14

DATE YOUR DREAM

You’ve gone through the process of cataloguing your strengths, exploring the hopes you had when you were young, remembering what makes you feel strong, focused, fulfilled. As we look over our list of strengths, we begin to piece together potential dreams. Some months ago I discovered a website called SuperCook (supercook.com), a recipe search engine where you type in the ingredients you have on hand and it will find a recipe for you to make. I find this concept compelling, the premise being that we all have lots of “ingredients” on hand. In fact, I believe we have a lot more on hand, or a lot more possibilities available to us, than we realize.

When we bootstrap our way into a dream, we have a goal in sight and go in search of the necessary skills and resources to make it happen. In the SuperCook approach, we identify the skills, resources, and knowledge we already have on hand and see what we might make of them. That we have more available to us than we may think was illustrated nicely in a short-lived show on TLC titled I’ve Got Nothing to Wear. In this six-part series, a professional stylist assigns the guest’s clothing to one of two categories: salvageable or unsalvageable. The unsalvagables are sent to the “chop shop,” where three designers have been assigned to cull, rip, redesign, and re-sew the items into fresh, fashionable pieces (for example, an outdated pair of slacks might become an evening gown). In the meantime, the stylist shops with the guest for four or five classic items to complement the salvaged clothing. When the stylist creates a “look book” that shows the guest how to mix and match the salvaged clothes, the newly purchased classics, and the revamped pieces, the wardrobe makeover is complete.

As we figure out our dreams, I’d draw a number of comparisons: Salvaged clothing or clothing that is wearable today is a metaphor for our strengths, strengths we already possess, ingredients on hand, as it were. Newly purchased classic items are the one or two new skills we may need to achieve our dream; these skills are not necessarily expensive or even time-consuming to acquire. Revamped or refashioned clothing: just as each of us has clothes that we love, possibly inherited from our grandmothers or mothers, that no longer fit us or who we are, we also have strengths, qualities that may have even gotten us through tough times, that now must go to the chop shop for a repurpose (i.e. revamped or refashioned clothing). As we inventory our strengths, examine how we might repurpose longstanding skills, and acquire new ones, we are in effect figuring putting together a “look book” of our possibilities. Out of this book, we will find two or three dreams we’d like to try on for a day or two, dreams we’d like to explore.

Ingredients in search of a recipe, clothing in search of a personal style, strengths in search of a dream—possibilities really do abound. Once we have figuratively “typed in our ingredients” and the search engine of our imagination has generated a list of possible dreams that we can make happen, it’s time to start writing them down.

You just be may be surprised by the consequence of doing so, as was Melissa Stanton, a former editor of People and Life magazines, and the author of The Stay-at-Home Survival Guide: Field-Tested Strategies for Staying Smart, Sane, and Connected While Caring for Your Kids.

Melissa Stanton: Don’t Just Think It, Ink It

Was it my dream to be a stay-at-home mom?

No, at least I didn’t think so. But I’ve recently realized that becoming a stay-at home mom, which I’ve been for nearly eight years, might have been an unintentional dream come true.

This past year, for the first time in my stay-at-home career, all three of my children were in full-day school. With my newfound freedom I started working through two decades–worth of files and boxes, including boxes from when I left my job at People magazine, where I was a senior editor. At the time, a confluence of events—my husband taking a job in Baltimore when his Wall Street–area employer hit hard times, my being a weekday single mother with a demanding career and long commute, September 11—led me to conclude that I needed to work a different way, and live a different way.

In the chaos surrounding my decision to leave a career I had aspired to and worked hard at for more than fifteen years, I didn’t realize I was making one of my dreams come true. Nine months earlier I had participated in a career development workshop in which the instructor told us to write down three personal goals we wanted to achieve within a year. The activity’s mantra:

“Don’t just think it, ink it.”

As I sorted through the old work papers, I found the class handout and my scribbled list of goals:

1. I will have a family-friendlier career.

2. I will have a second child.

3. My husband and I will be more financially secure and able to pay down some debt.

It turns out that within a year of “inking” those goals, I had achieved each one—although not in ways I ever imagined.

1. After leaving People, I started freelance writing from home.

2. Baby Number 2 materialized as Numbers 2 and 3.

3. My husband’s new job enabled us to get by on one income.

My goals (or dreams?) had come true.

Navigating the huge transition from an active work life to a life dominated by domesticity led to another goal. I wanted to combine my “past life” as a writer and editor with my new life as a stay-at-home mom by writing a realistic, non-Mommy Wars “support-group-in-a-book” for, as one reviewer would so aptly describe, “any mom who has felt she has the best job in the world, and the worst job in the world, all within a two-minute time frame.”

While some women love every minute of being a stay-at-home mom—and are, in fact, living their dream—many others struggle with the demands of being a 24-7 at-home mom. To them, stay-at-home motherhood isn’t necessarily a calling. I believe stay-at-home parenting is a job, and stay-at-home moms are “working moms.” No one loves her job every minute of the day. Not always loving stay-at-home motherhood doesn’t mean a woman is a bad mother, or that she regrets leaving the workforce, or that she doesn’t love her kids or appreciate her good fortune. It just means she needs a break, and she needs interests and activities independent of caring for kids.

After many, many rejections from agents and publishers who didn’t want to do a “stay-at-home mommy book,” or else wanted a book with a “strong” platform (“Mothers should stay home with their children” or “Mothers should stay in the workforce”), my pitch landed on the desk of an editor who had once been a stay-at-home mom. She understood the need for the book (which I researched and wrote at night while I cared for my kids by day) and championed it to publication.

Would the former me have ever dreamed that I’d someday write a book about stay-at-home motherhood? Absolutely not. But just as dreamers need to live in the real world, dreams—manifested as goals—emerge from our realities.

My new dreams, which I’ll dare to “ink” here and not just think, are to:

1. Write a “support-group-in-a-book” for stay-at-home moms seeking to reenter the paid workforce.

2. Reenter the paid workforce myself, with a truly family-friendly career that allows me to earn decent money and do professional-level work without having to sacrifice my family to my job.

What dreams would you dare to ink and not just think?

Since inking this essay, Melissa has reentered the workforce with a “family-friendlier-than-before” career. While she still hopes to write a “support-group-in-a-book” for moms seeking paid employment, that goal is taking a bit longer to achieve due to her now-full plate, balancing work and family.

As you enumerated your strengths, you likely wrote down your thoughts and ideas, even scribbled in the margins here. I would encourage you to continue to do so. Ideas that intrigue you will also flit through your mind. If they persist, write them down. I imagine note cards tacked to a large corkboard, each card with a word or phrase describing a potential dream written on it. This is your pool of dreams. Maybe you already have a favorite, a dream that you know you want to pursue wholeheartedly. Or maybe, like me, you have a dozen half-formed dreams that you might want to try on. At this point, you must give yourself time to explore—to take a dream out for a test drive.

If you are a perfectionist like me, it is really, really hard to start. Which is why I believe in dating dreams—when we give ourselves permission to date dreams with a no-commitment clause, it’s really quite liberating. That’s precisely what Kristy Williams, a former Bain management consultant and corporate strategist who now focuses on motherhood, opted to do a few years ago.

Kristy Williams: Five Dreams I Think I’ll Date

Goals have always been a central part of my life. I like feeling proactive and productive and enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes once goals are achieved. As I read Whitney’s article “Making Space for Your Dream,” I realized that while I continue to set goals, I’m plumb out of dreams.

In the busy years after college, I worked challenging jobs, traveled to many places throughout the world, met a wonderful man whom I married, and became a mother. In the process, I achieved the dreams I set in high school and college. In all the excitement of those years, new dreams weren’t really needed. The pace of my life has now slowed, making room for dreams once again.

But what do I dream of?

I want dreams I can work on now, recognizing that full realization may be fifteen to thirty years off, once the role of full-time mother lessens in intensity. Many weeks of introspection have yielded five dreams I’m going to consider. Each of the five potential dreams is something I enjoy, but until I spend some time with them, I won’t know if they merit dream status. So, while I’m happily married, I’m going to spend some time dating this year—dating my dreams to determine which ones are right for me.

Dream No. 1: Writing (Of the Nonfiction Variety)

My first date has gone well—writing and publishing this post about my dreams has been engaging, stretching, and rewarding. I want to come up with two more topics and find two other places to publish. Future dates will involve considering how I can make writing a more consistent part of my life.

Dream No. 2: Business Consulting

I did this for a living and, on the whole, enjoyed it. I love reading about business and chatting with my husband about his start-up. My first few dates with this dream will be all brainstorming. How can I consult in my spare time? Who would be interested in short blocks of commitment? One option would be to focus on creatives: those selling their wares via a personal website or Etsy, or other small business owners. I could provide support in creating a strategy, identifying a focused market group, setting prices, etc.

Dream No. 3: Teaching

This can start simply, perhaps by inviting some friends for a one-off class/discussion. First date: come up with a topic I’m passionate about. Second date: develop the material and invite people to come. Further down the line this could lead to something more structured—maybe a class at the local high school (filled with underprivileged teens) on preparing for college.

Dream No. 4: Politics

My long-term dream may be to run for office. For now, my efforts will involve researching the candidates running for governor in California. If I like one of the candidates, I’ll date some more by looking at ways to get involved in the campaign. Or I may keep this simple: get involved by joining the online dialogue on politically based sites.

Dream No. 5: Competitive Running/Triathlons

The competitive part is surely many, many years off, but in the meantime, I can get involved in racing. I’m going to identify five races that pique my interest and start by running in a local 10K.

With all the focus on dreams this year, I am bound to discover something that excites me and provides enlightenment, energy, and joyful anticipation as I work to determine who I want to become.

Kristy subsequently received two intriguing inquiries from small business owners in New York about short-term consulting gigs. Nothing ultimately came of these inquiries, but that’s not important. The point of exploring is to explore. To date dreams. Or, as Madeleine Walburger wrote in chapter 5, to play with a concept and dream dabble.

A few years ago, I dated what felt like a rather frivolous dream. I’m not going to leave my husband and children and take up with a rock band, but when I saw a friend’s blurb on the Ladies Rock Camp, a weekend fundraiser in which women learn how to play instruments and write songs, I knew this was something I didn’t want to just imagine or think about; it was something I wanted to explore.

I noodled around with this possibility for several weeks. Earlier in the year, my husband, kids, and I had visited our friends Renee and Troy Tribe. Troy and the three oldest kids had started a rock band. After dinner, they performed ’70s classics “Smoke on the Water” and “Takin’ Care of Business” in their basement studio. It was a highlight of the vacation.

I found myself thinking, why not?

But I just imagined, and then my imagining was done, with no exploratory follow-up, which is what we often do. No surprise, really. We are primed to stop at imagining, whether it’s because we don’t want to be disappointed or vulnerable, or because we may not do whatever thing we want to explore very well. Or we don’t want to be impractical. Why spend the time if we aren’t really going to pursue something, to seriously commit to it?

There’s an irony in this. If we will allow ourselves to move beyond imagining to exploring, knowing that we can say “no” at any point, it’s really quite liberating. We have so many commitments, that we want and need to keep, to God, family, friends, community, work, and most importantly, to ourselves.

But there are some things we don’t have to commit to. We get to do these things for a day, a week, even a month, and then if we want to, we can be done with it and go on to imagine and explore another possibility. Like Ladies Rock Camp.

As we begin to think about and explore our possibilities, it is quite likely that we will fall off the saddle. Trying on dreams for a few minutes or even a day will be uncomfortable for us because we are in essence asking for what we want. Because our family or friends—or even we—may label some dreams as “not sufficiently important,” “frivolous,” “fun,” or “pointless,” we may not end up following through. That is what happened with Ladies Rock Camp. I registered and made my hotel reservations for the camp months in advance, but two days before camp started, I cancelled my trip. I felt sad about it, but there are times when circumstances beyond our control prevent us from exploring. I wonder, though, if—more often than not—we simply lose our nerve. It’s probably good for us to sort through the why of our decisions.

It’s more important that we never, never, never give up exploring; when we fall off the saddle of our possibilities, we need to get right back up. Rebecca Ellsworth Menzie (beantown.menzie.org), a wife and mother who enjoys baking, quilting, gardening, triathlon-ing, and blogging, shares how her daughter taught her an important lesson about exploring possibilities and not giving up, even in the face of failure.

Rebecca Ellsworth Menzie: Not a Track Star

Sometime last fall, my fourteen-year-old, Christina, announced she wanted to do track. Imagine my surprise, considering I’d never seen Christina run, jog, or walk for exercise, not to mention that she hasn’t participated in a team sport since elementary school soccer (I think she did two seasons). Honestly, I thought she was kidding, but she brought this up a couple more times, and then she went and signed herself up! The Saturday before track started, Christina suited up in workout clothes, borrowed my old running shoes, and said, “I’ll be right back. I’m going to take a run.” I scratched my head and chuckled. And she was off.

After a couple weeks, I asked Christina what event she was doing. She answered, “The 100. I can’t run very far.” Again, I was taken aback. I don’t know any sprinters in our pedigree. Not one. “Any other events?” I ask. “Nope. Just the 100.” After discussing her times, and how she fared in meets, it was clear that she was at the back of the pack for her single event. My husband and I wondered if the $240 athletic fee was worth it. But having that feeling that there was more to this for Christina than whether she was an emerging track star, we decided to support her. We made the extra trips to the school for practices and meets. We purchased workout clothes, the team sweat suit, and spiked shoes for our sprinter. We had conversations about the benefits of her participating in track.

We talked about how this is good for Christina’s health. She’s not growing in height anymore, and so it’s important to be active in order to stay in good shape. She can always go jogging—it requires minimal gear, just get up and go. Jogging gives quick positive boosts to mental and physical well-being. It’s good for your bones.

While we asked about her times and placement at meets, that has always been secondary to how much effort she puts into her races. We asked questions like: How do you feel about how things went? What went well? Is there anything you’d like to change? Christina has come in last place often. At first, this was embarrassing and discouraging for her. No one likes coming in last place. But since when is last place equivalent to failure? I shared with her how I quit the track team in high school because I was too scared to compete. I was afraid of not doing well. I let my fear of failure keep me from what could have been a great experience on the track team. To see my daughter get out there and go for it regardless of where she places, and having the confidence to sign up for a sport she knew nothing about before high school, makes me beyond proud . . .

So, no, Christina’s not a track star, but she’s a star nonetheless.

Rebecca clearly admires her daughter’s refusal to back down from her dream of running track, even when she has come in last place many times. Sometimes our children can be our greatest examples, and in this case, Christina is teaching her mother how to try on a dream.

Part of dating dreams is that, just like first dates, we can sometimes be quite uncomfortable and things can go badly when we explore; we are in uncharted terrain. Here’s a post I wrote on my blog after a particularly tough week.

WORTH DOING BADLY

Always be a beginner at something.

—Bill Buxton, senior researcher at Microsoft

We need to get over what we were taught in school. Look at Google. Everything is always in beta.

—Paul Gillin, technology journalist

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

—G.K. Chesterton, nineteenth-century philosopher and writer

When I read the above quotes, I feel myself physically relax, perfectionism fading away. Because the fact is, anything really worth doing, from parenting to marriage to career to friendship to dreams, we sometimes do rather badly.

This last week I did things so badly I just wanted to quit. Which is why having my friend Lisa Boyce quote G.K. Chesterton was a gift. If we’re doing things badly, maybe it means that we’re doing things worth doing, that we’re fully engaged in our lives, our relationships, and our dreams.

Be a beginner.

Be in beta.

Do things badly.

As you discover your dreams and begin to dabble, you may feel some amalgam of thrill and fear, and maybe even become defensive. That is when you know you are getting close, as happened with Janna Taylor, the founder of Mind Full Tutors (mindfulltutors.com), located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Janna Taylor: If You Get Defensive, You’re Getting Close

In fall 2007, I opened Mind Full Tutors, a tutoring company located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Even though starting a tutoring business had been my dream for several years, I resisted pursuing it like a stubborn mule.

Prior to receiving a Master’s of Education at Harvard, I’d helped build a successful tutoring company. But when I graduated, I took a job working for a nonprofit teacher education program with no plan to start a tutoring business. Even though my work for the nonprofit was meaningful, I was unhappy. The job responsibilities did not play to my strengths and were far from the “action” of educating students.

When I complained to friends about my job, many responded with, “When are you going to start your tutoring company?” Each time, I met this encouragement with defensive responses such as, “There is no way I can do that,” “I can’t even think about that right now,” or “Maybe someday . . . I don’t know.”

I have wondered—why was I defensive?

First, I was protecting my heart. I fervently wanted this dream to be a reality. But to pursue the dream would be to expose it to possible failure. I wondered if my heart could bear the disappointment.

Secondly, I was deflecting guilt for not acting authentically. I knew in my bones that part of living authentically was to start my own tutoring company. Because I knew it was going to be difficult and risky, I resisted.

These two factors blinded me to the possibility of success.

After several more months of job dissatisfaction, I decided to take a chance on what my friends and family could see, and what I had lost sight of. I wrote a business plan and five months later opened Mind Full Tutors. When I shared this news with my loved ones, all of the responses were akin to, “Finally!”

So what were my friends seeing that I wasn’t?

My friends saw an open road to success, where I saw barricades and roadblocks. They saw abilities, where I saw deficiencies. They saw, “Why not?” and I saw, “Because . . .” They saw my need to live with passion and purpose, and I saw a need to compromise because of fear.

I’ve learned that others can play an important role in anchoring us to our dreams. They remind us of what we can and are meant to accomplish in this life. While it is true that some people can distract us from our dreams, those who know us best often see us for what we are—women of great ability and purpose.

Mind Full Tutors has been in business for almost a year now. My heart feels alive and I know that I am making difference in the world every day—one student at a time.

It is often true that when we are close to diving into a dream and we somehow sense that the advice we are receiving from those we love is right, it terrifies us, and so we reject it. I remember that being true four years ago with Rose Park Advisors. When I first started speaking with the Christensens about launching a hedge fund, I thought, “I’ll just work on this for awhile, it will be temporary.” When my husband would say, “Why don’t you do this?” I’d think, “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly.”

A dream I dated this past year was designing a dress for the Shabby Apple dress design contest. Because I don’t draw, I wasn’t going to enter, but I loved to sew as a young girl. I have an acquired competency of pulling together people and ideas (in this case I asked a talented artist to help me). Most importantly, I wanted to do this “just because,” and it was important for me to be respectful of my wishes. So I dabbled.

I’m also exploring more intently my desire to produce a documentary. I know it will involve women—and probably dreams of some kind. Beyond that, I don’t know. My innate talent around music should serve me well.

My acquired competencies of building and running a business will also come in handy, as will having learned to craft a narrative. Before really pursuing this, there’s a lot more dating I’d need to do, given that a real script and financing would be required, but it’s a dream that I want to explore. Who knows—maybe my dream that Rose Park Advisors’ portfolio will eventually include capital devoted to women-owned businesses will lead to a documentary? I don’t know yet. And I don’t need to. Right now I’m exploring, dabbling, dating. It’s in my look book of possibilities.

DABBLING, DATING, DELINEATING . . .

I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.

—Eric Liddell, in the Academy Award–winning film Chariots of Fire

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

—G.K. Chesterton, nineteenth-century philosopher and writer