CHAPTER 5

Possibilities: See Your Dreamer’s Vision

When I dare to be powerful—

to use my strength in the service of my vision,

then it becomes less and less important

whether I am afraid.

—AUDRE LORDE

When I was growing up, my best friend was a girl named Ellie. We spent hours at Ellie’s house, dreaming up kingdoms in faraway lands where we could rule as nobles. Our subjects were popular dolls named Barbie and Ken. Ellie’s mother’s closet provided beautiful “gowns,” as well as the all-important blue eye shadow and red lipstick. We were very regal princesses.

Sadly for me, Ellie and I didn’t live in the same town. We didn’t go to the same school. So we couldn’t see each other too often.

Of course, back then, a chance to see Ellie meant my parents driving me to her house. That was the only way to see anyone. You actually had to go where they were, and see the person—in person.

As Ellie and I grew from little girls into teenagers, we were content to talk on the phone. That was instead of seeing each other, since you couldn’t see people over the phone. We also sat still in the house when we talked. Our phones were attached to the walls.

As I think about that now, I’m sitting in a coffee shop outside of Boston. A mom and her kids are at the table next to me. One of the kids is texting. Another one is playing games on her mother’s iPhone. The oldest is catching up with friends on Facebook.

I’m picturing young Ellie and me. What if we’d grabbed Barbie and Ken, and taken a rocket ship time-machine to this coffee shop?

We’d look at each other with wide eyes. We’d wonder with amazement at the seemingly magic gadgets. We’d ask each other two questions:

“What faraway land is this?” and “How did we get from that land to this one?”

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The Dreamer Invents New Possibilities

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Human beings have an incredible ability to create.

We make things up all the time.

When we’re young, we call it playing. In adolescence, we call it daydreaming. As grown-up professionals, we call it innovating. Design. Disruptive technology. Vision statements. We’re adults. We don’t play with toys. We’re “early adopters” of the newest, fastest, coolest, “smartest” electronics.

At its core, the impulse is the same. We desire. We experiment. We wonder.

Yearning is basic to human nature. We long for love. We aim for success. We wish the economy would improve. We pray for our sick relatives to get well. We want our troops to come home safely, and for soldiers and civilians living in combat zones to stay out of harm’s way.

As Dreamers, we continually strive to improve the way we enact our social contract. In 1517, Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses onto the door of a Catholic church. Then, for centuries, people gathered in the public square to debate issues and make demands of their governments. We humans are natural change agents, continuing to seek new ways to engage with each other through public discourse. In 2011, strengthening what became known as the “Arab Spring,” citizens by the thousands took to the streets in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. These men and women longed for a new society. They risked their lives in hopes of a new beginning. They wanted freedom and opportunity.

Like demonstrators in decades past, the Egyptians convened in the public square. But this time something was different. They didn’t spread the word by nailing a declaration on the mosque door. They didn’t hand out flyers or depend on word of mouth. These activists organized a protest over Facebook, and 350,000 people showed up. They engaged the world in their power struggle by sending photos over Twitter. They toppled a regime by engaging the global community in an entirely new way. Dreamers imagine what’s possible for every sector of society. Including how to build society itself.

Dreamers love to push themselves, striving to accomplish what no one’s done before. Like Mario Andretti, a legend among all-time greats in auto racing. And another Mario—soccer superstar Mario Balotelli. Or Michelle Kwan, one of the most graceful and competitively successful athletes in the history of figure skating. Testing our limits. Setting new records. Looking for the next frontier. That’s what Dreamers do. People already landed on the moon. So we want to walk on Mars.

The question remains: How did we get here, to this world so remote from the faraway land of Ellie’s playroom? How did we start walking down the street and talking on the phone at the same time?

Through the power of visionaries who heeded the call of the Dreamer within.

Dreamers Take Us to New Places

Think about Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and his Danish partner, Janus Friis. They’re founders of a company they first called Sky Peer-to-Peer. You and I know their revolutionary product as Skype.

Because of these futurists, you can interview job candidates from around the world face-to-face, without anyone leaving their office. And that’s just the beginning.

I know a lawyer who led settlement talks over Skype. He looked all the parties in the eye when he put the best offer on the table. That would be unremarkable, except for where the parties were: one in Dubai, one in Lima, and one in New York. You can do personal things over Skype, too, like applaud your kids’ haircuts when you say good night. That’s very helpful when you’re stuck at an airport gate at tuck-in time.

Zennström and Friis are pioneers. Their vision was to create a peer-to-peer communications application that enabled people to talk as they would on the phone, and see each other at the same time. From opposite sides of the world. For free.

Ironically, what’s now amazing about Skype is how utterly normal it seems, as if we came into the world able to see each other across the globe. Talking on Skype is like having a cup of coffee at breakfast. It’s no big deal.

If you step back for just a minute, you remember what a big deal these advancements really are, both for us and for our societies. Innovators create enormous value by turning their dreams into reality. Ask Microsoft, which acquired Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Or the 663 million users who’d registered with Skype by September of that same year.

Or ask me.

Skype created a lot of value for me. It let me sleep at night.

Remember in 2010 when that volcano erupted over Iceland, spreading volcanic ash through the skies of Europe? If you don’t recall, no one could leave Europe. Planes were grounded. There was no flying with volcanic ash in the jet stream.

Those of us on the European continent were basically quarantined. Some people didn’t care. But those of us with roots in North America, who had hopes of getting back someday, definitely did.

During the lockdown, I was visiting in The Netherlands, and contemplating my future move to live there. For the first time, it crossed my mind that I could move there—and not be able to return. For roughly ninety years, the volcano’s explosion switch had been turned “off.” In all that time, no major eruptions.

Now suddenly, the switch had flipped “on.”

“What if it stays this way?” I worried. “Could the volcano maintain the ash cloud covering European airspace—for years?”

Admittedly this wasn’t my most rational moment. But remember, this was Vulnerable Erica time. Logical reasoning isn’t her currency.

“When will I see my family and friends again??”

Zennström and Friis came to my rescue.

Skype. There would always be Skype. I’d be okay.

The Dreamer Enables Innovation

In the end, Skype was but one wave in the social media ocean. A tsunami in new technology marked the early years of the new millennium. Silicon Valley overflowed with young Dreamers who birthed new forms of communication, shopping, enjoying music, and more. They put unprecedented capability into the hands of everyday people. Buying plane tickets. Trading stocks. Diagnosing your child’s fever.

They also transformed human relationships. People text more than they talk. Invitations became “Evites.” If you want information about your cousins’ nuptials, visit their wedding website. Between Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, nearly everyone built a presence online.

One by one, industries we took for granted vanished in the face of another Dreamer’s vision of how to use the Internet. Email threatened to bankrupt the U.S. Postal Service. Amazon.com wiped out Borders Books. iTunes killed Tower Records. Netflix took Blockbuster Video off the map. The way we look up information changed so completely that students today can’t imagine a world without Google or Wikipedia.

All of this groundbreaking innovation was driven by people whose inner Dreamers believed in things the rest us never considered. Inspired by imagination, these Dreamers saw how new technologies could create a whole new world.

Business is a common place for strong Dreamers to shape the future. And not just on the Internet. Coco Chanel pioneered a new kind of fashion for women. Nearly a century later, Sara Blakely started making “body-shaping” garments for women in her home. As a 100 percent owner of her business, Spanx, Blakely became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

Recall Narayana Murthy, visionary cofounder of Infosys. With his wife, writer Sudha Murthy, as his Dreamer champion, Murthy architected the huge success in IT outsourcing in India.

And consider the meteoric rise of “Jenny from the Block”—the affectionate term entertainment superstar Jennifer Lopez gave herself to affirm her humble roots. Recognizing the drive of her inner Dreamer, Time magazine wrote, “As the Bronx-born daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, Lopez . . . has an outsider’s hunger and a native’s assumption of infinite possibility. She works hard and dreams big.”

Indeed she does.

In 2012, Forbes magazine ranked J. Lo number one on its Celebrity 100, listing her as the most powerful celebrity in the world. She’s also one of the wealthiest, with hundreds of millions of dollars to her name. Not only an entertainer, J. Lo has her own clothing line, multiple fragrances, a past stint on American Idol, and her own singing competition show, Q’Viva. While she’s admittedly unlucky in love, you can’t miss the incredible way that J. Lo went after her dreams.

Dreamers also play crucial roles in moving society forward. Like Jawaharlal Nehru, a leader of the independence movement in India, and its first prime minister. In his inaugural speech, he declared proudly that “at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” Lech Walesa, a strong Warrior as an activist, brought out his Dreamer to preside over Poland’s transformation to a postcommunist state. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, widely known as “Lula,” fulfilled his hope of lifting millions of people out of poverty as president of Brazil.

Earlier, I compared the Dreamer to a CEO. In a public-service context, visionaries thrive in roles such as president or prime minister, in which they can impact the course of history by realizing their dreams. Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl had a profound vision for unification and cooperation. He became the main architect of a united Germany, as well as a lead player in the creation of the European Union. Soviet statesman Mikhail Gorbachev introduced unprecedented reforms in glasnost and perestroika. Gorbachev and fellow visionary President Ronald Reagan helped to bring an end to the Cold War.

Creative Dreamers gave us Jurassic Park, Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, and Pandora, James Cameron’s alternative universe in the blockbuster Avatar. Dreamers channel beauty, inspiration, and transcendence into the arts, from Alvin Ailey’s masterpiece Revelations to the ballad from John Lennon that asks us to “imagine all the people, living life in peace.”

The Dreamer is everywhere around you.

It is also within you.

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Dreamer Quiz: What’s Your Favorite Strategy?

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Here’s a “quiz” to check out your Dreamer’s favorite strategy. Don’t take the results too seriously. This is simply meant to give you a place to start reflecting.

Look at the scenario below. Then read the three potential responses. As you read them, ask yourself: “Which of these sounds the most like me?” If you don’t click with any of them, think of a person who knows you well. Which option would they say describes you best?

Feel free to jot down any reactions as you read.

What Would You Do?

So, what would you do with an opportunity like this?

Which of these options appeals to your inner Dreamer?

These situations represent a Dreamer whose favorite strategy is to run low, high, and balanced, in that order.

In Option One, a Low Dreamer lacks not just the vision but the conviction to “go for it.” She defers to her more experienced colleagues because she can’t imagine rising to this role. Her Dreamer’s audacity is frozen by fear and self-doubt.

In Option Two, the Dreamer is running high. She’s giddy with possibility, to the point where she’s lost sight of practical limitations. This High Dreamer thrives on opportunity, already tasting the spoils of her victory. Overtaken by both vision for the company and personal ambition, she’s blind to the way she’s taxing her team. She will be shocked in her performance review to learn that her team finds her difficult and overly demanding.

In Option Three, the Dreamer is more balanced. She has a healthy respect for both her strengths and her limitations. She lets herself daydream about what might be possible, and feels excited by the prospect of taking the job. At the same time, she’s realistic that this position is a “stretch.” She knows she can’t succeed alone. She gets her boss’ buy-in to provide help. She’s balanced in that she is at once bold in her actions, creative in her approach, and intuitively sensitive to her needs as a new leader.

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The Dreamer in Daily Life

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Your Dreamer might tend to run low, making it hard for you to imagine a different and better future. It might run high, so you’re busily filling up whiteboards with one initiative after another. All things being equal, you have the widest range of choice if you find a balanced way to relate to the Dreamer, as well as to the other members of the Big Four.

In daily life, you need your Dreamer to create and seize opportunities. To roll the dice because you see potential. To cook up new ways to tell an inspiring story. To paint or write poetry.

With your Dreamer you can do things like:

■    set bold fees for your services

■    inspire your workforce to become industry leaders

■    demolish your kitchen for a renovation

■    move out of your home office and rent the first “real” space for your small business

■    try an experimental medical treatment

■    accept a drop in salary for a job whose mission means the world to you

■    join the gym

Your Dreamer knows you get more than one turn at bat. It’s the part of you that says “get back on the horse,” after you’ve tried and failed.

Then you can do things like:

■    continue pitching your vision to venture capital firms after several turn you down

■    set ambitious sales targets for this year when you didn’t hit your targets last year

■    send out your resume again, and again, and again

■    get back on the court after a sports injury

■    campaign for legislation you care about, even though the same policy has failed to pass before

■    start dating again after a divorce

■    build up your savings account, after you emptied it to upgrade the furniture you still had from graduate school

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Putting Principles into Practice

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One of the principles that the Program on Negotiation at Harvard (PON) drilled into me was to make links between theory and practice. Roger Fisher expressed this lesson in fancy words, saying “good ideas are always operational.” What he meant is that explaining a principle to people but leaving them without any sense of “how to do it” is incomplete. Our mission was to generate new approaches that would help people in “the real world.”

I remember a conversation I had about fifteen years ago in the PON conference room with William Ury. We were talking about an article I was writing when I told him, “I have twenty-five good ideas” for it.

“Choose the best three, and leave out the rest,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. “There are so many interesting things to say. I want to be thorough and accurate.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re right. Twenty-five ideas will be more thorough, and maybe more accurate. What I’ve found in my work is that I often need to choose between being thorough and being helpful. I choose to be helpful. I think you should do the same.”

Since that discussion I’ve learned this lesson firsthand. I still get tempted to share twenty-five ideas. But I’ve seen for myself that people can’t remember or use that many concepts at once. William was right. Three ideas work well. Like my teacher and friend, I choose to be helpful.

Given that, starting here with the Dreamer, and in each chapter in Part Two, I’ll highlight three “sweet spots” of each inner negotiator. As you can tell from the story above, those three won’t tell you the whole story of the Big Four. Instead, the three points of focus will help you develop the strength of your inner negotiators and expand your choice of strategies.

Dreamer Sweet Spots

Pablo Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” The Dreamer’s power source is intuition, and his strongest muscle is creativity. The Balanced Dreamer provides direction, and specializes in the skills you need for innovation.

The Dreamer’s sweet spots enable you to:

            1.    Generate Your Vision

            2.    Dare to Pursue Your Dream

            3.    Sense a Path Forward

The Dreamer’s inner resources include audacity, imagination, passion, and hope.

Let’s see how these work in practice.

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Generate Your Vision

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People often come to my workshops knowing they have a Performance Gap they want to close: what they’re getting now is not what they want. That’s a fine place to start. Working with your inner Dreamer will help you transition your vision from what you don’t want to what you actually do want to bring into your life.

Figure Out What You Want

Jordan came to a weekend workshop I ran that focused only on developing your inner Dreamer. Given the topic, people came to the class specifically because they felt blocked in figuring out what they wanted, or they didn’t know how to go after it. It was a two-day Dreamer Boot Camp.

By his own description, Jordan’s life was going along fine. He managed a restaurant, had two healthy young children and a stable marriage. His parents and siblings all lived nearby, and they got together every Sunday. His family had good friends in the local church, where his kids sang in the choir. Life was good.

When he introduced himself, he told the group, “My problem is that I don’t have any dreams.”

At a Dreamer weekend, lots of people feel the way Jordan does. They say they don’t want anything, or they can’t “think of” anything to want. When I hear things like that, I imagine that the person in front of me does have some dreams. The “problem” is that they can’t hear what their inner Dreamer is trying to tell them.

In other words, if you ask them a direct question like “What excites you about the future?” you’ll probably get an answer like “I really don’t know.” That’s an honest answer. But it’s not coming from their Dreamer. You’ve asked their Thinker a question that only their Dreamer can answer. Their Thinker is telling the truth: he doesn’t know. But the Dreamer likely does.

I open these weekends with a lesson I learned from my friend and colleague Marcia Wieder, who created Dream University. She tells people they can start with a sentence like “My dream is to have a dream.” In Winning from Within terms, that’s a good way for inner Thinkers to let their inner Dreamers know their input is welcome.

The key in situations like Jordan’s, when you can’t “think of” what you want, is to stop expecting your Thinker to come up with your vision, and start asking your Dreamer. When you shift into your Dreamer’s perspective, you’ll find wisdom about your hopes and aspirations waiting for you.

It turned out that Jordan did have something he wanted. He dreamt of opening his own restaurant. We also discovered that Jordan’s Thinker had a lot to say to him about his hopes for the future, things like:

“That’s not realistic.”

“It’s a total waste of money.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You will fail.”

To move forward, Jordan needed to negotiate with his Thinker, and broker a deal between these two members of his inner team. That’s a very different approach than beating himself up for not having any dreams. On the contrary, it’s noticing that he does have a dream. But like the Supreme Court justice who couldn’t bring himself to talk to his wife about his ties, something inside of Jordan is getting in his way.

To pursue his ambitions, Jordan needed to turn toward his Thinker, who was causing an impasse. It started by Jordan finding a new way to relate to his Thinker. He found out that his Thinker didn’t object to his specific dream at all. It wasn’t about the restaurant. His Thinker was trying to protect him by raising doubts in his mind. These doubts were coming up because that’s what Jordan’s Thinker does. It generates doubt. In every situation.

Jordan realized that “doubting” was a favorite strategy of his Thinker. He also saw for the first time that the purpose of the doubting for the Thinker was to shield him from getting hurt. With these insights, Jordan negotiated this agreement: his Dreamer could start taking steps forward, provided he checked in with the Thinker along the way. Jordan promised to confirm to the Thinker that he wasn’t getting hurt, and to hear any concerns on the Thinker’s mind as things progressed. With this new arrangement in place, Jordan left the weekend prepared to look for a business loan.

You can imagine my smile when I got an email inviting me to the Grand Opening of “Jordan’s Bar and Grille.”

Check If Team Members Are Blocking Your Dreamer

Before Jordan negotiated for his Dreamer to take any concrete steps, notice that he paused to explore what was up with his Thinker. Why was he so negative? Why wouldn’t he let Jordan take a shot? Jordan needed to know that in order to move ahead.

You can loosen the grip that your inner negotiators have on you by appreciating what they’re trying to accomplish. Very often, like Jordan’s Thinker, they’re trying to help you. That might seem hard to believe, particularly if they’re wreaking havoc in your life. In your life now, it might not feel helpful at all. Quite the opposite. You might blame this inner negotiator for the Performance Gap that holds you back in your life.

Creating more effective strategies will come about by negotiating with your Big Four, not by trying to ignore them, or eliminating them from your life. Just imagine for a minute that it’s true—your inner team does what they do because they’re trying to help. And they’re operating on outdated information. At some point, their strategy likely did help. But they haven’t noticed that times have changed.

For you to start making new choices in your leadership and your life, you need to update their database about your current situations. You can tell them that you appreciate their intention to help but their old strategy is now getting in your way. When they understand what you need from them in your life today, they can start to adapt.

Dreamers and Thinkers Can Do Great Things Together

In Jordan’s life, his Dreamer and his Thinker were at odds. One was blocking the other. But that’s not a given. All members of your inner team can work together for a common goal, if you learn how to negotiate with them and harness their respective strengths.

I met a woman named Inge at a seminar I taught in Germany. She combined her Thinker and Dreamer to great effect. Originally trained as an architect, Inge now works as a town planner in Hamburg.

Inge told me that when she sits down to design a new neighborhood she needs to start with the facts. Her Thinker gathers information: How many people are involved? What kind of housing is needed? She collects the details required for things like commercial zones and parking.

Then, eventually, she needs to consider: How will we do it?

Earlier in her career, Inge would’ve moved straight from gathering these facts to sketching a plan. “I’ve done it that way,” she told me, “but it’s very rational, so I made very conventional structures. The crane moves along the track, putting up the flat, and the next one exactly the same.”

As I listened, I imagined row after row of identical buildings, without color or personality. Just slabs of gray concrete. Then Inge added, “You can get them up quickly, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because these places are not alive, they are dead.”

How does Inge plan a new neighborhood where people do want to live?

She still starts by gathering all the facts she can find. But then her Dreamer negotiates with her Thinker, asking it to step back for a bit so she can muse on the plot of land. “You put the facts into the back of the head, because now you need a vision.”

I asked her to explain.

“I start to get an image in my mind. I see a slope, a hill, at first it’s a rough picture. I start to imagine the hill, and I see some green, and then houses on the hill.” Then she starts sketching. “I grab the pencil I love most, and see what happens. I fill in details as I fix my picture onto the paper. And then I see—yes—we will put the houses on this hill.”

Soon Inge starts to see a dynamic drawing. The green takes shape into a park where people walk their dogs, and kids ride bikes. Homes on the hill are different shapes, all designed for larger families. She adds a tree-lined street with smaller houses for singles or couples in their first home.

“Yes,” Inge tells me, “here people can live.”

Before too long, her inner Thinker negotiates back into the process. Inge feels her Thinker’s tug to account for limits and requirements. “Now you come back to the facts at the back of your mind,” she told me. “You have what you imagined on the paper, and the facts. Now you find out what’s possible, and what’s not possible.”

I couldn’t resist asking, “If you start with the facts, and end with the facts, why not just work with the facts?”

“You can if you want a place where people can sleep and eat. But not if you want to make a place where people want to live.”

Inge integrates both Dreamer and Thinker to get optimal results. She uses her Thinker’s strength of clarity to assess practicalities and constraints. She draws on her Dreamer’s creativity to muse about the spaces she’s designing. Inge practices the wisdom of Charles Schwab, founder of the huge financial services firm that carries his name. Schwab said, “A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.” Inge doesn’t choose between her Dreamer and her Thinker. She gets the best of both by using them as a team.

Tell an Inspiring Story

To realize their visions, Dreamers often need to enlist followers. Particularly if you’re aiming for large-scale change, you need to get other people on board. Painting the picture for other people by telling a great story is one of the Dreamer’s skills. People often ask me about leading without authority. “I could make this department fly,” they tell me, “but I’m not in charge. How can I get people to listen to me?”

Show them a bright future through a compelling story. That excites them about getting there together. In scientific terms, storytelling engages the right brain of the listener, which is more visual, and also the side of the brain that houses their emotional life. Giving information, but not delivering it in a great story, speaks to the left brain, which is more linear and not emotional. One of your Dreamer’s sweet spots is generating your vision. That goes hand in hand with telling an inspiring story that brings people on board to support you. Stories about vision should touch the emotions of the person listening, to inspire them.

Consider my client Nick, a VP of operations. Before his year-end performance discussion, he received a written review (see Table 5.1). For every category in the review, he got a rating of “E,” “M,” or “F,” according to this scale:

Table 5.1

Overall, the review was good, a mix of E’s and M’s. With one glaring exception. In the category of “Inspirational Leadership,” Nick got an F.

Next to the F, the comment said, “Nick thinks short-term and doesn’t see the bigger picture. He needs to inspire others with a strategic vision. As a leader, we expect him to role model the aspirational tone of the company’s change strategy.”

I know a lot of professionals like Nick. They nod and acknowledge this exact feedback during their reviews. Then they turn to people like me and ask:

What on earth is “inspirational leadership”?

I came in to help Nick develop skills as an inspirational leader. Without noticing, he’d lost touch with his inner Dreamer. He needed to make contact again.

We started by looking at a recent conversation between Nick and his VP of Human Resources. I wanted him to notice his focus on short-term goals and the bottom line. Not inspiring stuff.

This is Nick’s write-up of the discussion.

WHAT I THOUGHT and FELT BUT DIDN’T SAY	WHAT WE ACTUALLY SAID
I’m really worried about the CEO hitting me on the head about cost targets.
	HR VP: Nick, how are you looking at our people plan this year?
We need to trim some fat from the budget, and fast.
	Nick: Our business plan calls for 20 percent cost reduction. Let’s determine where we have redundancy and which people we can let go.
	HR VP: That would impact a lot of people. Maybe there’s room for some of them in another part of the business.
These HR people don’t know anything. Why do they try to be “business partners” with us?
	Nick: Well, we need to stay competitive. Keep your eye on the ball. They call it a “bottom line” for a reason.
Did she even read the business plan? Give me a break.

In this conversation, you can see which negotiators occupy the seats at Nick’s inner table. Look back at the left-hand side above. Which voices do you find in his internal dialogue?

I’ll tell you what I see.

■    First, his Lover expresses worry about the CEO.

■    Next his Warrior pipes up, advocating action to trim the budget, as soon as possible.

■    Then his Thinker weighs in, bringing Nick’s attention to the business plan. The Thinker takes a moment to judge the VP of HR.

■    Where’s the Dreamer? Missing in action.

Nick wants to improve as a leader. He wants to inspire. To do that, he needs access to the part of him who carries vision. That’s his Dreamer, and right now, he’s the inner negotiator who’s absent from the table in Nick’s internal world.

In the coaching session I asked Nick, “What would your Dreamer be musing about, if he were listening to the conversation about the people plan?” He wrote it down on the left side of the page:

WHAT MY DREAMER MIGHT THINK and FEEL
How is the industry evolving? What kind of expertise will we need in the future?

I continued.

“And if your Dreamer were musing on that, what would you say to the VP of HR? Can you write it down on the other side?”

This is what his Dreamer could say.

	WHAT MY DREAMER COULD SAY
	Nick: Well, given where we think the industry’s going, we need to rethink the people profile. We need to move from a low-skills, low-customer-touch profile to a high-touch, customer-focused approach.

Progress. We took another step.

The next question I asked was a little extreme, but it was part of an exercise. “What would happen if the Dreamer took over the inner negotiation completely? If he pushed the other three out of the way, so he could improvise and talk about the future with no cares at all about real-world constraints?”

This isn’t advisable as an approach to dealing with people for real. Balance is the name of the game in the real world. When you’re working on developing one of the Big Four, though, it often helps to take big stretches. When you’re in a learning context, like a workshop or a coaching session as Nick is, experiments help you to expand your range. Just be thoughtful about the difference between the “practice environments” and the situations where what you say and do have real-world consequences.

Here’s his practice dialogue, with his Dreamer on a roll:

WHAT MY DREAMER MIGHT THINK and FEEL	WHAT MY DREAMER COULD SAY
	VP of HR: Nick, how are you looking at our people plan this year?
Production in our sector isn’t moving overseas yet, but we need to be ahead of the curve!
	Nick: In five years we’ll have all operations in Asia. Next year we should open our first factory in Shanghai.
	The year after we should hire a full R&D department there.
	VP of HR: That seems like a very fast timeline, don’t you think?
Oh, come on, see the possibilities!
	Nick: Use your imagination! China is the future. We need a strategic approach to our people plan. I’d set all eyes on Shanghai.
	VP of HR: We can look into the Asia opportunity, but we’ve got loads of ties to our local markets here. We should understand the impact of nonlocal product development and production.
Yeah, whatever. I’m excited!
	Nick: Now that we’re talking about this, maybe I should move my family to China for a few years. I wonder if my kids are taking Chinese in school. Maybe I should start studying Chinese?!

Finally, after “playing” both roles, Nick is able to dial the High Dreamer back to become a Balanced Dreamer, looking ahead, setting a vision, and bearing in mind what can realistically be achieved.

This is what happened at the next real meeting.

WHAT I THOUGHT and FELT BUT DIDN’T SAY	WHAT WE ACTUALLY SAID
	VP of HR: Nick, how are you looking at our people plan this year?
I thought about this, and wonder if it’ll inspire you as it did me.
	Nick: In my view, we’re going to move production and R&D to Shanghai in the next five years. What does that mean for the capabilities we’re going to keep here?
	VP of HR: Good question. I think we have a lot of strong technical skill. But we don’t have the leadership skills we’re going to need as things are changing so fast.
Right. And the technical skills aren’t needed here anymore. What we do need is people who understand our customers. First, we have a short-term cost issue, though.
	Nick: Our business plan also calls for a 20 percent reduction. At the same time, we need to think strategically about the people decisions to make sure we’re building the right teams here and abroad for the future.
	VP of HR: I agree.
	Nick: Can you start making a plan for short-term FTE cuts [full-time equivalents] while making sure we keep bench strength in leadership, and marketing and sales?

When your inner Dreamer is balanced, you can shoot for the stars and keep your feet on the ground.

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Dare to Pursue Your Dream

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You know the adage “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” It sounds a warning bell. Some people steer clear of their dreams because they fear getting burned. What can you do if you feel like that, but you also want to dream big? You know that putting yourself up front comes with certain pressures and trials. Can you learn to take the heat?

You bet you can.

The first step in that direction is going in with your eyes open. You’re a lightning rod when you stand in front, whether you’re pushing your family to create new routines, or leading a political protest. Putting yourself there gives you unique opportunities. And yes, at times it carries risks.

Expect Naysayers, and Follow Your Passion

My parents are good examples of how to feel the heat and stay in the kitchen.

Thinking again of those visits to Ellie’s house, I recall it was often my father, David, who drove me there. In fact, my father drove me most places—not just to school, but to ballet lessons, to piano, and to Little League practice.

My father was a parenting pioneer. Long before men and women shared child-rearing responsibilities, my dad was changing diapers, packing school lunches, and doing carpool.

I remember playing at Ellie’s house once when her mom commented on my pretty new shoes. I thanked her and happened to mention that my dad had bought them with me.

“He did what?” her mother asked me, incredulous.

“He took me to buy my new shoes.”

Ellie’s mom was in a state of shock.

Then she burst out laughing.

“David took you to buy shoes? At the shoe store?” she asked, still laughing. “I don’t think my husband knows where our children’s feet are. He definitely doesn’t know where a shoe store is!”

My dad was ahead of his time.

Meanwhile, where was my mother? Why wasn’t she taking me for new shoes?

Well, she had four young children, had just finished her Ph.D., and had a full-time teaching load in New York City. You could count on one hand the number of women in our small town who had children and jobs outside the house. Another vanguard ahead of her time.

It worked for them, and it worked for us. There was a problem, though. Their approach to raising a family was not well liked by their friends and neighbors. The other mothers in town didn’t look kindly on the “working mother” whose husband picked up her children from school. Likewise, the men in my family never understood my father.

“What kind of man is he?” an uncle would ask. “Why can’t he just let their mother feed them?”

You bet, they felt the heat.

But they also felt empowered by their vision.

They believed in equality between the sexes (in the language of the time) and wanted to expand traditional gender roles. Sometimes they felt hurt by the judgments of their neighbors. But they were energized by the desire to role-model a marriage of equal partners for their daughters.

As the medieval philosopher and theologian Meister Eckhart wrote, “Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.” My parents followed their own path with their whole hearts, with joy. That’s how they felt the heat and kept on cooking.

In a twist of irony, one of my sisters chose the opposite path. She got a great education: Princeton followed by Cornell. Then she was a Fulbright scholar.

She also met a terrific guy, got married, and had five children. Since my second nephew was born nearly fourteen years ago, my sister has been a very happy stay-at-home mom. She loves motherhood. She’s great at it.

Of course, it got under our mother’s skin that “her own daughter” would stay at home and “waste her education” by not “fulfilling her potential” out in the world. My sister then had to accept our mother’s judgment, and still follow the beat of her own drummer.

Like our mother before her, my sister dared to dream her own vision, and live it. She is there, day in and day out, raising her children every step of the way. She fulfills her potential by tailoring her “mothering” to each of five different children. This is no small feat. Each one is a unique person, with his or her own strengths and needs.

Like our mother before her, my sister role-models for her children that you can figure out your own path. Then, no matter what other people say, it’s in your hands to live your dream.

Expect Setbacks Along the Way

You hear lots of stories about “overnight sensations” and nearly magical turns from “rags to riches.” When you dig a little deeper, you generally learn that it didn’t feel magical along the way, and it didn’t happen overnight. Part of daring to dream means holding firm to your hopes—even in the face of disappointments, obstacles, and outright rejections.

The story of J. K. Rowling is a good example. Today she’s sold more than 400 million copies of the Harry Potter books. She’s author to the bestselling book series in history. Yet the manuscript for her first book—Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—was submitted to twelve publishing houses, and rejected by them all. Imagine the force of her passion and faith in that book to continue. Today Rowling is one of Britain’s wealthiest citizens. Yet before Harry she lived in poverty, describing herself as one small step away from homelessness. Big dreams aren’t for the fainthearted.

The Dreamer’s audacity isn’t only about cooking up bold visions. It’s also about nerve, and the guts it takes to hang in there until the world sees what you see in your dream. Basketball sensation Jeremy Lin stayed true to his Dreamer’s longing, despite one setback after another. He was undrafted out of college, rarely played in his rookie season, and got assigned to the NBA Development League (D-League, or minor league) three times.

To our eyes, Lin popped up “out of nowhere” to lead a winning streak for the New York Knicks. He was so successful when he finally joined their starting lineup, Lin became a global phenomenon, fondly known as Linsanity. Virtually a benchwarmer before his rise to stardom, Lin signed a three-year contract with the Houston Rockets in 2012 for $25.1 million.

In the public eye, it took about two weeks for Lin to change from an unknown athlete to an international basketball hero. But in truth, he’d been playing since his youth, throughout high school and college, and had longed for years to get a “break” in the big leagues.

As life would have it, Lin’s very next season, and his first with the Rockets on that pricey contract, was rocky. He had a few great games. But only a few. So his Dreamer returned to the challenge of holding center when people doubt him, and waiting for his next chance to prove he’s got what it takes.

In a completely different context, people often say the civil rights movement “started” the day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. But movement organizers say that moment was years in the making. The bus boycott, including the search for the right legal case to take to the courts, was planned long before Rosa Parks entered the scene.

To accomplish great things in your life takes more than envisioning what you want, or even daring to go after it. Like Rowling and Lin, you need to want it enough that you’ll keep going after it, even when things aren’t going your way.

Set Your Aspirations High

Theodor Herzl famously said, “If you will it, it is no dream.” His message tells us to aim high and believe that anything’s possible if we set our eyes on the prize. All of that talk about naysayers and setbacks is preparation for going in with your eyes open, and then going for it with everything you’ve got.

After people do something remarkable, especially if they do it at scale, in our minds they change from being someone like us. They become “that famous economist” or “that amazing woman who got a new law passed.” Actually, before they went after their dream, they were a person just like you or me.

Take Khan Academy. This is an educational website, set up by Salman Khan. It aims to provide a high-quality education through videos to anyone, for free. Khan Academy has delivered 240 million lessons to users around the world, making Salman Khan an education maverick. But how did it start? Did Khan know all his life that he’d be a great innovator? Did he know of his unique destiny to turn global education on its head? Was he a lifelong Dreamer?

Absolutely not.

He was a nice, well-educated guy, who was helping his cousin with algebra. Since he was tutoring her remotely across the country and others wanted to join, Khan thought using YouTube would be an efficient way to teach math. Only along the way did the vision emerge to create a free, global university. Then he saw the potential for what was possible: he’d landed on a practical way to educate a vast number of people at very low cost. Done well, his vision could eliminate economic barriers to a quality education. He also opened vast new possibilities for teachers in classrooms. They started to experiment with ways to use his videos, such as freeing students to learn at their own pace by replacing one lecture given to a full class with students choosing the level of content they are ready for when they pick their own video.

By now Khan Academy is a worldwide education phenomenon. Khan himself is recognized as an innovative genius. But it’s important to remember that before his enterprise took off, he was a good person living his life, going to work, loving his wife, and not particularly seeing himself as a pioneer of anything. Something got rolling, and then he started to dream big. As he felt the response to his early videos, his aspirations grew even larger, and wider. Khan embraced the surprising turn of events: what had started as a friendly way to help a family member could possibly revolutionize education around the world.

Khan’s story should remind you that big dreams are not reserved for some other, special group of people. You have a visionary Dreamer inside of you. That Dreamer can cook up wonderful things if you believe in it. You can hold yourself back by telling yourself what you want is out of reach. Or that it isn’t important. “It’s just my silly dream, after all.” But remember the wise words from Herzl: If you will it, it is no dream.

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Sense a Path Forward

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The hardest thing for many people about drawing out their inner Dreamer is the habit of falling back on their thinking skills. As we talked about in Jordan’s situation, you don’t need to choose between your Thinker and your Dreamer. You want to make room for both of them.

Dreamers excel at sensing your next steps as you figure out where you’re going and how to get there. As you saw throughout Nick’s dialogues, Dreamers look at things strategically rather than tactically. They look down the road. Dreamers care more about where you’ll be five years from now than at the end of this quarter.

They also call on intuition to inform the choices they make. Like Dr. Jonas Salk, the medical researcher who discovered the polio vaccine. Salk conducted his research on the vaccine for more than seven years, running the most elaborate field trials to date in history. About his enormous and far-reaching experiments he said, “Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.”

Embracing your Dreamer doesn’t mean you should check your prudent Thinker at the door. As Ronald Reagan loved to say, “Trust, but verify.” In fact, you start balancing your Big Four when you see that intuition and deduction are partners, not adversaries. Consider Albert Einstein, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist. Einstein had a superlative scientific and mathematical mind: he articulated the theory of relativity. Yet Einstein himself said that “the only real valuable thing is intuition.” Partners. Not adversaries.

Intuition Says Follow Your Nose

Jane Goodall is the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees. When she was young, Goodall found her way to Tanzania. Originally she had no degree, and no formal training. So when she started spending time with chimps, Goodall wasn’t following the protocols of standard research methods.

Under scientific guidelines, Goodall should have numbered her research subjects. That provided the necessary objectivity. But she didn’t know the rules, so she related to the animals in her own way. Intuitively she gave them names. Watching the chimps she knew as Fifi, Mike, Gigi, and David Greybeard, she observed them to have unique personalities and social relationships that were unknown at the time.

Other primatologists criticized her for getting emotionally involved with her subjects. Yet her deviation from conventional methods is precisely what enabled her amazing discoveries. Had she constrained herself rather than following her gut, we might still not know about the links between chimps and human behavior. Instead, she showcased the humanity of our animal cousins.

Eventually, Goodall went to Cambridge and earned her Ph.D. Yet throughout her career, she followed her gut sense and her innate love of animals. Even after her scientific training was complete, this willingness to value her intuition set her apart.

Allow Yourself to Know What You Sense

People define intuition in different ways. Scholars use fancy words to talk about it. The idea of tacit knowledge, for example, refers to what we know in a “pre-logical” phase, before we understand something rationally. Tacit knowledge is made of what we perceive through our senses directly. In a landmark work, The Process of Education, Jerome Bruner defined intuition as “the intellectual technique of arriving at plausible but tentative formulations without going through the analytical steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions.” That is a mouthful. But Bruner was a forerunner in supporting intuitive intelligence along with analytical thinking. You and I are more likely to recognize intuition when we experience it, such as when we tell a friend, “I’m not sure why, but I have a bad feeling about this.”

I’ve found that at life’s profound moments, opening myself to a sense of what to do or say, rather than trying to think it through, is often the best thing I can do. That’s one simple way to understand what intuition means. Let me give you an example.

I shared with you in the Introduction that my mother died of a stroke. It was a massive hemorrhage in her brain that took her life within forty-eight hours. Thankfully I made it to the hospital to sit with her before she passed away.

When I got there, the nurse explained that my mother had lost functioning in most of her brain. “Think of her like a little girl, around two years old,” she said. “That’s the level of comprehension she has now. You can talk to her if you want. But she won’t understand you. Her language center is totally shot.”

I sat down next to the hospital bed and took my mother’s hand. It was perfectly manicured, since she got her nails done every Friday morning at the same place for the last twenty-five years. It was Saturday night, and it was late. Those polished nails on her soft hand were so very familiar.

I was talking to my mother, but I couldn’t block out what the nurse had said. I wanted to communicate my love. Yet I had to admit to myself that given the state of her brain, my words were useless. They were meaningless sounds, if not noise.

Without thinking, I started humming the song we sing at the Friday night table, when we begin dinner on the Sabbath. I learned this song, “Shalom Aleichem,” from my mother, who no doubt learned it from her mother. Like me, she’d heard this tune since she first came into the world, and every Friday night of her childhood. Just naturally, or perhaps intuitively, I sang this tune to her while I stroked her hand.

All of a sudden, I looked up, and there was a tear streaming down her cheek. A little tear of recognition, a tear of contact. That tear told me some part of her was still there, even if it was two years old. She knew the music, she heard my voice. She didn’t have language anymore, but that tear said to me, “I know you’re here, and I love you, too.”

Not a minute later, that same nurse came in.

“Don’t worry, honey,” she said. “She’s not crying. Probably a little piece of dust in the tear duct. Something’s irritating her eyes. Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Dust in her tear duct? Doesn’t mean anything?

I suddenly wondered: Did she recognize the song? Could she hear me singing to her? Could she feel that I was there?

Of course, I’ll never know what “really” happened in that hospital room. And it doesn’t “technically” matter. I had a sense of making contact with my mother when she wasn’t conscious anymore. I felt connected through the music. Maybe both explanations hold some truth. Perhaps there was a piece of dust in her tear duct, and she heard and recognized the tune. I don’t know. And I don’t need to choose.

Maybe you’ve had moments like this, when you sensed something but you couldn’t explain it. Maybe someone gave you a logical explanation, but like me, you had an uncanny sense that you knew something else about what had happened.

My take on instances like these is to allow ourselves to know what we know, even when we can’t prove it. At least in moments like mine, when nothing was at stake besides what that tear meant to me. No one will lose their job or their home if I’m wrong. I accept the wisdom of Chinese Taoist master Lao-Tzu, who said, “A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is.”

To be clear, that doesn’t mean I think intuition’s usefulness is limited to personal life, or to private moments. With the information overload we face in the workplace, our Dreamer’s intuition is a great asset in professional life. As John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends, said, “Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.” Thankfully, as human beings we’re blessed with a range of strengths and skills. Like me with interpreting my mother’s tear, we don’t need to choose.

We’ve now looked in more detail at the inner Dreamer, exploring the strengths, sweet spots, and some favorite strategies. In the next chapter, we’ll do the same for another member of the Big Four, your Thinker.

Below is a short set of reflection questions. Feel free to read them now, or at your leisure.