At Convention, I passed out these little “Dream Cubes” that had four quadrants represented by a distinct category for each one, such as: professional, personal, cultural, and physical.
And I challenged people to write down on each of the four sides their dreams for each component of life, and then on the flip side — also listed by quadrant — action items needed to get going. Basically, what are a few things you need to be doing next to get going and accomplish the dream?
It was an easy exercise to do flippantly — or to flippantly avoid. It has actually been more difficult than would seem on the surface to do this with some thought and soul searching. In fact, it took me about two months from end-to-end to finally identify and settle on the four dreams.
Each dream/goal (I am using the terms interchangeably for this exercise) could be something with a five-year horizon or a one-year, or an even greater time frame than that. Why use the terms “dream” and “goal” in an interrelated way? I would expect if you have a really big dream that someday you’d like to have happen professionally — perhaps ten years from now — it would be made up of smaller dreams. And for this to not simply be a pipe dream akin to winning the lottery (an understandable but somewhat irrational dream), each dream ties to a degree with goals, though perhaps the former are more heartfelt and symbolic than the latter, which are typically more rote and quantified.
So I’m taking the 1-2 year focused approach for me personally.
At our meeting in Seattle I used my personal one-year dream in the physical category of trying to quantify a really big goal for me: 15% bodyfat (I wouldn’t argue with less) within the next year. So when I turn my dream cube over the next action items for me included changing my eating habits. In fact, it laid out this simply:
Dream: 15% bodyfat
Actions: 1) Start the South Beach Diet, 2) Walk a MINIMUM of 5,000 steps total a day (about a half hour of walking), 3) Resistance training at least 1x/week.
That’s it. And a few months from now maybe I’ll have to change some of my action steps depending upon my progress, but for now that’s what I KNOW I need to be doing.
As an aside, the South Beach Diet has always worked well for me, and I think it is among the healthiest and most sustainable options. I like it for the following reasons: 1) It’s balanced with protein/carbs/fats and lots of whole grains and fresh fruits/vegetables. 2) It’s delicious. 3) It will help you break a sugar addiction, which you probably don’t even realize you have. 4) It works and you can see significant results even within the first two-week induction phase. I would highly recommend it. Dr. Agatston just wrote a new book called “The South Beach Diet Supercharged” that’s worth the $30.
And I still haven’t even gotten to the point of my blog entry for today.
As I got going in one dream quadrant, the cultural one, I soon realized the challenge — and conscientious thought and commitment — required to get going on the other areas.
And I’ve been wrestling with the other quadrants because I really put some of the dreams that were desires of my heart on this piece of paper — and I’m committed to it but there’s a tough bridge between desire and action.
Here’s what hit me today: On the cultural quadrant I made a decision to move forward with a really important personal activity, something that I’ve been thinking about for many years. Probably five or more, and I hoped that SOMEDAY, even decades from now, I would take this initiative on and accomplish it. And when I was creating the Dream Cube, I figured “might as well try to add it to the list now and see what happens.”
It doesn’t really matter what my cultural dream is; in fact I’m not going to share this one (at least not now) because I don’t want it to cloud the lesson I learned.
Which is that it’s easy to talk about dreams but difficult to take action.
And exceptionally hard to accomplish them.
Which is why it’s important to list some of the “next action” steps to keep it front and center.
With my Cultural dream, I had a bunch of great reasons not to pursue it. In fact, I’ve been using them for years so that I wouldn’t have to take action — but I also never killed the idea of the dream from my mind either, because that also would have been depressing and destroyed some of my hope. Of course, at the rate I was going nothing was ever going to come of it anyways, so for a while it wasn’t theoretically hopeless. Just practically hopeless.
But I wrote down this cultural dream (defined in ONE simple word), and then on the reverse side listed some next steps — the action items required just to start making progress on the dream. And I started going down the list of steps. Before I knew it, I’m into the throes of planning for this initiative, and today it came time to make a critical decision in preparation for this event.
When I was driving down I-5 thinking this through I was at a crossroads, where for me to go to my next action step I would have to make a really big commitment with action step number one. And it was then that I realized that I was spending more time thinking about the reasons that I should stop pursuit of this (too much money, risky, difficult, etc.) than I was towards moving it forward. The thoughts were rationalizations — some legitimate and some not — to postpone this accomplishment. And during the drive down I-5, I finally got sick of finding reasons to hold back.
So I pulled the trigger and made a big commitment towards the next step.
And after committing how do I feel? Amazing.
Freedom. Excitement. Liberation. Purpose. Alive.
It’s like I got an IV injection of power, and not in an egotistical sense, but rather a centered/fulfilled/confident sense. It’s like one of those feelings that you get when you give something your total commitment — and to a degree, the end result doesn’t even matter, because you gave it all.
Today was one of those simple magical moments. And it came from a combination of silent thought as well as a simple but logical process that was fueled by both inspiration to be better and a dismissal of excuses that each of us experiences at various times.
I really felt a reinforced lesson of the importance of having a dream or passion, that to move it meaningfully forward it must be accomplished by some action steps, and that all throughout this process each of us will find opportunity to move it forward or backward.
Today, I didn’t need advice. Didn’t need support, mentorship, enthusiasm, motivational tapes, GANTT charts, spreadsheets, proformas, or visualization.
Instead, today all I needed was to be by myself and make it happen. And regardless of how this dream pans out, I’ll remember today for quite a while — because of the lessons I learned, and the feelings throughout this process.
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