#5: Bitch, do you even dream?
Suppose that your Academic Imperfectionist Godmother could wave her magic wand and give you the life of your dreams, right now. What would you ask for? If you need to hesitate even for a second before knowing how you’d answer that, you need to stop what you’re doing and listen to this episode.
For the Wheel of Life exercise mentioned in the episode, click here.
Can you tell me what you want what you really, really want? If not, you really, really, really need to listen to this episode.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, welcome back to The Academic Imperfectionist podcast, and a big hello to everyone who has listened and subscribed since the launch just under a couple of weeks ago. I'm very happy to have you with me. Now, let me ask you something. If you could have any sort of life you wanted, what would it look like? Where would you live? How would you spend your days? Who would you spend time with? Would you be working? And if so, doing what? How would you relax? What would you have that you don't have in your life now? What aspects of your current life would you be free of? How would you feel about yourself? What sort of things would you be saying to yourself? Now many of my clients, when I ask what their ideal life would look like, they don't know the answer. They're just stumped by that question. Sometimes they think for a moment about the question, and they come up with really quite sad, tiny little goals, like, I'd have my email inbox under control, I'd get seven hours of sleep every night, I'd be meeting up with a friend a couple of times a month to catch up, I'd carve out time in my day that's just for me to relax and unwind. Now, those can't be their only goals. They're just so small. And why would you even bother to speak to a coach, if that's all you want to achieve? Now, what's going on there, I think is that they know that they want more than that. But they don't know what. So many of my clients just have this general sense of dissatisfaction, this sense of 'not this', you know, 'There must be more than this. I'm not sure exactly what I want. But what I have now is not where I thought I'd end up'. So sometimes I try to press them by coming at it from a different angle, and I ask something like, what would your life have to look like five years, 10 years, one year, six months from now, in order for you to look back and think, yep, things have gone well for me. Now, often, when I ask that question, a really interesting thing happens. They say things like, 'well, I need to be earning at least X amount of money, so I'd still be working full time'. Or: 'I share custody of my kids, so I'd have to be living in the same city'. Now, why is that interesting? Because they are approaching the question about what their ideal life would look like, by thinking of all the things that they can't have. They start out by thinking of the limitations and the things standing in their way, and presumably, they're planning to form the picture of their ideal life from whatever crumbs they have left behind once they've established the limitations. And that is all wrong. Let's just pause to consider how all wrong that is. How strange it is that anyone would respond to the question, 'You can have anything you want, what's it to be?' by either coming up with goals that are so small that you could pretty much achieve them today, if you put your mind to it, or by thinking of all the things that you can't have? If that way of thinking sounds familiar to you, ask yourself, when did you get that way? Because I'm pretty sure that you weren't that way when you were a kid. You know, kids have no problem dreaming up fantastical scenarios, and gleefully inventing worlds that they wish that they could live in. But somewhere along the way, you've learned to act as your own thought police. You have become so focused on what's not possible that you're preventing yourself from even imagining what it is that you most want. It's no wonder that you're feeling dissatisfied. What this shows is that the biggest obstacle standing between you and a fulfilling, happy life is your lack of knowledge about what that sort of life would look like. It's as if you realise that probably you'll need to compromise about your dreams, and so you're starting out with the compromise position rather than the dream position, which is just impossible. It doesn't even make sense, because you can't compromise until you know what you're compromising about. You know, a compromise is a position between the life you have now and your ideal life, so unless you know what your ideal life is, you can't even know what the compromise looks like. You can't even know where you would find that in between position. Now, often we're criticised for dreaming, we're told that we have our head in the clouds, or that we're living on another planet, if we are imagining or aiming for scenarios that are too distant from where we are now. And it's really drummed into us that it's important to be realistic, it's important not to get carried away. So as we grow from children into adults, we learn that it's bad, or frivolous, or unhelpful or childish to dream, and we stop doing it. What that means is, you end up without any big goal for your life to aim for. Whatever dreams we might have started out with, we shrink to fit into the gaps left by our non ideal reality. And eventually, we get to a stage where you don't need to shrink them anymore, they just start out small. We don't want to change the world, we just want to clear our inbox. Now let me try to make vivid what's wrong with that scenario with an analogy with a really everyday situation. So consider that, presumably, it's important to you to have easy access in your home to the things that you use pretty often, like your clothes, your furniture, your TV, your food, your cooking utensils, and so on. And you wouldn't want to live with all those things stored away where they're difficult to access, that just wouldn't be part of the sort of lifestyle that you want to have. But if you are due to move house tomorrow, you'll compromise on this. Because if you're due to move house tomorrow, all your stuff is going to be packed away and ready to move, right. So 'having easy access to those things that I use regularly' might be an important value in your life. But it's not an immovable obstacle. If it were, you'd never be able to move house - that would be an unrealistic dream for you. But without the end goal of moving house, you know, unless that is something that is on your radar, you'd never even think of packing your stuff away. Why would you? Something similar applies to all those other obstacles that you view as standing in your way between where you are now, and the sort of lifestyle that would make you happy. Unless you know what that sort of ideal life would look like, you have no motivation at all, to try and move those obstacles, to try and pack them up into boxes in preparation for the move. Now, if you are willing to compromise on your dreams, which clearly so many of us are, then why wouldn't you also be willing to compromise on the obstacles that stand in your way? And that's not merely a rhetorical question. It's something that I want you to think about. What aspects of your life do you view as open to compromise? And what are the non negotiable parts? And why? I want to suggest to you that if you're willing to compromise about how close you can get to your ideal life, then you should be willing to compromise about literally anything else. I mean, it's your ideal life, by definition. But as I say, you can't even begin to think about what that compromise would look like until you know, what your ideal life would look like. And to do that, you need to stop telling yourself to be realistic and allow yourself to dream. But how do you do that? How do you get back in touch with your dreams after years of censorship by your internal thought police? Well, you could start by thinking back to a time when you did allow yourself to dream big. So when you were a child, and as you moved through adolescence, what was it that you wanted then? What was your 'anything's possible' vision for how your life was going to turn out? Think back to those times when you were told to be realistic, when perhaps you were mocked for having your head in the clouds or being on another planet. What was happening then? What was it that you said or did that lead to that sort of reprimand? Let's bear in mind that that sort of reprimand might not necessarily have been unkind. It might have been well meant perhaps as a form of nurturing or just gentle guidance. These are all parts of a caring upbringing, but they are also sources of limiting thoughts, habits of thought that prevent us from achieving what we really capable of. Now, after a bit of time thinking back and remembering a time when you did allow yourself to dream big, here's another strategy that you can use. This strategy is called the Disney method. I was pointed towards this by my old friend and amazing coach Lee Chalmers when I did one of her courses a few months ago. The Disney method was described by Robert Dilts in his 1994 book Strategies of Genius, and it's based on the way that Walt Disney apparently developed his ideas. Now, the Disney method involves breaking down the process of bringing your dreams to fruition into their component parts and dealing with each of those parts separately. And those separate parts are the visioning or dreaming stage, the stage of developing a realistic way to achieve dreams, and finally, the state of criticising the whole project. Apparently, Walt Disney used to use separate rooms for each of the stages. So there would be a dreamer room where you'd focus entirely on the what, on the ideal. What do you want, if anything were possible. So in the dreamer room, you're not thinking things like 'I want to clear my inbox', you're thinking of things like, 'I want the moon on a stick'. Never mind what's possible, what is it that you want? And after spending some time in the dreamer room, you would then move on to the realist room. In the realist room, the focus is on how. So if you seriously set about realising the dreams that you've come up with, how would you go about it? How would you go about getting the moon on a stick? What would the stick need to be made from? How would it be raised and supported, etc. So the realist takes the dreams seriously, and comes up with the best plan for achieving them. And after the realist room, the final room is the critic room. And the critic looks for problems with the realist's plan. So the critic asks things like, what obstacles stand in the way of the realist's plans for realising the dreams? And once that's happened, there can be a back and forth dialogue between the realist and the critic where the realist considers the problems that the critic has thrown up, and tries to find a way around them before presenting them back to the critic. It's only after the realist and the critic have exhausted all of the options for realising the dreams, that the dream is abandoned. Otherwise, it's still very much in the running. And all this can happen in a completely matter of fact way. There's no judgement about whether a particular dream is stupid or bad, or anything else negative. The focus is on what is the dream? How could it be achieved, and what sort of problems stand in the way. Now, a lot of people when they are asked about what their ideal life looks like, try to do all these things at once. They're jumping ahead to the realist and the critic stage before giving any time and space really to the dreamer. Your inner realist and your inner critic are shooting down the ideas of your inner dreamer before she has even finished speaking, really. And so eventually, she stops speaking, because that's just what happens if we're attacked and interrupted every time we open our mouths. We stop trying to speak in the first place. And before we get too abstract about this, let's go back to the house moving example. Imagine trying to move house if every time you tried to pack something away, ready for the move, you had somebody in the room with you telling you that you can't do that, because you need easy access to your things, and they're not going to be easily accessible if they're all packed up in boxes. You just wouldn't be able to move house. You'd stop even trying. So after you finish listening to this episode, take some time to dream up your ideal life, even if you've only got 10 minutes to devote to it. And while you're doing it, stay in the dreamer room. If it helps, you could designate an actual room in your house as the dreamer room, or a place in your home or a place outdoors. But don't go anywhere near the realist or the critic rooms. At least not until after listening to the next episode of this podcast where I'm going to be looking at how you get to where you want to be. And just a hint here, you already know how to get there. I'm going to show you how to tap into that knowledge in a way that bypasses all your fear and anxiety about it. Now to help you with articulating your dreams, there's a framework that you can use. This is a coaching tool called the Wheel of Life exercise. You can download this with instructions from my website. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and happy dreaming.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook @AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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