Well, technically there are still a couple of days left in the 12 days of Christmas, but most of us are back at work, and hopefully rested and refreshed. I trust that your holiday season was filled with love and laughter. At the gym this morning I happened upon a neighbour who looked at me and said, “do you train here? I’ve never seen you here?” I replied, “I haven’t seen you either!” We shared a laugh then about how busy the gym was this morning. In contrast, my visits during the holiday break were quiet, as just a few of us were there. And moments later I overheard another guy say to his buddy, “oh, you’ll see a lot of me here this year!” I hope so, and yet a part of me recognizes that by mid February, the gym will be back to it’s regular ebb and flow of people.
I hold this gym moment up, in relation to a conversation with a family member over the break. We were talking about dreams, goals and plans. I told her of my dream, and she said, “that’s great, but I’m far more interested in hearing about the action plan to get you there.”
Let’s consider this challenge in the simple and complex issue of losing weight. She is right, simply dreaming, simply doing some magical thinking about how great it would be to lose weight is nice, but you need a focus, a plan, a series of steps to get you there. For instance, eating fresh food only, and going for a walk for half an hour every day. Those are clear and attainable goals; they are an action plan. But how do we keep at it? Why is it that the gym is back to normal by mid February? I suggest it’s because we lose the dream. And the dream isn’t dare I say, as mundane as fitting into a smaller size; the dream is that I want to run around and play hide and seek with my grandchild, or I want to have my partner flirt with me again. The dream is always about a positive change for me and/or for those that are important to me. The dream has to have a tangible, value based result. So, we need to have the dream, and we need to have the action plan, and the two work together to make a new reality.
In our organizations, we see the same mechanism at play. A vision (dream) that we want to “get better” is not going to help us move forward, even if we have an action plan to get us there. Nor will having a vision (dream) of being the “Number 1 in our market place” be useful if we don’t have a realistic action plan laying out the steps of our journey. So as we look forward to a successful and fun 2011, remember to dream, and to build those action plans to make the dream a reality.