Stay-cation!

A few weekends ago, Rachel and I sent the boys away to the grandparents for a few days, something we try to do quarterly, so we could spend some time hanging out just the two of us. We call it our “stay-cation” because our house is actually a fun place to stay and is not too far away from many of the things we enjoy doing. As an aside, can I just say how refreshing it is from time to time to be able to just get in your car and go somewhere without spending ten minutes looking for shoes?

Typically we spend the time doing some fun stuff around town, catch a movie or two, grab some meals out, and at some point we do a little dreaming out loud, talking about our dreams and business goals and evaluating where we are.

Dreaming Out-Loud

This particular weekend we decided to make the “dreaming out loud” activity a much bigger part of the weekend. After dropping off the boys we took a trip to Hobby Lobby and got a big whiteboard to match the one we’ve already got. We tidied up all of the clutter in our room (helps our minds to feel less cluttered), opened up the blinds to let in some natural light, set our whiteboards on their stands and got to work.

The Overlap Technique

We talked about book ideas, writing schedules, pod-casting, and everything else that we want to do. We ended up having to photograph our whiteboard scribbles and erase a few times because there was so much. At one point we were talking about our finances and about SeanWes’ Overlap Technique, (if you’re not familiar with the concept, you owe it to yourself to listen to this podcast episode where my good friend Sean McCabe explains it in-depth) and I had written down all of the different ideas I was working on. One of them, a business venture that I had decided was going to be my main focus, had a lot of words like “start” and “begin” in the task list. As we were standing back and looking at the board, my wife pointed to the “Ben Toalson Design” section and said, “You’ve already got all of this stuff built. You’ve got a website, you’ve got the blog going, you have an audience… why wouldn’t you just focus your time and energy on that?”

A Welcome Slap in the Face

BOOM. She was right. Here I was prepared to sink my time into something that I was essentially having to build from scratch when I already have a platform that, were I to spend the same amount of time and care further developing it, would be a much better tool for accomplishing my goals. Had we not taken the time to zoom out and evaluate all of these things, I don’t know if I would have seen it.

If you are building your own freelance business or pursuing your passion, it is vital to zoom out periodically and look at the bigger picture. If you’re like me, you may tend to feel a little lost in the details of what you’re doing. It’s much like wandering through a forest on your way to a mountain. Sometimes you’ve got to climb up and get above the treeline to make sure you’re still heading in the right direction.

Frequency

The frequency at which you do this is important. Too seldom and you may find yourself wildly off course. Too often and you will steal time away from the journey. If we zoom out to often, sometimes we find ourselves addicted to this activity which, though it feels productive, is not meant to be on our task list, but is meant to be a catalyst propelling us toward our goals. For my wife and me, once a quarter is really good. It causes us to set more targeted goals, to see what we are capable of accomplishing within each 3 month period.

What does zooming out look like? Zooming out effectively requires the following conditions:

A New Environment
This could look like going to a place where you don’t normally spend your time. It could be getting out in nature, going to an abandoned warehouse, a cabin in the woods, a lakehouse, etc. It could even be your own home, like in our example, the room felt new to us because it was clean, there was natural sunlight, and there weren’t children threatening to interrupt us at any given moment.

Seclusion
A coffee shop, though often a fine place to work, is not a great environment for a “dreaming” session. You need a place where you can be alone, away from the presence, voices, thoughts and eyes of other people. It’s okay to bring a fellow dreamer along if you are working on things together, but keep it to that. If you have children, you’ve got to get away from them or get them away from you for some period of time. I’ll address this challenge in next week’s article (I started writing down the ideas today and it was getting pretty lengthy, so I’m going to split it off). You will feel much greater clarity when not faced with the potential for interruption or distraction that comes from being around others.

A Big Writing Space
I am a huge proponent of writing by hand for dreaming sessions. There is scientific data that supports the idea that when we write our ideas as opposed to typing, speaking or thinking them, it fires in a unique part of our brains and actually carves a deeper memory path for those things. This is why many experts encourage you to write your goals down. For this reason, get something like a huge whiteboard, chalkboard, a large blank wall, whatever you can get your hands on that you can write on and is big and blank. This space will allow you to express your ideas freely without worrying about whether or not you are keeping within the margins. I find that my mind often reflects the writing space, in that my thoughts feel less constrained and I can think and dream more freely.

Constraints
Okay, so I just said that it’s good to not have constraints when it comes to dreaming, and certainly you should try to remove as many constraints from your environment as possible, but I find that having the right kind of time constraints actually causes me to think and dream more efficiently and gives me a boundary to break through from time to time. For us, we have the natural constraint of the length of the weekend, but we also build into our time little breaks here and there. If you’ve even gone to a creative conference you know that they don’t just have you sit in a chair and listen to speakers all day. The good conferences break up the day, put things on a schedule and offer different activities at different times. This allows the things your are hearing and experiencing to “breathe” a little bit before you dive into the next topic. Similarly, you want to have good, concentrated dreaming sessions, with occasional breaks or changes in activity, so that your thoughts and dreams can breathe a little bit. You’ll find often that you come back to the dreaming with a fresh mind. Also, sometimes knowing that you’ve only got 10-15 minutes left before you are supposed to take a break adds an excitement and energy to the process that you might not otherwise experience.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas for instituting or continuing your practice of zooming out periodically. I can’t overstate the importance of this practice. The world needs your ideas and solutions. Zooming out is the best way to ensure that you are staying on course so that you can reach your goals and realize your dreams! If you have any thoughts or ideas to share you can leave a comment below. Thanks for reading!