I was sitting on a beach in Punta Cana a few weeks ago.
Toes in the sand. Kids playing. Nowhere to be.
And a thought showed up. One I’ve had before. One I’ve shut down a hundred times.
But this time I didn’t shut it down. This time I let it stay.
Here’s the part that got me. The thought itself didn’t surprise me. I’ve carried it for years. What surprised me was that I was actually letting myself entertain it. Really sitting with it. Asking what it could look like.
The dream I kept in the drawer
The thought was this. I want travel to be part of how we homeschool our daughters.
Not selling the house. Not worldschooling full time. I love our home and our church and our people. I mean the freedom to take my family to a different city or country for two or three weeks at a time, a few times a year, as part of how my girls learn.
I want them to learn geography by standing in it. To hear another language in a market instead of on an app. To see God’s people, all of them, and know deep down that the world is bigger than our zip code and God is in all of it.
That dream is not new. It has lived in me for years. And every single time it surfaced, I had a script ready to put it back to bed.
We can’t afford that.
My business isn’t big enough for that kind of move.
I’d miss my family here. My parents, my church, my people.
Sound familiar? Your dream might not be travel. Maybe it’s homeschooling. Leaving the nine to five. Writing the book. Hiring the help. But I’d bet money you have your own version of those sentences. The dream isn’t your problem. The script is.
What finally changed after I understood why moms stop dreaming
On the podcast I walk through all three things that shifted, but I’ll give you the one I almost didn’t say out loud.
I saw women who look like me doing it.
Over the last few years I’ve been listening to moms of color share their homeschool and worldschool stories. Black moms moving to Portugal for a year. Moving to Colombia. Homeschooling their babies from another continent and thriving.
Those stories weren’t just interesting to me. They were doing something to me. They were making my dream thinkable. Because quietly, without ever saying it, part of me believed that kind of life was for other families. Then I watched moms who look like me actually living it, and something in my brain finally said, oh. This is allowed.
Representation is not a buzzword. Representation is permission you can see.
That’s also why my conversation with travel journalist Natalie Preddie stuck with me the way it did. She talks about what travel does for kids’ education and their understanding of the world, especially brown kids. If you missed that episode, it’s linked below. It planted seeds I’m just now watching grow.
>> Listen to my podcast with Natalie Preddie here
The other two shifts, learning to trust in a specific order and building a business that runs without me hovering, get the full treatment in the episode. The trust one starts with Habakkuk 2:2. Write the vision and make it plain. Notice God didn’t say wait until it makes financial sense. The vision gets to exist before the plan does.
The objection that was actually real
Here’s the most practical thing in the whole episode.
Those three scripts are not the same kind of sentence. We can’t afford it and my business isn’t big enough are belief problems. They feel like facts, but they’re fear wearing a calculator. Beliefs like that fall apart when you feed them evidence.
But I’d miss my family? That one is not a lie. That’s real. That’s love talking, not fear.
Most of us do one of two things with a real objection. We let it kill the dream. Or we bulldoze past it and the dream collapses later because we ignored a real cost.
There’s a third option. You design around it.
Don’t kill the dream over the objection. Build the dream around it.
Look at what I landed on. Not moving abroad. Two or three weeks at a time, multiple times a year. Home base stays. Church stays. Sunday dinners stay. The objection didn’t kill the vision. It shaped it into something that actually fits my life and my values.
Try it with your own dream this week. Find the real objection, not the fear one. Then stop asking should I do this and start asking how would I design this so that cost gets honored.
Your one assignment to stop why moms stop dreaming from becoming your story
This show is called The Visionary Mom Podcast for a reason. Not the hustling mom. Not the exhausted mom. The visionary mom.
I believe God put a specific vision in you. And I believe you already know what it is. It’s in your heart right now. You’ve just been afraid to say it out loud, because saying it out loud makes it real, and real things can be disappointed.
But a vision in a drawer isn’t safe. It’s just dying slowly.
So here’s the assignment I give at the end of the episode. Before today ends, say your dream out loud to one person. Your husband. Your best friend. Your sister. Not a plan. Not a budget. One sentence. Here’s what I actually want.
That’s it. You’re not committing to anything. You’re just letting the vision out of the drawer.
And if your heart pounds a little when you say it? Good. That’s how you know it’s the real one.
Listen and take the next step beyond why moms stop dreaming
This post is a taste. The full episode goes deeper into all three shifts, the trust order, and the moment on that beach. Listen to What Do You Actually Want? wherever you get your podcasts, or right here at the player above.
And if the episode stirs something up, your next step is my free CEO Day Guide. It walks you through 90 minutes of sitting with your vision and your business on purpose. Think of it as the first 90 minutes of taking your dream seriously. DM me the word DREAM on Instagram @nicolekvasco and I will send it straight to you, or grab it with the form below.