Welcome to the ‘Big Dreams Come True’ interview series where I interview fabulous people (just like you!) about having their Big Dream come true. This month my guest is the wonderful Jacqueline Gates of www.jacqueline-gates.com. (If you’d prefer to read the transcription is below the ‘About Jacqueline’ section.)
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Big Dreams Come True: Jacqueline Gates
ABOUT Jacqueline:
Jacqueline Gates is the creator of LoA nesting, a Goddess, and all around fabulous coach, writer and gorgeous soul. Using her theatrical background to make your life your living vision board, she can be found at Jacqueline-gates.com (or cuddling her grandbaby).
Connect with Jacqueline:
What big dreams have you had come true?
I’ve had quite a few, but I will tell you the one that is really relevant for me at the moment and that is being able to travel to a new place and live there on a whim. In other words, a kind of modern day gypsy lifestyle, but not gypsy as in being in an RV and travelling somewhere; but actually moving somewhere, taking up a nest and exploring and living there like a local until you get tired of it and move somewhere else. I’ve just recently done that for the third time in a row and I’m loving it.
What was the catalyst for this particular dream? What made you want this?
I find people absolutely wonderful and fascinating and it comes back to how we live, how different people live. We all see the generalized news, but we really don’t know a culture or a space until we live in it. This really 
hit home to me when we moved to the US. We sold up a 5-bedroom home, down to 8 suitcases, brought our kids, and arrived in the U.S. in 1998. We knew exactly one person on this entire continent.
I had only known about America from movies and CNN. I thought everyone sounded like the CNN lady and I was astonished when I got here to see just how different it is from one coast to another, form north to south. It was both wonderful and fascinating and the more I learned about this country, the more I wanted to go and live in other places.
I don’t just want to visit the south; I want to live there and experience it. I want to experiences the cities, and the desert in Arizona and Nevada, and I want to go to the rainy side of Seattle, and experience the crazy amount of people in Manhattan. Yes, I can travel to those places, but just staying there for a week always left me feeling like I hadn’t tasted it fully. It’s like being at a buffet and you just have a mouthful of everything. I wanted to be able to sit down and savor.
And because all my work has to do with homes and who we are in our homes, I love getting to know people in their natural home, so to speak. So that was the catalyst; that was part of it. We moved from South Africa to the U.S., and not only did we not know anything about the U.S., but I found out the U.S. didn’t know anything about us either.
Just saying I was from South Africa, I got questions like, “Do you have running toilets? Did you have lions as pets? You know that you’re white, right?” Yes, actually, there are white people in Africa. It was the most amazing realization of how connected, and yet disconnected we are.
This prompted my own kind of version of a gypsy dream. I really wanted to savor various areas around the world, but I’m far too much of a homebody – I like decorating and making my nest – to have something like a caravan. I don’t want to take my nest with me; I want a whole new nest. And for the longest time, we didn’t have a chance to do this, but just recently, my daughter said, “I’m pregnant!” and I said, “We’re moving!”
So we moved out to Minnesota in April and within a month we were able to decide to move, pack up, get ourselves somewhere else to stay, and within two months, actually be here, lock, stock, and barrel, with no change to the quality of our lifestyle or to our businesses.
What obstacles or challenges did you face on the way to this and how did you overcome them?
Well, the first one was – and I’ll be absolutely candid about this – my children. I had 9 different schools in 12 years at school. For me, it taught me to be madly social. I can talk to anybody about pretty much anything. I have no trouble with crowds, I have no trouble with strangers. My brother also had the same upbringing, and it taught him to be very suspicious with strangers, to be quieter, to get to know people before he shines.
A gypsy lifestyle on a child can either be a wonderful thing or not so much. My children moved from South Africa to here at the ages of 9 and 11. It was a major cultural change for them. They have since relished it, and loved every minute, and are thrilled that we did it, but I didn’t want to do it to them again in their high school years. I had already foisted upon them this enormous change and I didn’t want to do that again, so for the first 7 years we were here, we had two kids at school, so we didn’t move.
What we did do is sample. We went on various little trips to find out where we would want to live. We always went with a mind of, “Would we like to stay here for a year or two?” And we went down to visit Atlanta, Georgia, which is where some of our South African friends live, and that was first on the list. I loved the southern weather because, of course, we were in Minnesota.
The biggest change came for me when I discovered “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne in 2012. I was, at the time, really anchored in my space. I was the epitome of non-gypsy. I was working retail, my husband had a hell of a commute, we had a house, and a mortgage—all that stuff—I hated the weather, I really wasn’t happy with how far away my dream seemed to be. The secret came out and everything changed. Just the introduction to Law of Attraction changed everything for me.
Within 6 months, we had this gracious and beautiful home in the south, we were warm, we were still as wealthy, and we were working from home and living this new dream. One kid came with us and had the best senior year that he could have ever had and my daughter thrived when we were down there. We had to wait for things to almost align.
We had intention, but once I knew exactly how I wanted to live, and I started anchoring it within my Minnesota home, within 6 months, everything in my vision board was coming true. Because I had already begun living in my vision board. And that’s where “LOA nesting” started because that’s what I did. I used my house as a manifesting tool and these days, I do exactly the same over and over again.
Did everything turn out the way you expected it would when your dreams started to come true?
No it didn’t. It was absolutely delicious, and we moved, and I got the home that I wanted, the one that was actually on my vision board, and my kids were happy, and my husband was working from home, so he was happy. But you actually have to start moving towards the dream and start living it before you can flesh out the details. So what I hadn’t realized is that I’d just swapped one mortgage for another.
So buying the big house, as gorgeous and lovely as it was, and how happy I was with it, simply meant an up-level in my lifestyle, but it didn’t have the gypsy lifestyle. I wasn’t free. I still had the mortgage. And then of course I hadn’t changed my identity enough and I ended up back in retail.
I’ll just do a little segue here: part of my coaching focus, that I know for sure, is there is a reason it is ‘be, do, have’. You cannot have unless you do the right things. And you generally won’t do the right things unless you’re being a person who has and does that. And that’s why lottery winners lose all their money because they suddenly have, they don’t know what to do, but they’re still being somebody who lives on the bread line.
So within 5 years, they lose all they have, and they end up where they were, or worse. So in January 2010, I threw my hands up in the air and I recorded a benchmark video which is called The Great Quitting. I gave up on everything business-wise, all the doing that I had done, that I got stuck in. I just threw up my hands and said, “This is not working. I need to focus on the be.” And I started focusing on the identity of who I had to be to have the kind of lifestyle I wanted. And that changed everything.
What is the best thing about your dreams coming true?
At the moment, the best thing about my dream coming true is my grandbaby. He’s the reason we moved up here, and I was able to say to everybody in my business world yesterday, “I’m taking the afternoon off to play with my grandbaby”. I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been able to move, and I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t set up a business that supports this kind of globe-trotting, ‘live anywhere on a whim’ woman that I’ve become.
And at the moment, the whim takes me where this baby is. Next year it may be different. The whim may take me overseas, or the whim may take me back to South Africa to be with my family for a while. I don’t know, but at the moment, this is the best part, is to be able to take full advantage of life right now.
What is the worst thing about your dream coming true?
There’s this feeling of not being there yet. There’s always more, there’s always something else, and if we’re not careful, having a big dream can lead to chronic dissatisfaction. And chronic dissatisfaction is incredibly debilitating. I’m living, at the moment, in a teeny, tiny apartment, which is really cute, and in the location I wanted to be, which is within walking distance of baby. But it’s not exactly what I wanted. It’s just the best that was available when we came here.
We shot up from the south over a weekend to find somewhere to move to, to find something that worked with our timeline. Again, a whim. This is not precisely where I want to end up. But if we just keep focused on all the things it isn’t, we get more of what we put our attention on. And a lot of the time, when we have a really clear, big dream, we can get future-focused, which sucks us out of our power of the present moment.
It also leads us to what I call minding the gap. In the tube in London, there’s always signs that say, “Mind the gap.” When we have a really big dream that comes into focus it is easy to get caught in the gap. We know the dream, we can see where we want to be, and we’re painfully aware of where we are now. And the gap becomes our focus.
In LOA circles, they call this contrast, and what happens is that if you focus on the gap, if you focus on everything that’s missing, if you focus on how you’re not there yet, the gap will widen. So my task at the moment is to nest like crazy and stay riveted in the present moment because I know that the woman who does that is the woman who will have her high-rise penthouse next year. I’ll have it all. It will be coming, but at the moment, I have to tend to what is.
And not tend to it from a resistance point of view, but tend to it in a way that anchors my becoming. That’s what I teach in LOA Nesting, is that I start anchoring my client. Whatever their becoming is, we begin to anchor it in their current environment. I use my theatrical training. For 
example, if the curtain is open on a theatrical stage, you get a bazillion bits of information, all at once, that we can assimilate and digest.
We know the kind of people who inhabit that little world. We know what they’re going to sound like. If the set opens and it’s all Oklahoma, you’ve got a hay stack, and a wagon wheel, and all this stuff, then suddenly you have Ophelia waft in, all bedraggled and drowned that is not what you’d expect. So it’s the same kind of thing. When I walk into any space, the space talks to me of the people who live in it, and I get affirmation or information about who I am in it.
And this is the kind of work that I do because people will live forever in places that reflect who they used to be, rather than who they are becoming. And you can lock in your big dreams into your current space and your house becomes a manifesting tool. So that is what I’m working through now, is to make this nesting space a pathway and catalyst to my next big dream.
What advice would you have to other people who want to make this big dream of being location independent and being able to live anywhere they want, (or any big dream), come true?
The first thing is always to be as clear as we can. We are evolving beings. We can’t ever know all the nuances of who we’re going to be, but I think we can start. I listen for promptings. Inner guidance will tell you. If there’s a picture that just zings for you, that you see online, examine it. See why it zings for you.
I am addicted to hotel rooms. That is part of my thing. I wanted to find out why I am so addicted to hotel rooms. What does it mean to me to be in a hotel room? It can’t be any hotel room; I’m not doing the sort of Super 8 Motel crappy thing. When I am in a luxury hotel, I am in 7th heaven. So I analyze that. What part of my becoming really resonates here?
You may find it in a particular store, you may find it in a lifestyle blog, you may find it in a weird place you didn’t expect. But there’ll be something. There are clues. Life can be an oracle for you if you keep your eyes open. You could putter around with a little journal, looking for clues to your becoming. Then the next step is to start anchoring that in your environment.
So if your becoming has to do with somebody who is a grand traveller perhaps. You can go to a thrift store and find some kind of trinket or, here we have something called World Market and Pier One, which are kind of Indonesian and Philippine-type, very exotic décor. You can get something small from that and start making it look like you have actually been to those places.
That’s the magic of magic. It’s the doing of one thing and having a completely different result, where there is no obvious causality between the two, but it’s synchronistic. So you throw this gorgeous velvet bedspread over your bed and somebody will go, “I have a headboard that goes with that. Would you like it?” Or when Moulin Rouge the movie came out, so many people wanted to live in that kind of a vibe. It’s not hard to recreate and what you’ll find is when you enter into a room that is anchored in your becoming, you cannot be small and scared. You cannot be anything else but that gloriousness.
It is set design, and actually, my big program next year is about using acting skills to deliberately create the life you want because everything I do – from costume, to body language, to words, to set design – all of it has to do with creating this person I know that I am. It’s taken a lot of work to find that person and then move forward into the creating of her.
On the emerald tablet, there is a quote that says, “As above, so below. As within, so without.” The as within, so without, I believe, works backwards. The other way around. As without, so within. And you’re a perfect example of that Donna. You found that as you tidied your space, you felt more grown-up, more empowered, more business woman. Which actually means that your messy space was keeping you in amateur student mode, younger than you wanted to be, that kind of a feel, right?
So I have clients who have got job promotions, got a sudden ability to handle their money. All sorts of things just from anchoring an environment, a set that reflects that becoming. You speak to your environment and your environment speaks to you. And a lot of the time, if we’re not aware of this dance between inner and outer, we can swing the scale too far one way.
You can see it with people who get very materialistic because they’ve got this focus on the outer. Then they feel unfulfilled; there’s no depth. They’ll tell you that their life has no meaning or there’s a lot of surface stuff, and that’s because they haven’t swung to the other side, to look at the inner work.
Then I also have a lot of clients who have done a lot of inner work and they’re wise and brilliant people and they’re starving. They live in spaces that have nothing to help them contribute to the world. They, themselves, are incredible beings and need to get their work out into the world. So the work that I do is a dance between the two. I will tell you where you’ve been sitting on one side more than the other and we will work to get a rhythm between the two.
What is next on your big dream list?
I don’t believe in either/or. I want and/and, and at the moment it looks like two nests: one where I want to be location-wise, and one where my people are.
Thank you for sharing your Big Dream Coming True story Jacqueline, I adore it! Make sure you go and check out Jacqueline’s work at Jacqueline-gates.com. Have you had a Big Dream Come True? I’d LOVE to interview you about it – get in touch and share your Big Dream Story.
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