Supercoach - Michael Neill [68]
What’s Their Dream?
“The greatest good we can do for others is not just
to share our riches with them, but to reveal theirs.”
— Zig Ziglar
In his book The Dream Manager, supercoach Matthew Kelly tells the story of a large cleaning company that solved the problem of high employee turnover by hiring a “dream manager”—in essence an in-house life coach whose job it was to help people articulate their dreams, formulate plans, and follow them through to achievement.
Along the way, he raises an interesting question:
How well do you know the dreams
of the people closest to you?
As someone who has worked as a personal and corporate coach for 20 years now, I assumed the answer would be: “Really, really well indeed.” But rather than trust my assessment, I decided to actually find out.
First up was my wife. Although I was embarrassed to ask (after all, surely I should know what the woman I love’s heart longs for), I was heartened by her clarity about her dreams for us as a family and a few particular personal ones, but I could hear her hesitancy about achieving them. It was then that I realized that one of the most profound ways I could support her was by working with her on making her dreams come true instead of acting as a “devil’s advocate” against them. (A complete aside, but does the devil really need an advocate? And if so, is that really whom you want as your employer?)
Next were the kids. Oliver dreams of life in high school and saving up for a Ford Mustang as his first car. Clara wants to sing and act, and Maisy is dead set on becoming a mermaid and then going to medical school.
What makes these dreams so powerful to me is not the impact they would have on the world, but the impact creating them will have on my children. As they learn to discover that they can have what they want (and that what they want may change many times through the course of their lives), they will become what T. E. Lawrence called “dreamers of the day.”
As he said in his autobiography:
All men dream: but not all equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was all vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous . . . for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
And that’s what I want for everyone in my life—my family, my friends, my clients—and yes, even you: that you may act your dreams with open eyes and make them possible.
So I’d like to bring this session and indeed our time together to a close with an invitation—the invitation to become “a believer.” A believer is someone who chooses to believe in the capacity inside each one of us to be more than we thought we were capable of—to fly higher and travel harder and arrive triumphantly, creating lives that make us (and often everyone around us) go “Wow!”
There’s no movement to join, no manifesto to sign, just a gentle reminder and an open invitation to be the difference-maker in someone else’s life and to be open to having that difference made in your own. Tell someone you believe in them. Mean it. Demonstrate it in the way you treat them. Then stand back and watch their life begin to blossom and bloom.
I began this session with a quote from Richard Bach’s wonderful book Illusions: “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.” I’ll put it somewhat less poetically, but hopefully with equal strength:
Argue for your possibilities, and sure enough,
you will find much more capacity and ability inside
yourself than you ever dreamed possible.
What’s Their Dream?
I think you’ll be surprised by how much you enjoy this little experiment. . . .
1. Make a list of the three to five most important people in your life.
2. Take some time this week to ask them about their dreams—what they long for, what they would love, and what would make them go “Wow!”
3. Let them know you’re on their side—that you love them, believe in them, and will support and assist them in making their dreams come true.
4. Ask at least three people you don’t know well