I once interviewed an entrepreneur who described how important the leadership team around him was. He relied on various people for their insights in different areas. “I have a lot of ideas,” he said with a chuckle, “and not all of them are good!”
He recognized that he had a strong suit and needed other voices to complement him.
The same is true for each of us as we pursue our dreams. We each have a voice that pipes up loud and clear, but to maximize our potential for success we often need to supplement it with other voices.
We don’t need to hire a management team though. We can find that
supporting cast in our heads. We just have to make it a conscious effort.
Here are five voices you can tap into to help turn those dreams into reality,
presented in order of appearance as you pursue your dreams.
Dreamer / Visionary
This is where it all starts. Your dreamer is the blue-sky-thinking voice that sees what could be. It expands the universe of possibility. Without the dreamer, you would be stuck with nothing more than the logical next step to whatever path you’re on. And unless you are already on the path to your dreams, plodding along to the logical next step isn’t the most inspiring direction to take.
If your dreamer had its way, it would look at the dream and go tumbling headlong after it, tripping all over itself like an excited puppy. That’s when it’s time to call in the pessimist.
Pessimist
The pessimist gets a bad rap, typically for good reason, but that’s because it just hasn’t gotten the right work assignment.
When you let your pessimist take the lead, it makes a supremely crappy boss. Thoughts about your dreams are met with an endless litany of, “It can’t be done. That won’t work.”
But if you let your pessimist play a supporting role instead of running roughshod all over your dreams, it can have an enormous positive impact. The focus of that supporting role is simply this: asking, “What could go wrong?”
What’s so positive about that? Because the better you understand what could go wrong, the better equipped you are to make sure it doesn’t happen. Which brings us to the next voice in our cast of characters…
Problem-solver
Some people are born problem-solvers. They like nothing better than to dig their brains into a meaty problem and ask, “How can I fix this? How can I get past this?” Whether or not this one comes naturally to you, you can make a conscious effort to bring it into the process.
When you pair the problem-solver up with the pessimist, it’s a match made in heaven. The pessimist finds the problem, and the problem-solver goes, “Cool!”
The problem-solver is convinced that any challenge can be overcome. In fact, not only can it be overcome, there are often multiple ways to do the job. Let your problem-solver go wild coming up with as many solutions as it can. Then it’s time for the next voice to do its work.
Pragmatist
Often what we think of as the pragmatist is really the pessimist wearing the pragmatist’s mask. “Sure, that’s a nice idea,” the faux-pragmatist says, “but what about reality?” In this case, “reality” is just another excuse for a stream of reasons why it won’t work.
The real pragmatist, on the other hand, is neither dreamer nor pessimist. It simply says, “Given the constraints of my reality, what is my best option? What is the best path to making this work?” It takes the options provided by the problem-solver and picks the optimal path.
Your dreams have to unfold in the real world. Your pragmatist provides the common-sense bridge between the two. Then it’s time for the next character to do its thing.
Actionist
OK, so actionist isn’t actually a word, but this is my article, so I get to make it up. Without your actionist, none of the previous characters make a lick of difference.
Your actionist is not so much a voice as it is the muscle that takes action and moves you towards the dream. It picks up the choices laid out by all the previous voices and says, “OK, let’s do it!”
Your actionist takes action with the intent of getting a specific result. Once it takes that action, it’s time for the final voice in your internal cast of characters.
Learner
In an ideal world, there would be an unbroken line of positive motion toward your dream. But this isn’t the ideal world. So there’s no guarantee that the steps the actionist takes will take you where you want to go. Or that it will take you there on a bump-free ride.
What is guaranteed is that, regardless of the outcome of the action, there will be something to learn. And if you have a process in place to consistently harvest the results of that learning, it can provide you with insights and tools that will ratchet up your potential for success.
That’s where the learner comes in. The learner’s role is to get the most out of your investment. It asks, “What happened here? What made this work? What went wrong? Why?”
Your learner has no baggage around whether or not you made the right decision or did something well. All it cares about is, “Whoo-hoo! There’s something to learn here!” Whether that insight comes from your successes or your failures is irrelevant.
Once you have the insight, you can plow it right back into pursuing your dream. And the cycle continues.
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BOOK
Embracing Your Inner Critic
Hal Stone & Sidra Stone
One of the biggest obstacles to our dreams is right between our ears. We
have amazingly creative ways to get in our own way. One of the biggest of
those is our Inner Critic.
Your Inner Critic rips off a constant barrage of reasons why you don't
measure up. "You're too ____. You're not ____ enough. You should have
done ____ better." Its effect can range from annoying to downright
debilitating.
If any of this sounds oh-too-familiar, I have a book for you. It's called
Embracing Your Inner Critic, by Hal and Sidra Stone.
In a nutshell, the book gives you an understanding of where that Inner Critic
comes from, what role it plays, and how to engage it so you don't end up
getting internally battered.
At the heart of Embracing the Inner Critic is Voice Dialogue, a therapy
approach developed by the Stones that describes the different voices we
have as individual selves (the Pusher, the Pleaser, the Fun Lover, etc.).
The book zeroes in on the oh-too-common self of the Inner Critic (as well as
some of its cronies, like the Rule Maker, the Perfectionist, and the Judge).
By seeing the Inner Critic as a real character with a specific role, it becomes
easier to both understand and engage it, minimizing its negative effects.
The book offers a good combination of concepts and examples, and there
are good questions at the end of each chapter to help you go deeper.
