Righting Our Ships
If our ship has gone off course, then it's time to correct it. It's important to note that the longer we have been off course, the harder it will be to get back on track. And even just a few seconds going the wrong way can dramatically change our path. I don't say that to discourage anyone. I say that to make sure we enter these seasons with grace for ourselves.
Getting back on track will always require returning to the basics of making a plan, sticking to the plan, and always delivering! But if we have really strayed, there is likely a deeper issue and a more significant step that needs to happen. I need us to pay attention to this: The only way to win is to start dreaming again.
See, that's the thing that gets us off track the quickest. We cannot let go of our dreams, and when we stop thinking about them, then we start letting them go. Think about the dreams that we scored the lowest on. In my case, it was dreams that I had not nurtured. In some cases,
I was doing the bare minimum to keep them alive, but for a lot of them, I had put them out of my mind. When we lose the dream, the work gets tough to do. When I am not looking at the bigger picture of my blog, it is really hard to write three days a week, and it is really easy to justify not doing what I need to. Many of us made a plan for our dreams. In fact, you can go back to one of my posts from the beginning of the year and see exactly what my plan was. My plan failed for a couple of reasons:
1. It just wasn't the right plan for me
Some aspects of the plan were way too ambitious, especially starting on a fresh foot with many of those dreams. Having stretch goals is good, but if we have too much stretch, we are more likely to stop than push through. I also did not have the proper set-up for my life to make this plan sustainable. I found that the way I formulated it would work temporarily, but it was not a long-term solution. And when I burned out on that system, I didn't set up a new one in its place.
2. The plan was not sustainable for my priorities in life
I made that plan at the beginning of the new year, which was also when we completed our PCS. My plan did not account for how much time unpacking the house would take. My plan did not account for all of the minutia and paperwork of establishing a new place to live. My plan didn't match what I needed at that time. Moving to a new place meant my biggest priorities were establishing and building community. A big part of quickly building community is just saying yes to everything that comes your way. I did that, and it worked well to create my village here. That required a level of flexibility that my plan didn't allow for, though, and when I was too flexible, I lost the ability to manage my time.
3. I separated the dream from the plan
This was really the nail in the coffin for this plan. There is certainly a lot of value in making a plan and then putting our heads down to just do the work for 90 days or six weeks or however long you decide. That is incredibly helpful when ensuring that we don't get too caught up in making the plan perfect by monitoring results that aren't necessarily accurate. But that is a different process from separating the dream from the plan.
When we create this separation, then it is so easy to get lost in the work and forget why we started in the first place. Without the big picture in front of us, the details don't make nearly as much sense. When the minutia doesn't make sense, we get frustrated and stop. And our dreams become dead in the water.
Feeding our dreams will look different for everyone. For some people, it may be spending time in quiet meditation plotting out their dreams. For others, it could be writing affirmations every day. For many people it may look like taping pictures to the wall. It doesn't matter how we feed our dreams; what matters is that we do it. Our dreams are like plants. They need sunlight to survive and thrive. Too much time in the sun (spending all our time dreaming and not working) won't get them where they need to be. And too much time in the dark (spending all of our time working and not dreaming) will stunt them just as quickly. I've heard plants do best when they hear words of affirmation. I don't know if there is any science to back that up, but the plant community definitely thinks it makes a difference. I imagine it is more likely that by saying we care for our plants, we actually do, which means we do what they need.
So, when it comes to our dreams, we need to put ourselves in a position to dream while doing the activity. One without the other isn't a recipe for success. Some people can white-knuckle their way through it, but if we marry the two ideas, things become much easier. Our dreams drive our mindset. Feeling positively about them (which comes from believing them) bleeds out into the rest of our lives. Our mindset drives our activity, and our activity is where we see our dreams come true. The progress from our activity feeds our belief in our dreams. It's all one big circle that depends on us to keep it going.
Those of us who weren't happy with our grades need to reset our plans. That may mean making some dramatic changes to what we originally had or making a few minor adjustments. But the most important thing is that we get (or stay) with the basics of dreaming because the basics exist for a reason, and if we never get away from them, then we never have to get back to them to begin with.