Oneiric

“You can’t see the end from the beginning when you play where no one else is playing.”  --  Whitney Johnson

I read these words and it’s instantly apparent why everything I’m after in life these days feels so darn hard to attain.  That project at work that will transform how our business operates, my teenager following the road less traveled to adulthood, my personal quest for epic love.  I’m not on a chartered course anymore, anywhere.

In life we get extremely comfortable walking a highly-socialized, “everyone’s doing it”, prescribed path.  Assignments at work follow a rote pattern of deliverables, a cadence of operating we know like the back of our hands.  Of course our children go to college after high school and become white collar workers.  We have the means, so naturally this is what they’ll do.  Marriage follows its patterns as well, one of them being this:  Buy a house in the suburbs with all of the requisite stuff, birth and raise children, retire and live on a golf course.  There are manuals, directions, models to follow for all of this.  We know how to get these things done and feel successful. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, as long as we are happy and fulfilled with it.

But we’re all born with dreams, those desires that excite and terrify us at the same time.  We barely dare to articulate them because they are so far left of center. If we let them bubble up and spill over, we’re going to disrupt the status quo, change the world maybe.  So we keep them contained in the glass, sipping slowly on what’s safe.

 

Sometimes we go after our dreams outright. Sometimes life pushes us off the path, presenting an opportunity to work on groundbreaking innovation at work, giving us a high school graduate who can’t see himself in school for another minute, or causing us to make choices that net a chance to enter into a relationship on new terms.  And suddenly everything is hard, not only because we have never been here before, because no one involved has been here before either.

We can get paralyzed.  We don’t know what to do. Without any guidance we’re so afraid of failing, we do nothing at all. We can get frustrated, distressed over the need to write the manual or chart a new course.  What if, instead of being upset, we look at the situation as an opportunity to create something uniquely ours that’s never been done before?  Isn’t this place where there is no documented right or wrong the perfect place for all of us imperfect souls to play? 

In Johnson’s post, titled "Where There's a Why, There's a Way" , she submits that when we are clear on why it is we’re doing what we’re doing, we’ll figure out how.  This is what I tell young people I coach on long term career goals; don’t worry about how you might achieve your goal, get used to saying it out loud. If you truly want it and believe it, you’ll find a way to make it happen.

And so this is how it is:  Believing so completely that the product we’re creating will transform our industry keeps me coming back to the drawing board restructuring our approach.  Believing wholeheartedly that my son is capable of reaching his potential on his own terms keeps me constantly looking for new ways to equip him and support him on his journey.  Believing emphatically that the best relationships are not stepped into under perfect circumstances, but are living, breathing, ever-evolving creations of the two unique souls comprising them keeps me pursuing the one in front of me. These are my passionate whys bringing the strength, tenacity and determination to keep me forever modifying the how.

   

The reality is, I don’t want to play in the space everyone else is playing in. And maybe that’s because I believe I am built to play where no one else plays.  When I ask a colleague for feedback, she deconstructs my leadership in these words: 

“You are very thoughtful about how you consider everything and you decide on your tactics based on what's going to yield the most value long term. Then you cautiously and correctly go after it meticulously and you alter your pace and focus based on reactions of everyone:  Eye on the prize and a very intellectual approach to getting there.”

What a priceless gift her assessment of my skills is.  I’ve never been more challenged in my life than I am right now, but with those words never more confident that I’m in the place I need to be, that place where no one else is playing.

I recently invited someone who’s never been here before either to come and play with me.  I wonder if he’ll accept.