Helping Dreamers Become Doers
Whether it’s a creative project, a promotion, a business idea, a trip or even a relationship, the amount of things we can dream up are seemingly endless. While this short blog post won’t guarantee you success in all your endeavors, it can help jumpstart you from the dreaming phase to the next step of making that dream a little more of a reality. Here are five steps to helping dreamers become doers.
Identify your goal. What exactly is it that you want to achieve? Is it to write a book? Afford a trip to Europe? Build your own home? Whatever it is, identify it and make it as concrete as possible. Try to break it down from the general to the specific.
Set benchmarks to keep you on track. You’d never dream about taking a cross-country roadtrip with zero pitstops. Maybe even the thought of attempting that feat would put you off the trip altogether. Setting up smaller goals and self-imposed deadlines are like pit stops on the road to achieving your dreams. For example, if your goal is to write a book and there is no set deadline, then the likelihood of following through will decrease substantially. Instead, set goals to complete a certain number of words, set time goals, or create a daily habit of writing (with rewards attached!). You could also sign up for a writers’ conference or a group writing challenge to keep yourself accountable. This is just one example, but the same principles apply to anything you can dream up.
Envision your dream. This is why it helps to be very specific. There are countless sports psychology studies on the benefits of visualization for mentally conditioning an athlete’s brain for success. So in that vein, visualizing yourself not only at the end of the journey, achieving your dream, but also completing each step along the way is proven to improve outcomes. In fact, outcome-based images (i.e. winning a medal) are rarely used in sports psychology according to one study. Instead, athletes are encouraged to focus on envisioning your process goals (i.e. the smaller goals you created above). The beauty of this technique is that it can be used to imagine not only how we want things to happen, but also how we want to feel. Say our goals are less about what we want to achieve and more about how we want to interact with others, we can also envision ourselves in a better state of mind, having a positive conversation with our spouse or child, asserting ourselves, etc. Try using your five senses to make the visualization even more real. Repetition is key. Some great places to visualize are on a commute (eyes open!), doing some mundane task, or even lying in bed before you go to sleep.
Get out of your own way. What does this mean? In the book The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey posits that we have a Self 1, the “teller” and a Self 2, the “doer.” Self 1 is basically our overthinking tendencies. The side of us that will try too hard, criticize ourselves, and calculate each of our moves. Side 2 is the side that knows inherently what to do, it’s non-judgmental, child-like and instinctual. By first visualizing how to succeed, we must then let it take its course. If we mess up or make mistakes along the way, which we most certainly will, it’s seeing the mistake clearly and accepting it as it is rather than assigning a value judgment to it or ourselves. When you miss a few days of writing, for example, you are not an inconsistent loser who will never finish anything.
Gallwey uses an analogy to help drive this point home: “When we plant a rose seed…we do not criticize it as ‘rootless and stemless.’...When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped…we stand in wonder at the process taking place…The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state…it is perfectly alright as it is.” Although it is difficult to see ourselves, our progress and our aspirations in this way, Gallwey insists it is the only way to progress forward.
Don’t give up. While this phrase may seem very rigid, what it really means is, be flexible. Don’t worry about “shoulds.” If something doesn’t work out exactly as you envisioned it, try a different approach. Keep trying every iteration you need to in order to see your dream through. Don’t give up on yourself!
No matter where you are on your journey between point A and point D(ream), remember if our minds have the power to dream up just about anything, it’s with that same power that we can also achieve just about anything. Hopefully these tips are helpful along the way.