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iQuestions Faculty, Dr. Gary Smalley 
 
 
Question: 
 
I’ve been dreaming and setting goals, but am not achieving them. How 
do I manage this? 
 
Answer:  
 
You’ve read, just like I have, that if you’re going to be successful in 
business, you’ve got to have goals, you’ve got to have dreams, and 
they should be clarified. You should write a business plan on how to 
get to that goal. 
 
But there are a few more things that are involved that I have found 
that are very exciting to me. If you want to be successful and see your 
dreams come true, one caution is, there is this old thing called stress—
that if you have a big dream, and you’d love to see this happen in your 
life, but it’s ten years you’ve been dreaming this thing, and it still isn’t 
there, and you’re only scratching the surface of this dream, and so 
you’re really stressed.  
 
Stress is the gap between what you dream about getting someday, 
and what you actually have now. Let me show you how I’m solving 
that in my own life at my age. I’ve been doing this for forty years, and 
I love talking about dreaming and setting goals.  
 
What I’ve realized is that God gives everybody a measure of faith. 
Now, what a measure of faith means is that God gives everybody a 
certain dream. It’s either a small dream or a big dream. That’s what 
faith is. Faith is hoping for things that you can’t see right now, 
expecting things that aren’t actually here right now. That’s what faith 
is.  
 
 
 
And so, God gives everybody a dream, and the dream always involves 
loving people, because every successful vocation is serving people, 
serving people’s needs—which is really what love is. What I asked for 
forty years ago was somehow to discover, “What is God’s dream for 
me? What measure of faith has He given me? What goals do I need to 
set?” 
 
I actually spent two years running every morning. I’m a jogger—back 
then; I’m a walker now—and every morning I would say, “God, what 
do you want me to do? What dream do You have for me?” Eventually, 
several different people came up to me and, totally independent of 
each other, they quoted this verse, Isaiah 61. They said, “We believe—
I don’t even know why I’m saying this,” they’d say to me, “But you’re 
going to rebuild the walls of crumbled marriages and families and 
relationships of singles. 
 
I went, “Wow.” 
 
But when you have several people saying that about you, and a 
minister might be saying it, or somebody who knows you well or a 
neighbor, and the you start getting a great peace about it, and then 
doors start opening up to you, where people were actually bringing 
money to me. They were actually saying, “Hey, I want to give to 
somebody who’s helping families and marriages. I hear that’s what 
you’re doing.” And so, some people would give me thousands of 
dollars to use to start this work that would help couples and families. 
And this kept happening regularly. 
 
And so, here’s what I’ve discovered. This is one of my favorite, all-
time verses. Mark 11:22-24. Listen to what this says. It says, “Have 
faith in God, from God, with God.” Faith is given to us by God.  
 
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If you say, even the size of a mustard seed—in another context—if you 
say to this mountain, “Be lifted up and cast into the sea, it will be 
done, if you don’t doubt in your heart.”  
 
Here’s what I found. The next verse says, “If you believe that what 
you ask God for, without doubting, has already happened, God will 
give it to you.” That’s exactly what that verse says. Look at it. 
 
What I realize is that God gives us a real measure of faith, and really 
all we need to do is discover what He has given us, and if we believe it 
in our heart that it’s going to happen, as soon as it hits our heart as a 
belief, God begins to open the door. 
 
I wanted to talk to people about rebuilding marriage, family, singles’ 
relationships in a loving context, so that people really enjoyed their 
relationships, and they really were in love and stayed in love with 
people for the rest of their life. And look what’s happening. The door 
opened right in this very company to allow me to share this kind of 
information with people that I know will help couples.  
 
So, if you have a dream from God—whatever it is, I guarantee it will 
be about loving—once you feel peace about it, once you feel confirmed 
in your heart about it, once it reaches your heart, watch God open 
doors for you. And you know what? It’s pretty nice to wake up in the 
morning and say, “It hasn’t happened yet, it’s not going the way I 
liked it, but you know in God’s hands, God will make it happen in His 
timing.” It’s so much less stress than trying to make everything 
happen, and just laboring to get all of this stuff done. When God gives 
a measure of faith to a person, God will make it happen. You just keep 
your eyes open as to how. 
 
Let me close with this one. Listen to this one. Oprah Winfrey called me 
back in the ‘80s, and asked me if I’d be on her show for an hour, and I 
was very busy at the time doing all kinds of things, so I asked her, “Is 
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it possible to do this later?” She said, “Sure. Don’t worry about it. We 
love what you do. We’ll reschedule you.” That never happened. 
 
When God opens up a door, be real careful about what you turn down, 
because a short time after that, she had Dr. Phil on her program, and 
the rest is history. 
 
 
 
 
 
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