229. Dreaming Bigger When You're Surrounded By Small Thinkers
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
Our biggest ideas often shrink to fit rooms built for safety instead of possibility. We choose comfort over alignment when fear of failure, rejection, or instability drives the decision, but naming what we want doesn't obligate us to act on it right away. We become who we're capable of being by borrowing our future selves' thoughts now and surrounding ourselves with like-hearted people instead of merely like-minded ones.
Desires don’t go away when you ignore them—they nag at you.
Are you holding back a big idea because the room went quiet the last time you shared one? Are you making career decisions from safety instead of from what you actually want? Are you surrounded by people who share your comfort zone but never push you to think bigger?
You'll learn that thinking like your future self—the version of you who's already achieved the goal—can help you make bolder decisions now, before you have any proof it will work out.
WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
Why naming your fears can turn these fears into useful data about your perceived limits of your comfort zone
2 practical exercises to help you get honest with yourself about what you truly want
Why surrounding yourself with curious, generous people matters
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success podcast, episode two hundred and twenty-nine. I'm your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way.
I want you to think of the last time you said an idea out loud in a meeting—something big and bold—and watched the room go quiet. Not hostile, just quiet. Then someone said, "Let's stay focused on the agenda", and someone else nodded while still staring at their laptop. And that idea disappeared into the ether and you were left feeling rather uncomfortable. If you've spent any time at all in a competitive workplace, you may be familiar with this feeling. It's not that anyone is actively working against you. It's more that you're surrounded by people who aren't willing to think bigger, but it makes you feel like you haven't yet found your footing.
In this episode, we're going to talk about why that sometimes happens, why it's not a flaw in you to want to think outside the box, and more importantly, what to actually do about it when you're left hanging. Because dreaming bigger is a practice. And I'm going to give you some suggestions for how to navigate things when you have a bigger vision than your work environment currently supports, when you would rather explore possibilities instead of just doing things the way they've always been done.
Here's a question I want you to sit with, not necessarily answer this immediately: when was the last time you made a career decision from possibility, instead of from safety?
Most of us don't even notice we're doing it. You pick what seems more stable over what feels more ambiguous. You take the promotion that's barely a half-step up from where you're at instead of the lateral move into the unproven project that feels more exciting. You stay quiet about the idea that would require some redesign, because that feels risky, and risk means it might not work the way you think it will. And failing in front of people in a field where you're already under a lot more scrutiny feels like it could cost you more than it might for anyone else.
This is your fear talking. So, let's name the three fears that tend to come up for most of us:
Fear of failure: which says, if I try the bold thing and it doesn't work, I will have proven the doubters right.
Fear of rejection: which says, if I pitch the big idea, people might say no, they might laugh. I might be perceived as the one who just 'doesn't get it'.
Fear of instability: which says, choose the safe path with fewer unknowns because the bold path has no guarantees.
All three of these fears are real. I'm not going to tell you they're irrational, because they're not. But here's the distinction I want you to make: feeling that fear is not necessarily a sign that you need to stop what you're doing. It's simply data. It tells you where the edge of your comfort zone is. But it doesn't mean you can't push the edges of what you currently see as potential limits.
The shift I want to offer you isn't to stop being afraid, it's to stop making decisions to eliminate that feeling of fear, and start making decisions to move toward what feels most aligned for what you want out of your career. Safety-driven decisions ask, "what will keep me comfortable?" whereas aligned decisions ask, "what does the work I actually came here to do require?". Those are two different questions, and they have the potential to produce two completely different careers.
If I had to guess, what got you into engineering in the first place was your desire to build things that could change the world. But somewhere along the way, a lot of that curiosity evaporated after hearing, "that's not how we do things here", or "let's not let the scope creep" or "focus on delivering what's required, nothing more". In my experience, I heard those phrases or something similar so many times that I've lost count.
Curiosity is the raw material of every bold thing you'll ever do. And it's the first casualty of an environment full of small thinkers, because curiosity is inefficient in the short-term. It asks questions that don't have immediate return on investment.
So, here's another question to consider: if nobody was going to ask you to justify your return on investment, what would you want to explore, build, or learn next? Not what's practical. Not what your manager would approve. What would you actually want to design if you followed your curiosity?
The reality is that your brain evolved to keep you alive, not to help you have a fulfilling career. Over the years, it learned that the past is safe because it's known—but the future might be dangerous because it's full of unknowns. So, your mind defaults to making decisions from what has already happened. That's why it's so tempting to think, "I need to get the promotion first, then I'll feel confident", or "once I have established the track record, then I'll pitch the big idea". We want to hold it in our hands before we're willing to become the person who feels worthy of having achieved that result.
Unfortunately, that is backwards. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The easiest way to create meaningful change in your life is not to wait for evidence and then change. It's to think from the perspective of your future self—the version of you who already has the career, the title, the confidence—and let the thoughts and feelings she would have generate your actions now. This runs counter to how we've been trained to think, because engineering, like many professions, rewards evidence-based reasoning. But you're allowed to want something before you've figured out all the steps required in making it happen.
The mechanism at play here starts with a thought that creates a feeling. That feeling helps to create an action. And that action creates a result. If you're only willing to think thoughts your past can prove, you will only ever get the results that you've already achieved. To get a new result, you need a new thought—and that thought has to come from somewhere your past can't yet validate. It has to come from your imagination.
Here's an exercise to try. Picture yourself five, maybe ten years from now. Your future self has already achieved the thing you're currently scared to go after. She's led the team, managed the exciting project, or made the career leap you're contemplating right now.
Ask your future self these three questions:
Who have you become? Not your job title—but how you carry yourself, what you're willing to tolerate and what you're not.
What did you have to let go of to get here?
If I wanted to be where you are now, what is the one thing you'd tell me right now, today, that would save me two years of hesitation?
Let the answers come. Don't edit. Don't let yourself decide if it's realistic or not. Just let your future self talk.
This isn't a visualization gimmick—it's more like a mentorship relationship with your future self. I have gotten better advice from my imagined future self than from almost anyone else, because my future self is not limited by what my current environment thinks is possible. She already knows it's possible because, in my mind, she's already done it.
And here's the part that matters most for your current work environment: your future self is not limited by the same small thinkers you're surrounded by right now. She's immersed herself in a more curated environment that has helped her achieve her goals. Part of what she's here to teach you is how she did that—who she stopped listening to, and who she started paying more attention to instead.
You don't become her by waiting for permission. You become her by borrowing her thoughts now, on purpose, before you have the proof. Ask yourself daily: what would she be thinking about? What would she no longer spend her energy worrying about? Start thinking those thoughts today. That's the whole practice.
Unfortunately, none of this works until we have an honest answer to another important question: what do you actually want? Not what's realistic. Not what your team would support. Not what would make your parents proud or those around you comfortable with your decision. What is it that you want from your career?
If that question made you go blank for a second, that's normal and it's worth noticing rather than rushing past. It's relatively easy to lose track of what we want, especially in a field that trains you to optimize for what's asked of you rather than what you're drawn to. A lot of us learn to want conditionally—like wanting that promotion once we feel we've proven we've earned it—and eventually the wanting gets so buried under justification that we stop admitting to wanting it at all.
The truth is, you don't have to justify your wants. You are allowed to want something purely because you want it. Full stop. No business case required. A lot of us over-explain our desires when being brave enough to admit something like, "I want to lead this project" is more than enough justification.
And when you do have the courage to uncover your deeper desires—the ones that scare you a little—here's the promise I want you to hold onto: you will never regret believing in yourself. Going all in is never something people look back on with regret, even when it doesn't work out on the first try. You may not succeed immediately. You may need a few attempts. But trying is never the thing you regret.
Desires don't go away when you ignore them—they nag at you. If you don't listen, you don't stop wanting; you just start distracting yourself, usually with busywork, or perfectionism, or over-functioning at a job that isn't quite what you'd hoped it would be. But when you actually sit with a desire and let yourself feel it, it generates the real fuel—those feelings of confidence, determination, and excitement—instead of the exhausting loop of self-doubt and overwhelm.
If asking yourself what it is that you want still brings up nothing but static, try rephrasing it. These four questions tend to help you get past the noise:
If I already knew the answer, what would it be?
In a perfect world, with no constraints on possibility, what would I want?
What's the thing I've always wanted, the one I've never said out loud?
If nobody in my life had an opinion about it or would judge me for it, what would I do?
Let the answer surprise you. You're allowed to be delighted by it. You're allowed to feel scared by it—even feeling both at the same time is normal. And remember, knowing what you want does not obligate you to act on it immediately. You still get to decide. Naming the want helps you reclaim your power, and the rest is still up to you.
The one thing I would suggest is that you be specific when you answer these questions. Don't stop at something like, "I want to have more impact". What does 'more impact' look like concretely, so you'd recognize it if it showed up. Vague wants stay vague forever. Specific wants are what you can plan around.
As I said, your brain is programmed for survival, not for desire—so, of course, the want you've identified might scare you a little. That's not a signal to abandon it. Let it be scary and choose to work towards it anyway.
Which brings us to the actual decision point. Every time a desire shows up, you get to decide whether you are willing to pursue it, delay it, or deny it. All three are choices. Only one of them keeps the power in your hands and moves you forward. When you choose to pursue it, you will face challenges—you may fail on the first attempt, people around you may not fully support the shift you're making, and you may become a version of yourself some people in your current environment don't recognize. That's not a sign you chose wrong. That's an indication that that thing is something worth wanting.
The problem is that you might be surrounded by the wrong kind of people.
You may think you're surrounded by like-minded people who share your opinions, your approach, and your risk tolerance. Hanging around these sorts of people feels comfortable, but it can also be stifling because no one is going to push you past what they believe is possible.
You're looking for people who are generous, curious, and genuinely rooting for you to make your desire a reality. They don't have to agree with your specific idea, but they're willing to think bigger with you, really consider what you've said, instead of just trying to shut it down.
If the people you've surrounded yourself with can't seem to dream bigger—that doesn't mean they're bad people. It might just mean you need to go find a few people who can, elsewhere, deliberately, the way you'd seek out a mentor or a subject matter expert. You'll want the ones who are willing to start projects without knowing exactly where they'll end up—and stay open enough to be changed by what they learn along the way.
So, here's what I want to leave you with today: your environment may be full of small thinkers right now, who don't share the vision for your future that you're imagining, but that shouldn't set the limit on the type of career you want to build. Your future self already knows that. She's waiting for you to start adopting her perspective before you have the proof.
I invite you to write down the answers to the questions that were posed earlier. Don't edit what comes up or discard it for being unrealistic. Just write it down, articulate the why behind it, and trust that you'll figure out how to make it happen.
I invite you to let yourself dream a little bigger than you did yesterday.
And that's it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to Dreaming Bigger at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode two hundred and twenty-nine.
Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch, I'm on Instagram @cindyesliger. My email address is info@cindyesliger.com.
If you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out The Confidence Collective. It's my monthly coaching program where we dig a little deeper into what's holding you back in your career and we find the workarounds. We help you overcome the barriers and create the career you want. Join me over at cindyesliger.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in The Confidence Collective.
Until next week, I'm Cindy Esliger. Thanks for listening.
