It’s not about how to achieve your dreams, it’s about how to lead your life . . . If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, the dreams will come to you.
—Randy Pausch
How often do you daydream? You know those moments when you slip into a temporary state of imagining. Maybe you have had daydreaming beaten out of you when you were growing up. Certainly there is a huge amount of negativity about daydreaming whether as a child or an adult. Did you know that ten minutes of every hour you fall into Alpha state—or as you might think of it, zoning out, away with the fairies or daydreaming? Alpha state (Berger, 1940) involves the conscious mind turning inwards, transporting your mind to a different time and space.
You might think that this never happens to you, but have you ever come around when driving, having zoned out, not quite sure what junction you are up to on the motorway? You have passed dozens of vehicles, possibly gone through numerous maneuvers, but have no conscious memory of how you got where you are. In the USA, the traffic cops even refer to a ‘black and white’ syndrome, which occurs when someone who is driving perfectly safely in Alpha state suddenly becomes aware (conscious) of the police car and switches back to conscious thinking. The end result is rather than driving more safely, the driver begins driving erratically because they become overtly conscious of their actions.
Or consider this, when you walk up a flight of stairs, the first few steps you think about as you get a measure of the height and width of the stairs. Next time you ascend or descend a flight of stair, count how many stairs it takes before you stop thinking about walking up the stairs, you’ll find yourself wobbling more than usual, because the act of counting forces you to think about how you are walking up and down the stairs. If you have ever wondered why the top step on a spiral staircase in a castle is always slightly lower than all the other steps in the castle, it is because even several hundred years ago the castle builders had worked out that invading soldiers stopped thinking about where they were placing their feet on the stairs by the time they had run up hundreds of steps. So, the crafty builders deliberately reduced the height of the final step in order to cause the invading soldier to stumble. This gave the defenders an opportunity to step out of a hidden door and bop them over the head. Daydreaming, it seems, is not a modern phenomenon; it is part of what makes us human.
The Importance of Daydreaming
Daydreaming is essential to our mental wellbeing; it is our download time and if you prevent yourself from daydreaming, you will find that when you do daydream you will do so for longer and with greater intensity. You might believe that you have full control over whether you daydream or not, but consider for a minute a meeting or workshop that you have recently attended. In the morning, as a willing participant, you will have consciously prevented yourself from drifting off. You will have diligently shifted the position in your seat in you efforts to stay focused and pay attention, even during the boring bits. You may have found yourself participating in activities to help you stay focused; sitting up straight, drinking coffee, and even writing notes to stay focused, especially if the presenter was droning on a bit. After lunch, however, the struggle to remain focused gets harder, and by 2pm to 3pm, you will have found yourself zoning out for long stretches.
But daydreaming isn’t an activity without merit or importance to our personal development and wellbeing. The greatest thing about the Alpha state is that it is the hot bed of creativity. Our conscious minds can only hold onto about eight pieces of information at any one time. But our subconscious is like a massive warehouse with every single piece of knowledge, thought, experience, and idea you have gathered during your lifetime stored and accessible to your imagination. When we daydream, we open up access to all that material stored away like a giant library. As we daydream, our brain peruses the shelves picking up information in a seemingly random jumble and throwing them out for us to ponder on. The wealth of a lifetime of experience and knowledge just waiting for an opportunity for your subconscious to poke and pry, creating the possibility of a great idea.
Make Daydreaming Deliberate
In my development practice, I urge my clients to daily Take Ten@Ten. The idea behind the daily practice is to encourage people to take time out from task lists and action point and just stop and reflect for a brief period. Reflection plays a significant part in personal development and growth and is a major element of my development practice. Reflection is described “as a process [which] seems to lie somewhere around the notion of learning and thinking. We reflect in order to learn something, or we learn as a result of reflecting” (Moon, 2004). Literature describes reflective practices as a deliberate attempt on behalf of the individual to confront imperfect existing knowledge, which concludes with transformation in meaning (Peltier et al, 2005; Dewey, 1933; Schön, 1983). My own research, demonstrated that reflective writing adds value by improving agility and preparing you for change. Furthermore, it is a great tool for improving the speed and quality of decision-making.
If you allow yourself to daydream, taking ten minutes every now and again, you never know what might occur. You might just come up with the next big idea that will add millions of dollars to your organization’s bottom line, you might just figure out the way to solve a problem you have been grappling with, or take advantage of an opportunity that you have been presented with.
Dream Bigger
While driving back to North Wales recently from a day trip to London, I found myself daydreaming about what might be. With a busy household and hectic work life, I value these quiet moments when I am alone in the car as an opportune time to allow myself to daydream about possibilities, what might be and what could be, in order to shape my plans and actions. There are several projects that I have been dreaming about for about ten years. I am closer to achieving these dreams than I was ten years ago, and these dreams have more shape and substance to them, more clarity than when I first pondered their possibility. But as yet, the dreams have not been achieved although things are in progress for them to become a reality.
The radio was on in the background and as I was daydreaming; the presenter said; “dream bigger.” Maybe because I was engaged in dreaming dreams at the time, his voice resonated with my thoughts. Now, my dreams are not small fry; it’s a large enterprise; but there it was, a challenge to my thinking, perhaps my dream was too small. At the time I chuckled to myself and for the rest of the journey, I must admit I was stumped; and several days later, the question still irked me. I was still pondering how I could dream bigger than I was dreaming, which for someone like me who likes to think big is not a problem I usually suffer from. This process meant that I was then forced to reflect on how I had suddenly found myself in a position where I was struggling to dream bigger. It forced some uncomfortable self-examination:
- Where had these limits to my dreams come from?
- What were the boundaries that I was imposing on my dream?
- What assumptions were driving these self-imposed boundaries?
- Where had these assumptions derived ovfrom?
This isn’t the first time that I have discovered some self-imposed boundaries. Some years ago, I was talking to a friend about our dreams for remodeling our house and some of the painful choices we were faced with to make the project work for our family. My friend innocently asked me “Why don’t you just move house?” It was a fair question, but it threw me. Why was moving house not in our framework? There are many things about our house that I love not least the location and the south-facing garden, but there were also lots of things, that at the time frustrated me. I regularly cursed the layout of the kitchen, I would inwardly groan every time I went to the bathroom, the lounge was too dingy, the conservatory needed replacing, and the front room was cold. Moving wasn’t in the framework because I moved a lot growing up; the house I lived in represented permanency, it was home, and I had never had a place that I could call home. Further reflection resulted in me realizing that since I had lived in the house for the longest period that I have lived anywhere, my heart and head had no desire to leave to another house, and in fact, the house had become my home. However, this process of reflection forced me to confront many of my mental models about what a home was and also prioritize the things that were really important to me. Although the choice remained with remodeling the house, what the remodel looked like evolved into from solving some of the niggles to developing a dream for creating a ‘forever home.’
In terms of my daydream on the drive home from London, there were many reasons why my big dream was too small and plenty of limits that I am putting on myself. Firstly, I know that I am limiting myself to the local area because of my desire to be where my home is. I’ve since upscaled my big dream to include national and even global reach. Secondly, I am living one big dream in regards to my business and writing, something that I thought was going to take years hasn’t, and my dreaming hadn’t caught up with the new reality that I am living. I realized that now is the time to dream in a new paradigm and allow myself to think beyond my current experience and understanding of what is possible, to dream about the impossible.
Dreaming the Impossible
For some people, it is difficult to understand why anyone would dream the impossible. After all, what is the point of the impossible, but for me, that is the point of dreaming. If you only dream about what is possible, you will be forever limited by your experience and your current situation. The impossible dreams take you outside of your comfort zone and into new territory. It was through dreaming of the impossible that electricity was invented, a man was put on the moon, the World Wide Web was developed, and we all ended up with smartphones. If mankind had limited our dreams to what is possible, we would still be hunter-gatherers and living in wooden huts. We are ALL capable of achieving the impossible, but too often we reduce and limit ourselves to our current circumstances. My encouragement to you is that it is time to break out and dream bigger.
Manage Your Career Tool #12 – Dream Big
Revisit you answer to the question in Career Tool #5 and prepare an opening statement, which articulates your big dream. Be courageous about what is significant to you and challenge yourself to go beyond you existing paradigm. There are six parts to the dream statement, which you need to consider. Be honest and answer each question in the fullest way possible. Don’t hold back for fear of ridicule or disappoint. This is your Big Dream, there are no wrong answers.
Task 1 – Develop a Dream Statement
Complete your Big Dream statement using the table below:
