It’s not the dream that’s wrong. It’s our timelines.
Our lofty, borderline crazy dreams are absolutely fine. But pressurizing ourselves to reach them in compressed timelines isn’t.
Dreaming feels good but turning it into a goal is better
It’s true. Dreams excite us. But most of us stop there, that’s enough. Just that little dopamine hit from imagining the dream in real life, or better yet telling someone close to us that we’re working on it can sedate us into inaction.
However there are some of us who know that dreams can materialize if we turn them into small achievable goals.
There’s several ways to go about goal achievement and we’ll save that for another post, but picking the system is not the problem.
It’s the duration we give ourselves to achieve the goal that dooms us.
I’ve been guilty of it for many years and am only now breaking out of the habitual 'overambition' I have when it comes to my timelines.
When I examined my behaviour over the years and across various projects, I realized the underlying reason for my pile of failed goals.
The reason for the over reach and trying to squash the goal getting into a tighter window was and is actually just simple scarcity.
Scarcity mindset = A results orientation
Trying to get somewhere faster or quicker is us running away from our pains. But there’s only so much running you can do when you’re in pain.
Instead, what’s needed before we set off any quest is first remedying the pain.
Fixing the scarcity within myself allowed me to still go after my goals but with a much more smoother, stable walk compared to my laboured, fist clenched running.
Change your mindset
If the goal truly matters to us, we need to forget about reaching it in our unrealistic timelines, set by our pained selves.
What actually gets us making true progress and eventually reaching our goals is to opt for an abundant process orientated mindset.
Abundance mindset = A process orientation
Without getting all 'law of attaction' here, an abundance mindset in this case is simply letting go of neediness.
You don’t need the goal. You want it. There’s a big difference between those two sentences.
So now, yes the goal is cool but doing the work that gets the goal, is actually cooler.
In fact, it’s so much fun to focus on the work that nerding out on it and looking at how well we’re working gives us a level of pleasure that we were looking for all along from trying to chase down our original goal.
It will vary based on what your goal was, but perhaps you were looking for one of these:
- A sense of accomplishment?
- Connection to others?
- A sense of contribution?
- A sense of personal growth?
- A sense of control?
Well given enough time focusing just on the process, the work required, you’ll definitely start feeling some if not all of these.
Measure your performance within the process
So how do we actually make sure our process is on course and that we’re on track to reach our goal?
Yes, we love the work but hey, we’re aiming at something concrete still!
Well this is where measurement comes into the picture.
Once we’re measuring our key performance indicators, the few but essential things responsible for forming our process, then we can begin managing ourselves and the quality of our process.
At this point now, we’re hacking our way closer to our goal without explicitly thinking about it. This is where we’re looking at our stats regularly, looking for emerging patterns and looking for major trends and seeing what we need to do to continue to drive more of what it is that we want to see from our output.
An example of dream into goal into process
Let’s look at this all through an example. Let’s say our dream is that we want to write a New York Times Bestseller yesterday.
Well we need to have a look at what goals we need to on our way there. Here are a few that may be relevant:
- Produce a volume of writing to find our voice.
- Produce quality distinctive writing.
- Build a following around our writing.
- Pick up a literary agent.
- Propose our book idea to publishing houses.
- Get the deal and write our hearts out.
- Market our book strategically.
- Hit that best sellers list!
Now this is a rough roadmap and likely an inaccurate one, but let’s just pretend for now this is what we need to do.
There’s no need to force ourselves to try to rush through this all.
For one thing, for those of you familiar with software design methodologies, this is a waterfall type goal, in that one stage cannot be completed until the prior one is finished.
So what do we do?
We fixate on the first goal in front ourselves and break the major process down into key performance indicators that tell us how well we’re doing.
So with the first goal of “Produce a volume of writing to find our voice”, we need to look for the process we need to analyze and clearly that is writing in this case.
So now we can examine writing further, looking at things perhaps like:
- Number of sources used.
- Range of sources used.
- Topics covered.
- Metaphors used.
- Type of tone used.
These again are just rough examples, but I hope you get the point.
If we now focus on these things or similar, within our writing process we are now able to take control of the quality of our output and that is what we need to continually focus on.
If you keep going, it will happen. Just not when you want it to
So whatever the dream is, all of the sub-goals that stand in the way can be reached in this manner.
The dream will inevitably be reached at whatever point in the future, so long as we keep this process orientation up.
But by the point it arrives we’ll have changed how we go about life.
At this point we think and operate very differently:
- We’re no longer a chaser of things outside of ourselves.
- We instead only play games where we are in charge of our destiny.
- We compete with our past performances rather than peers or idols.
- And we’re self satisfied by our efforts rather than having our emotions at the mercy of outside forces.
This state of being is how dreams are turned into reality.
Are you working on a dream right now? If so, share below and if not.. why not? Get dreaming!
