Why Your Dream Needs a Calendar Invite
Earlier this week, I delivered a virtual webinar for a women’s networking group called WIT: originally named for Women in Tech it has broadened its scope to create community and guidance for all women. The session was called Unboxing Your Dreams, and I shared part of my own story, along with three practical exercises to help people move closer to their biggest goals.
Exercise 1: Write down your mission
We talked about writing down your mission, not just the goal itself, but the deeper reason behind it. The thing that matters enough to keep you going when excitement fades and the work gets inconvenient.
Exercise 2: Visualize the work, not the goal
It is easy to picture the big beautiful moment at the end. The published book. The new business. The marathon finish line. The career change. The thing finally becoming real. But the finish line is not where most of life happens. Most of life happens in the Tuesday morning run, the messy first draft, the awkward first email, the quiet hour where you choose to keep going even though no one is watching.
Exercise 3: Align your identity
Don’t wait until the book is published to call yourself a writer. Don’t wait until the business is thriving to call yourself an entrepreneur. Don’t wait until you feel fully qualified, fully ready, or fully certain to begin living like the person you are trying to become.
I believe in all of that and I stand by every word I said this week, but after spending part of this morning focused on the things I love most, I found myself thinking about something even simpler. Sometimes, the biggest gift we can give our dreams is time.
Time to think.
Time to manage the details.
Time to focus on what matters most.
Time to remember why we cared in the first place.
So often, when something important has not started yet, we assume the problem is discipline, clarity, confidence, motivation, or some perfect plan we have not yet figured out. Sometimes that is true, and sometimes we have not started simply because we have not given the dream any room to breathe.
We keep it alive in the background of our lives. We think about it while driving, while folding laundry, while answering emails, while standing in line at the grocery store. We let it float in and out of our minds throughout the day, giving us small flashes of possibility, but rarely giving it the sustained attention it needs to become something real. While thoughts like these may comfort us, inspire us, and remind us there is more we want from our lives, without time they rarely become anything we can hold.
If there is something you have been wanting to do, but have not started yet, I want you to take out your calendar right now. Look at the next few weeks and choose one two-hour block of time you can commit to. Not a full day. Not a dramatic life overhaul. Just two protected hours. If you can't find it these two weeks, then look further out. Once you find it, block the time. Protect it. Then, when that time comes, go somewhere you will not be interrupted. Turn off your phone. Close the extra tabs. Step away from the noise. Let yourself think about the thing you keep saying matters to you.
You do not have to finish anything in those two hours. You do not have to solve everything, map out the next five years, or emerge with a perfect plan. You just have to give the dream your attention long enough to ask, “What is the next honest step?”
Maybe you write a few notes.
Maybe you make a list.
Maybe you finally send the email.
Maybe you open the document.
Maybe you sit quietly and admit, without minimizing it, that this thing still matters to you.
If you end up with a first step, great! If not, then just pick the next two-hour block of time and rinse and repeat as many times as it takes to start moving in the right direction because the first step to turning a dream into something real is not always a grand declaration; sometimes it is simply creating enough space to begin. The dream may be big, but the next step is usually much smaller than we think.
