The DREAMS Cycle ™
I resigned from my job for love. The year was 1995 and I decided to move from Kingston to Ottawa to join my future wife. The move also provided an opportunity to redirect my life and career from a research scientist to a more people-oriented profession. I returned to graduate school at the University of Ottawa to study Educational Counselling. One of the courses I completed as part of my degree was on counseling approaches. The major assignment for the course consisted of developing your own personal counseling model. After much soul-searching, I created the DREAM cycle approach. DREAM was an acronym for Dreams, Reality, Explore options, Action plan, and Monitor. The visual that I associated with the DREAM cycle was of a bicycle, which was appropriate at the time as I was heavily involved in triathlons. The spoke on the wheels of the bicycle represented the letters of the acronym, while the wheel represented a continuous cycle. The bicycle also meant to indicate that the perso