You Don’t Need to Have It All Figured Out to Live Your Dream – Part 1

What do you find easier – dreaming big, or finding a way to make those dreams come true?

Most of us have more difficulty with the latter. If you don’t, you may not be dreaming big enough. But how do you connect the vision with reality?

For years, I was convinced that having a vision and goals meant having a clear and specific picture of what was ahead and designing a plan that would ensure that certain milestones were met at designated intervals.

I was taught that goals had to be specific, measurable, and time bound (and spent a good part of my career teaching others the same). I would spend a considerable amount of time wordsmithing these goals and generating a detailed project plan as though I could bend reality to my will.

And then life would happen and I’d get extremely frustrated when things didn’t fall into place the way I had planned. The part of us that wants to lay out a course of action that minimizes risk and controls all the variables is analogous to a manager, whose function is to plan, direct, organize, and control.

The dilemma is that preconceived ideas of what needs to happen to bring it to fruition can never take into account all the unexpected twists and turns that each day throws at us. So the manager in each of us needs to take its orders from a higher authority.

This higher authority is our inner leader. The leader lives in the present, takes its cues from its inner and outer environment, and speaks to the hearts as well as the heads of its people. It is that part of us that rises up with the awareness that we must make a change in course in order to realize our greater visions. It blends concrete data with intuitive hunches and moves much more fluidly.

“Establishing goals is all right as long as you don’t let them deprive you of interesting detours.”

~ Doug Larson

The manager in each of us often wants to fix things and tends to put more attention on what is wrong than what is right. It is so concerned with problems that it tends to identify with them and unwittingly propagate them. The manager would have us set goals about behaviors we want to stop, and things about ourselves that aren’t good enough.

These goals almost always fail because they lead us to identify with the very state we wish to rise above. We enter into them from a state of deficiency, and though our behaviors may temporarily change in alignment with detailed plans we have crafted for ourselves, our thoughts about who we are and what’s wrong keep us tethered and ultimately propel us to act in ways that reinforce old habits and patterns.

The leader focuses on possibilities and speaks to that part of ourselves and others that has the capability and potential to achieve it. It sees through the eyes of someone who has already achieved their goals and visions rather than identifying with the experience of past failures or shortcomings.

The leader in each of us knows that action follows thought and invests time in identifying limiting beliefs and trading them for something more empowering. Rather than moving away from an undesirable place, it focuses on moving toward what it desires to create.

With the leader in charge, the manager’s willfulness is balanced with willingness – willingness to change and adapt even the best laid plans, to reach higher, and to trust that something greater than ourselves will help us get where we most need to go.

Go to Why You Don’t Have to Have It All Figured Out to Live Your Dream – Part Two.