The DREAMS Cycle ™

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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 person on the bicycle was in the driver seat. The professor gave me an A for that elaborate model.

Over the next two decades of using the model and refining it, it evolved into the DREAMS Cycle ™. This time the acronym stands for:

D for Dreams and Desires
R for Reasons and Reality
E for Explore options and Establish SMART goals
A for Acquire knowledge and Action plan
M for Move forward and Monitor progress
S for Stay motivated/focused and Seek support
C for Celebrate and Cycle back

The DREAMS Cycle ™ is a systematic approach to helping people reach their dreams.

Recently, during a conversation with a person I mentor, I explained the DREAMS Cycle ™. My mentee wondered why I had not produced this is a book. I responded that I was involved in other endeavors and that I planned on getting to it in the future. At that time, I was deep in the editing of my first children chapter book, Frankenstein’s Science Project.

Once Frankenstein’s Science Project was published, I focused on marketing and selling my book. I also pondered my next major project. So many ideas and opportunities presented themselves. After many internal deliberations on my possible lifetime legacy, I realized it was time for me to share my DREAMS Cycle ™. At the same time, I was exploring topics for an author blog and I floated the idea of writing about my journey of selling my book. With a flash of brilliance at 3 am in bed, the idea of combining the two ideas, the DREAMS Cycle ™ and the blog emerged. Why not write a blog about selling my book using the concept of the DREAMS Cycle ™?


Explaining the DREAMS Cycle ™ can be rather dry and grasping the concept and the process can be challenging. You need pertinent and interesting practical examples to facilitate comprehension. Describing the DREAMS Cycle ™ through my experiences of selling my book would greatly increase the value of both projects. It would provide a great example to incorporate in the book I will eventually write about the DREAMS Cycle ™ and allow the sharing of my experiences with selling Frankenstein’s Science Project. Thus, the creation of this blog, Sell Your Self-Published Book!

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