little bit further because I spent about 20 years inside of entertainment. And I had dreams inside of building my corporate career that I would’ve sworn by, oh I’m gonna get to this level.
I wanna try and make this amount of money. I wanna be invited to sit at this table. These are the things I dream of because of a belief that on some level I will be seen as lovable or worthy or enough or whatever when I actually get there, when I have a business card that says a certain word, when I have a circle of people that I get to interact with that have some kind of status or prestige, and so I worked really hard for a really long time to slowly move up the ladder.
I’ve worked at Disney for a length of time. And I can remember one of the lowest points of my career, and this is gonna sound cuckoo cuz there’s a lot of privilege even in my ability to suggest this, but when I was made the president of sales at the Walt Disney Company and they offered me this four year deal, I was working at the time inside of a space where I made it to the thing I thought I was dreaming of.
And all of the feelings I had associated with being named a president or having access to filmmakers or working in the way that I did with the team that I did, it was just I, it was an amazing job, but it didn’t produce the thing that I had pedestaled as what was going to be at the end of that climb. And so I, in signing this contract in a crazy way, felt like I was selling out a little bit for continuing to do something that was safe, that was about security for my family or about ego and the prestige that came with the job that I was doing, and not necessarily the maximum utilization of the gifts that I was given or the work that I was meant to do.
And it took me into a pretty dark place. Because part of what I was recognizing in that moment was I had been climbing and climbing this mountain, and when I got to the peak, I realized in some way that I’d been climbing the wrong mountain the whole time. And so the decision to end up leaving this corporate job, having to go ask permission to be released from this contract that I had just nine months previous to that signed.
It was an act of, yeah, in some ways courage, but it was also an act of trying to return to the possibility of connecting to what might be the right mountain to start climbing. If I were to acknowledge, oh, You misaligned the dream with satisfying ego or you misaligned the dream with, insecurity that you were trying to fill some hole for.
And it doesn’t mean that doing something new or doing something that maybe is more aligned with your actual dream isn’t hard or scary because man, there were plenty of things that were hard and scary. But I feel like the willingness to be self-aware enough and acknowledge, oh, geeze, I’ve been climbing the wrong mountain.
This was, this is maybe the wrong reasons to have been. I’m happy and feel great for the effort that I put in to create the kind of success I did in my career. I also wish I could go back and tell my 25 year old self that the things that I thought would make me happy. are not, in fact the things that will make me happy.
As much as I want to tell myself the things I’m worried about, either they’re gonna happen and they only produce good, not the things I’m worried that they will or they never happen. So quit worrying altogether. But life is, like change is a guarantee in life and there’s change that chooses us and there’s change that we choose.
And I think oftentimes, like the most courageous thing is to choose the change that pushes you away from the thing that you were climbing when. . Yeah. You may have already invested a lot of time. You may have already invested a lot of energy, but you have some kind of knowing intuition, God’s voice, whatever it is saying you’re climbing the wrong mountain man.
You’re doing it for the wrong reasons. There’s an opportunity for you to turn around and go back down this mountain and start climbing the right one. If you’re comfortable enough to admit that, hey, something more meaningful can exist when you move away from ego, when you move away from fear, when you move away from certainty and step into something that feels more like calling, that feels more like the intention of why you.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. I think that decoupling of that people pleasing, that approval seeking from what we call our dreams, at least over here at Jules Inc. , is one of the tougher ones to try to really get clarity on what is something God’s placed in my heart and what is something that I’m still looking to feed that thing that wants somebody to say, Atta girl.
And the courage, you’re right, that it takes to be willing to drop that and really listen is so profound. I love one of the metaphors that you have in the book with your daughter, Noah, where she begins to talk about these different dreams that she has, and then there is this construction of the boat that’s gonna take you there.
Wow. Wow. And this boat is just an amalgam of all kinds of experiences and stuff that’s washed up on the beach. It is not a cruise ship. It is not the things that you would think, oh yeah, let’s do that. That’s seaworthy. And what I love about that metaphor, Dave, is to me so often when we’re on the place where we’re heading toward purpose, when we’re on the place where we’re heading towards something that we know God has for our good, the means by which we get there do not always match the expectation we have about if this is really God kissed, it shouldn’t feel like this. I kept thinking about the place in scripture where Paul is going to do such good, and he ends up in a shipwreck. Here’s another metaphor of a boat that is not the cruise ship that you would’ve expected.
For something as noble and selfless as the dream and the call on Paul’s life. Tell me about the boats in your life. What are the things that you thought you were getting on and heading a certain direction and it just went completely different? Or the things that you’ve cobbled together. And I think sometimes we’re on a boat that probably we could christen imposter syndrome because it doesn’t seem to look like everybody else’s boat, and yet it is seaworthy enough to take us where we’re supposed to go. So what have those avenues of travel looked like for you?
Dave Hollis: Yeah. I’ll start by saying this, I, whether it’s Garth Brooks unanswered prayers or anything else. I do think we make the mistake sometimes as humans in thinking that just because we pray, we also get a say in how the prayer gets answered.
And so many of the things that have happened in a life that I couldn’t have scripted over the last handful of years, and plenty of things that man I wish it were Burger King. I wish I could just have it my way. I would have done things completely differently. And also I wouldn’t have had the yield, I wouldn’t have had the outcome because so many of my prayers have been answered.
They just had to be answered in ways that I could never have conceived of. And also plenty of times where pain, or grief or struggle was a necessary ingredient in the answering of the prayer. I just didn’t necessarily like it. I just didn’t necessarily opt for it. It was the way it was. I’ll give you one example that’s very specific to Noah.
In our journey to finish our family, as it were, we had three children biologically. We decided that we wanted to adopt a daughter as a way to finish our family. We started in international adoption. Another couple at church had adopted through Ethiopia. It felt like, Hey, maybe we’re meant to do this, and we went down this process and as it turned out, that as an avenue was closed for a whole host of reasons that were happening on the ground in Ethiopia.
We turned our attention to foster care. There was just massive need in LA County. We were living in Los Angeles at the time. And we became foster parents. We had two placements in the spring of 2016, and ultimately after satisfying the kind of prerequisite to foster to adopt, we got a phone call that there were two babies.
There were four days old twins. They’ve been abandoned by a mother, and there was an opportunity for us to fast track adopt them because of the circumstances of us. We originally planned to take one, but ended up taking two foster kids in the spring. Our house was uniquely qualified to have two kids under two in our home.
It felt ordained by God. This is what is meant to be. The answer was needed. Within 20 minutes, we prayed about it and said yes. So we have five day old twins. Back at our house, we named them. They were being weaned off of drugs. They’re twins. It’s a lot. And for six weeks it was one of the most beautiful and hard and awesome and challenging things.
And in the sixth week, we get a phone call. It turns out that the twins were misrepresented as being adoptable as much as you have adopted them and created this picture of the way you think the rest of your life is meant to look with these beautiful girls as a part of your family, we’re gonna have to send a white van over to your house and pick them up.
And we were devastated. It was just the most devastating thing. And we were in a really dark place and we ended up deciding I, I was a super advocate. Like we have gone too far in this journey. We cannot stop now as much as there is pain. Our story is not over. I was I, of all things, I was given a phone number from my mother of a, an attorney who’d helped with adoptions.
Two days later I went to work a filmmaker of Prestige. Ha Yeah, I’m having lunch with her. She says, Hey, I also adopted my daughter. Here’s a phone number. My mom, who lives hours away from this filmmaker, they gave me the same phone number. It seemed, again, like God’s back in the picture. Great.
We’re gonna push forward in this adoption. , we end up meeting a birth mama. We end up flying months later, Noah is born. We have this baby girl .And I bring up the sequence of events because in the moment when the girls, the twins were being pulled from our house, we could not understand what in the world was going on.
What I understand now is, hey, for six weeks’ worth of time, They were given the maximum amount of love at a very important point in their life. And as much as an emergency placement worker represented, there was a certain thing that was gonna happen and then it changed. They were loved. They were then ultimately sent to some biological family who I hope are loving them so stinking well.
But in that moment when we were deciding should we or shouldn’t we continue to go, what the heck is happening? If we had stopped in our journey, one of the brightest parts of my life in Noah would not exist. And so while I couldn’t understand what was going on in the midst of the most heartbreaking thing that we’d experienced at that time, I do know that there was sun after the dark.
I know that there was something good that came after. And I do know that we were able to be a bright light in the lives of those girls when they were in our home. And . I don’t know why bad things happen. I don’t know why we have to go through hard things. I think I have a better appreciation of them now because in like Steve Jobs had this quote and the great commencement speech, you only see the way the dots connect looking backward.
, I can only see the hard things ultimately showed up for me, or the way that the struggle that I’ve been through showed up for me looking backward. . And so you know, if you find yourself as a listener in real time, you’re going through something hard, it does require something of an act of faith to believe that you’ll see the way the dots connect when you’re looking back six months or 12 months from now, when we were in the midst of the darkest part of that journey.
There was no way to believe that it was gonna end with a happy ending. And I, like I can tell you like Noah is easily one of the greatest parts of my life. There is something so amazing that came out of one of the hardest parts of our journey. And I just because of that kind of evidence am on the hunt in the midst of the hard for where there might be another Noah like happy ending that’s gonna come out of the dark cloud that might have, shown up for very good reason that I don’t yet understand.
Julie Lyles Carr: And I love that her name’s Noah on this good ship called Redemption that that was the kid who took you to the shore and I think that’s so phenomenal.
Dave Hollis: Can I tell you why her name is Noah? I don’t know how long this show is, but . So we go to meet with this lawyer whose number was given to me by this filmmaker and by my mother.
We have a very nice meeting. It’s a thing that we are now committing to. But just prior to having gone to the, to the meeting, my then wife had asked if I would reach out to the biological family of the twins to ask if we could bring some food, if we could bring some clothes. Yes, they were transitioning to them, but we still obviously cared about them and wanted to, support them in any way that we could care about their wellbeing.
And I’d reached out to the family and the family said, . You know what? We’re good. We’re gonna just have a hard break here. We’d prefer to not have you guys as a part of their life, and now I know this information ahead of us going to this meeting to meet with this person that might actually help us finish this family and introduce us ultimately to Noah and I decide to hold it because if I were to say this, I’m not sure we get to the actual meeting.
The meeting goes well with the lawyer. afterwards there’s a place downstairs that serves $22 grilled cheese sandwiches cuz we’re in Beverly Hills and that’s what happens in Beverly Hills. And as we’re now recounting this meeting, we’re sitting there, we’re eating our expensive cheese and bread, and my then wife Rachel says, Hey, did you hear back from the bio dad of the twins about us bringing some food and clothes.
And I said, you know what I did and he’s gonna pass. He appreciates the offer, but he’d just like to move on his side and have us move on. And she’s wearing these big old Jackie o glasses at the time. Tears are now coming down the face and she in that moment is I’m done. I’m out. This hurts.
I can’t. And the tables at this very expensive grill cheese’s restaurant are very close together and sitting at the table immediately next to us, though we are not even aware of the fact that he’s, there is a gentleman who slams his hand on the table and he says, hello. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to overhear your conversation, but the tables at this expensive grilled cheese sandwich shop are too close together.
Of course. I just overheard everything that you’ve said. I’m adopted and my parents, this is gonna make me cry. This is so crazy. And my parents were also themselves faced with circumstances like this when they were adopting myself and my brother. And if they had stopped when you stopped, I would not be sitting at a place that serves $22 grilled cheese sandwiches.
I’ve gone on to become a successful person. I’m married, I’m having a kid, and I’m here. I think God’s put me here so that I can tell you to keep going. And we’re like, what in the world is even happening? And at that point, we reach over our hands to introduce ourselves to this stranger who is interrupting our questioning whether we continue or not on our adoption journey.
And he says, My name is Noah, which felt like in the midst of our flood here, we have been sent Noah to help us get through the, the waters rising. And so our decision to name our daughter Noah, after this man who allowed this journey to continue just felt too,
Julie Lyles Carr: Wow. I had not heard that story. And that is, Remarkable . What an amazing. And those are the kind of moments you hope to get when you’re so lost and you’re confused. Yeah. To have somebody show up in that way.
Dave Hollis: Wow. It was beautiful. If there’s like a Is God real? Does Yeah, God’s real. He showed up at a grilled cheese shop back in 2017.
I’m pro I 16. I promise you that. He is. And he’s still in our life. I just I love things like that. God wink or otherwise, it was like, it was a perfect moment.
Julie Lyles Carr: I love too that her name means rest or repose. You know that place that, yeah, God’s got it. We may not get it. We may not, the boat may not look like, we think it should look , but we can still rest even when that flood is rising.
That’s incredible. I try, Dave, we’ve got time for.
Dave Hollis: And I’ll tell you right now she’s the fiery, like the most strong rest. Rest is a thing that will happen for this child when she is 87 years old. God bless her. .
Julie Lyles Carr: Yeah, exactly. God bless it. . Dave, tell me. In the, all of us have places where we have public life and it may not have the amount of followers or the amount of eyes or the amount of reach, but all of us have those people that we feel accountable to those people we want to please those people who we don’t wanna be disappointed in us.
And when a dream collapses, when something goes sideways, In front of our individual publics, if you will, it can feel even heavier. And you went through this really difficult season of things coming apart on platforms and in public view, and with virtual strangers at your door, with your kids involved, and your heart, and yourself, and your own struggles.
How do we navigate that when the shipwreck of a particular dream seems to just vomit out on a beach with what can feel like a lot of opinion, a lot of criticism, a lot of critique? We want people to be transparent and vulnerable and then when they are, we often stand an audience to it and Monday morning quarterback.
So for someone who’s going right now through a public dissolution of a marriage within their small group of their church, for someone who is struggling with a child who is dealing with something, and everybody at the school seems to know for someone who is seeing their job and because of maybe something they did that wasn’t the greatest choice, but now those people who’ve been there, public are standing around watching it.
What have you learned? in this very intense season that you’ve just recently come through in terms of how to get the boat back in the water?
Dave Hollis: So many things. Number one, like I, I think just normalizing that it’s hard being human. I wish that there I wish I could give a better answer than, man it stinks sometimes to be a human who has to go through public disappointment or has to go through the shame that exists when you don’t do what you said you were gonna do or whatever it might be. And yet we’re all human. And so I think the first thing I would encourage is one, just wrap yourself in abundance of grace and find yourself a community of people that will remind you that you aren’t, your mistake, you’re not the shortcoming of your marriage, you’re not working, you’re not the, dumb thing you said, or, you’re not .The second thing, and I guess I may be, I’m aware of this because I have, in as much as like I have a mild public platform, I’m not, I hope to never be famous, but like I’m a little more public than maybe a normal human being.
There definitely is something that you have to be really conscientious of when you allow your feelings to be connected to the applause or the critique, right? If you feel good about yourself when you’re getting likes or the applause or you’re like, or and you feel bad about yourself when you’re being criticized, then you have allowed your worth or your identity to be defined by them instead of yourself.
Instead of what it means to be in integrity with who you say you’re gonna be, or keeping promises with yourself, it means that you’ve probably created some distance from God and the way that you would feel reminding yourself. You know who you are and who’s you are. I went to this thing at our church the other day, Mike not Mike, Mark Teixeira baseball player, played in Texas, goes to the church and it was like a sports and faith kind of night.
But he said this one line, he was like, such a good line. He said, A man who is intimate with God will never be intimidated by a man. So man or woman, but if you’ve got a close relationship with God and you make a mistake, then what other people have to say about it isn’t gonna affect you the way that a distant relationship probably would.
And so I know I, for me, I can track like the times when I was most affected by the opinions or the criticisms or the critiques of other people as much as they may have been warranted. That they might compromise my belief in myself or my belief in my worthiness was usually a reflection of the proximity that existed between me and God at the time.
Like I was more in ego or more in self than I was in relationship, allowed that dissonance to let their criticism affect me in a way that otherwise it wouldn’t, because when I’m close, I know yep, I’m human and I make mistakes and I’m good and I’m worthy, and I’m enough. Ad I’m still gonna make mistakes.
And that next mistake, man, I hope it’s not as bad as the last mistake cuz I’ve learned something, but I’m still good and I’m still worthy and I’m still enough because I know who’s I am. And stay connected to that. But also for me, especially in the last year, being able to be in community where I could walk into a room and be wholly and completely myself, own all of my good stuff, but maybe, and most importantly, all the stuff that I’m still working through and struggling with in a way that didn’t bring shame with it, but just an acknowledgement that like, this is who I am and I am a work in progress and I’m working through myself and being able to be in communities like that where they were like, I see you and I appreciate you being here.
I do not judge you for being human. I wanna walk alongside you. I wanna hold you accountable. I wanna encourage you. That was really important in a time, especially when you’re going through hard things, man, your confidence gets compromised. Your belief in, self gets compromised. But being in community with people that are like, you’re welcome here just as you are, and we love you just as you are, we’re still gonna hold you to a high standard just as you are.
But you’re loved and enough and good as you are, even as you are this work in progress.
Julie Lyles Carr: Love that. So beautiful and such a great reminder to be intentional about finding those communities, those islands in the stormy seas of life that do both, that love you exactly where you are and hold you to a standard and challenge you and embrace you.
What a beautiful thing for you. I’m so glad that you’ve had that in this last season as you’ve been navigating some stormy waters. Dave, tell us where we can find the book and where listeners can find and interact with. .
Dave Hollis: Right on. There’s a cool website. Herestoyourdreams.com. There are a bunch of pre-order incentives, bonuses.
There’s some mantra cards. Noah’s got the way to do a perfect teatime. There’s a bunch of activity sheets and when you pre-order, you are automatically instantly entered to win an autographed copy from myself and from Noah. So herestoyourdreams.com and if you wanna hang out with me on social, I’ve been a little more reserved in being as out front on social in the last year’s worth of time.
But Mr. Dave Hollis is my handle on Instagram. It’s where I’m hang when I hang.
Julie Lyles Carr: All right, great. Dave Hollis, thank you so much, neighbor. Excited for this newest dream of yours to be launching this book with your daughter. What a great and beautiful homage to your relationship as a daughter and father, and I just wish all the best for you.
Dave Hollis: Thanks, Julie. Appreciate you so much. Thanks for having me on.
