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[post_content] => It seems obvious to say, but the more special moments you fill your life with, the more special your life will feel.
That goes for planning, too.
That’s why we love not only creating products that help people plan out their big dreams, but help them do the planning itself.
Our number one tip for how to make planning a part of your life that you adore is to make it feel really special.
Here are three ways to do that so that your time spent planning feels more like a treat than another item on your to-do list.
1. Set aside time and treat it like a date.
Because it is! It’s a date with your future self. Set aside time for your planning dates and let them be really special. Lots of people in our community like to do their planning at what feels like the start of their week, whether that is Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.
Pick what feels right to you! You may find you work best when planning on Friday evenings with a glass of wine & jazz music playing, or on Wednesdays after your favorite yoga class. Whatever you choose, see if you can create a plan that honors your life, your schedule, and what feels fun to you.
2. Weave your big dreams into your day-to-day life.
So often we have a disconnect between our big picture goals (write a book someday, start a non-profit eventually) and our daily to-do list (pick up dry cleaning, prep for meeting) – how can you incorporate more of the big picture into your tasks?
3. Set small goals and follow through.
You’ll find that you get better and better at planning as you practice, and something great to do if you’re just starting to get into it, is to set small goals that you know you’ll be able to follow through with. This will help you build your self-trust and deeply know that you can tackle larger and larger tasks. So, rather than set yourself up to fail by planning to go to buckram yoga at 5am every day next week when this week you didn’t work out at all, how can you set a small goal that will feel good? Maybe you just take your morning tea on a walk to a local park, and aim to do that a few days this week. Then, add more and more. That way, you aren’t feeling overwhelmed or defeated, instead, you feel like you are truly the boss of your own life and that your #1 employee (you!) actually does what they say they are going to do.
Once you start implementing these habits, you’ll find planning is one of the most useful tools you have for creating a life that feels like it is truly YOURS everyday. You’ll look forward to your planning dates, because they are really just chances to get your priorities, preferences and big picture dreams INTO your actual life.
The next time you set up your ritual for planning or jot down a space for your big dreams in your schedule, tag us on social media @thedragontree so we can see and cheer you on!
Love,
Briana and all of us at The Dragontree
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[post_date] => 2019-10-24 22:33:54
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When our four-year-old daughter came home from her first day at a Montessori preschool, she handed me a swatch of cloth with several buttons sewn neatly onto it. “Where did you get this, sweetie?” I asked.
“I made it!” she exclaimed proudly. She also informed me that she had chopped apples with a “grownup knife” and cut flowers with pruning shears.
I couldn’t believe it. This girl had barely used scissors and never played with a needle before. We weren’t excessively protective parents, but we had no idea that she was capable of doing tasks like these (without hurting herself even). Part of the secret, we learned, was the mixed-age class. In a group of kids ranging from three to six, the older ones were instrumental in inspiring and instructing the younger ones. The teacher explained that when a child sees an adult perform a complex task, she won’t assume she’s capable of doing it herself. But if she sees another kid do it, she naturally thinks, “I’m going to do that, too!” This is one of the many ways I’ve been inspired and instructed by children – and it has informed how I work with adults.
When my wife founded The Dragontree, we wanted to provide a space for people to relax and heal. It wasn’t until some years later that we recognized a shared ambition to support people in whole-life wellness, which includes helping people to discover and actualize their potential. But while a young child may assume she can do what another child can, this isn’t always true for adults. We see other adults doing great things and often think, “I don’t have what they have.”
Most adults have old, fixed ideas about their capacities, largely influenced by teachers and parents. The best research on this subject comes from Carol Dweck, who studies childhood learning and self-esteem, and coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. A fixed mindset refers to a belief that one’s ability in a given area, whether strong or weak, isn’t going to change. Thoughts such as “I’m not good with numbers,” or “I can’t sing,” or “I’m not an organized person” all indicate underlying fixed mindsets.
In contrast, a growth mindset entails the belief that, whatever your current ability, you can work at it and get better. Dweck found that kids with growth mindsets enjoy a challenge, are more confident, and have a stronger work ethic. It probably seems obvious that knowing you can improve your lot would be more empowering than believing you’re stuck with it, but we rarely take the time to investigate and question our deepest beliefs.
Indeed, one of the tricky things about changing a fixed mindset about, say, your skill at math, is that you may also have a fixed mindset about your inability to change your mindset! (“It’s just the kind of person I am!”) Thus, there’s a something of a catch-22 here: in order to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset you must have a growth mindset around changing your mindset. However, I find it useful to remember that these two configurations – fixed and growth – aren’t equally valid. It’s not a case of “different but equal.” A fixed mindset is inherently incorrect. Though we may fiercely insist that it’s true, it’s not. We can change. We can grow. We can improve. Always.
In his 2014 TED Talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self, psychologist Dan Gilbert teaches that people usually believe they’re unlikely to change much in the future – but they’re wrong. “All of us are walking around with an illusion,” he says. “An illusion that our personal history has just come to an end. That we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” It’s true, his studies show, that our rate of change slows down somewhat as we get older, but it doesn’t slow down nearly as much as we believe it will. “At every age from 18 to 68 in our data set,” Gilbert continues, “people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience [in values, personality, friends, and preferences] over the next ten years.” He suggests that it’s easier for us to see how we’ve changed in the past than it is for us to imagine how we’ll change in the future. “Human beings,” he states, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
So, if the science shows that you’re bound to change whether you believe it or not, why not believe it? A willingness to believe (i.e., hold a growth mindset) moves you from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. If you believe you’re capable of change and growth, you can be a conscious creator of the life you desire.
A critical factor in making productive change is the recognition and acceptance of your current status. Many of us have a hard time giving ourselves an honest self-appraisal because of our upbringing. If you or your parents were raised during wartime there may have been a “stiff upper lip” policy of denying weaknesses and carrying on stoically.
Later generations faced a different obstacle – the self-esteem movement. In retrospective studies of the movement that picked up speed in the 1980s, Dweck and others found that kids who were always told they were great tended to grow into young adults with fixed mindsets that didn’t serve them. They saw themselves as awesome regardless of the facts or their quality of participation. And the inevitable dissonance that resulted when they underperformed often provoked disillusionment or depression. The fixed aspect of a fixed mindset implies a kind of rigidity, and thus a painful reckoning when disproven.
I believe it’s important to love and accept oneself completely (what you truly are is awesome) but what happened here might be seen as a form of “bypass.” Rather than help kids to face their deficiencies, we decided it was favorable to pretend they didn’t have any. The self-esteem movement, at least when understood and applied shallowly, aimed to help kids believe in themselves by giving them a gold star no matter what. The “participation trophy” is a good example. How can we grow (or track that growth) if we aren’t honest and accepting of our actual starting point?
Now, let’s get back to that disparity between adults and young children. In our work through the Dragontree to facilitate the emergence of people’s greatness we’ve encountered so many folks who see themselves as fundamentally different from (i.e., inferior to) those they see as great. I’d like to challenge this belief.
While Dweck’s research deals mostly with intelligence and success, we feel the growth mindset also applies to things like our capacity for healing, happiness, power, spiritual connection, and love. For instance, beliefs such as, “There’s no soul mate out there for me,” “I don’t have a connection to a higher power,” “I’m going to be sick for the rest of my life,” “I don’t have what it takes to change the world,” and “I’m just not an optimistic, light-hearted type of person” all reveal fixed mindsets and are therefore untrue – except perhaps in this moment.
If you feel an urge to emerge – to come into your power and make a positive difference – but something is holding you back, I encourage you to first unearth the fixed mindsets that are undermining you and challenge them. If it feels like too much of a stretch to completely reverse a negative belief, start by “trying on” a minor shift in a positive direction, coupled with an openness for things to get better. For example, if you’re mired in “I’m going to be sick forever,” trying to replace it with something like “I feel like a million bucks” may produce some cognitive dissonance; your mind may simply not buy it. But beginning with a statement like, “I allow myself to heal,” is harder for your mind to argue with. And even if a negative belief about yourself is factual right now, holding a growth mindset entails admitting that you don’t know what will happen in the future. Thus, a very small nudge in the direction of growth might look like replacing “I’ll never meet my soul mate” with “I haven’t met my soul mate yet.”
If you don’t believe you have what it takes to be great, answer me this: what do think is the actual, measurable difference between you and, say, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, or Rosa Parks? Were they smarter than you? You can learn. Were they more spiritual than you? You can open yourself to that realm of experience. Were they more dedicated than you? You can begin a consistent devotion to your dreams right now.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In order to be a conscious creator, you need to be able to hold a vision of the change you wish to see. That is, you need to hold it consistently until it’s actualized (and then update it as needed and continue the practice). For many who are mystified as to why they’re unable to bring about the changes they desire, the answer is as simple as this: they keep changing their mind and/or getting distracted. If you notice you’ve been doing this, don’t punish yourself for it (we live in incredibly distractible times); just recognize it and get back on track.
Finally, if you have trouble believing you’re capable of greatness, it may be worthwhile to journal about “What is greatness?” Greatness isn’t the same as fame and it doesn’t require breaking world records. (I’m not trying to convince you that even if you spend your life doing bong hits and playing Nintendo, you can still be great in your own way. Let’s be real here.) Human greatness may not have a universal definition, but I believe it’s much more common than we recognize. There’s greatness in storytelling, greatness in healing, greatness in communication, greatness in teaching, and greatness in feeding the poor. There’s greatness in the smallest of places.
I’d love to hear your feelings about greatness and living to your potential. What have your challenges been? How have you overcome fixed mindsets?
Be well,
Peter
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A few weeks ago we had a dozen Dragontree managers staying at our house for a 2020 planning session. There were lots of laughs and lots of great ideas. It was a wonderful reminder to me of the power of group consciousness.
We need only to look at the state of the world to understand the prevailing group consciousness on our planet. An individual has a big idea. This inspires a small group to adopt the idea and it grows. Increasing numbers of people are attracted. They hold the idea in their consciousness, they share it, they imbue it with their energy. And large-scale reality changes.
If you want to make an idea real, enlist the power of group consciousness – even if that group only consists of two people. When you do something with a likeminded friend, it’s more likely to succeed. This is why we talk so much about doing your life planning with your partner or a supportive group of comrades.
Numerous bands of Dreambookers have formed and they’ve shared that the collective energy inspires them to dream bigger, to get realer, and to express these dreams to each other. There’s something magic about telling another person of a dream which you’ve previously kept to yourself.
Besides the synergy that occurs when more than one mind is holding an intention, doing planning with others promotes clarity and alignment. This is especially important for those whose lives are intertwined. Whether you use the Dreambook or another tool, sharing this process hugely increases the likelihood that your plans are going to work out in a mutually beneficial and harmonious way.
It’s easy to see the downsides to not planning together: you’ll probably be out of sync; you may want things that are in direct opposition to one another and you won’t have the chance to forge a compromise; you may end up in circumstances that are good for one person but not the other; you may even subconsciously sabotage each other’s plans because of an unrecognized belief your partner’s plan may infringe on or contradict your own.
But the upsides are hopefully an even better reason to plan together:
You get to experience the alchemy of two (or more) people’s urge to grow and create. When you’re both aiming for a shared future, each person consciously adds their own colors and strokes to the canvas and the result is a more beautiful and integrated work of art than if you had crafted two works independently. You get to say, “Here’s what I want,” and they say, “Here’s what I want,” and together you stretch and grow, engage your creative power, and hold the space for a magnificent, fulfilling outcome. If you can your whole family or peer group involved in the co-visioning and co-creation process, that’s all the more energy flowing in the same direction.
You get to build plans that play off each other’s strengths and drives. Rather than each person doing everything themselves, the different roles in a shared plan can be managed by whomever is best suited to them. And if one person having an off day, the other person can carry the baton.
You get to use each other as a sounding board. When you discuss your future plans with someone who knows and cares about you, they can offer vital feedback. They might see what you don’t – that you’re pursuing something that’s no longer in line with your values; that you’re charging too little for your services; that you could be dreaming bigger; that you’re going about a task in a way that’s unnecessarily difficult; etc.
Inevitably, planning with another person, whether it’s a friend or a life partner, is going to push you (and your plan) to grow in ways that are less likely to occur when you’re doing it on your own. It’s harder to stay in your comfort zone when there are others involved. In fact, we may want to plan independently because we know this. “If I don’t tell anyone my plan,” we might think, “no one can tell me it’s a bad idea.” Or, “If I don’t tell my partner what I have in mind for the future, we won’t have to discover that we’re incompatible.” But opening up the conversation – with someone who genuinely supports you to live to your potential – is the only way to ensure that it’s going to work for the highest good of everyone involved.
Do you use the Dreambook with a friend? With your partner? What have you experienced with consciously co-creating?
Be well,
Peter
P.S. By the way, I was inspired to write about group consciousness by a passage I recently encountered in Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch:
“Group consciousness is something that is not widely understood—yet it is extremely powerful and can, if you are not careful, often overcome individual consciousness. You must always, therefore, endeavor to create group consciousness wherever you go, and with whatever you do, if you wish your larger life experience on the planet to be harmonious. . . . If you cannot find a group whose consciousness matches your own, be the source of one. Others of like consciousness will be drawn to you.
Individuals and smaller groups must affect larger groups—and, ultimately, the largest group of all, which is ALL humankind—for there to be permanent and significant change on your planet. Your world, and the condition it is in, is a reflection of the total, combined consciousness of everyone living there.”
[post_title] => Planning + Partners = Power
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[post_content] => It seems obvious to say, but the more special moments you fill your life with, the more special your life will feel.
That goes for planning, too.
That’s why we love not only creating products that help people plan out their big dreams, but help them do the planning itself.
Our number one tip for how to make planning a part of your life that you adore is to make it feel really special.
Here are three ways to do that so that your time spent planning feels more like a treat than another item on your to-do list.
1. Set aside time and treat it like a date.
Because it is! It’s a date with your future self. Set aside time for your planning dates and let them be really special. Lots of people in our community like to do their planning at what feels like the start of their week, whether that is Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.
Pick what feels right to you! You may find you work best when planning on Friday evenings with a glass of wine & jazz music playing, or on Wednesdays after your favorite yoga class. Whatever you choose, see if you can create a plan that honors your life, your schedule, and what feels fun to you.
2. Weave your big dreams into your day-to-day life.
So often we have a disconnect between our big picture goals (write a book someday, start a non-profit eventually) and our daily to-do list (pick up dry cleaning, prep for meeting) – how can you incorporate more of the big picture into your tasks?
3. Set small goals and follow through.
You’ll find that you get better and better at planning as you practice, and something great to do if you’re just starting to get into it, is to set small goals that you know you’ll be able to follow through with. This will help you build your self-trust and deeply know that you can tackle larger and larger tasks. So, rather than set yourself up to fail by planning to go to buckram yoga at 5am every day next week when this week you didn’t work out at all, how can you set a small goal that will feel good? Maybe you just take your morning tea on a walk to a local park, and aim to do that a few days this week. Then, add more and more. That way, you aren’t feeling overwhelmed or defeated, instead, you feel like you are truly the boss of your own life and that your #1 employee (you!) actually does what they say they are going to do.
Once you start implementing these habits, you’ll find planning is one of the most useful tools you have for creating a life that feels like it is truly YOURS everyday. You’ll look forward to your planning dates, because they are really just chances to get your priorities, preferences and big picture dreams INTO your actual life.
The next time you set up your ritual for planning or jot down a space for your big dreams in your schedule, tag us on social media @thedragontree so we can see and cheer you on!
Love,
Briana and all of us at The Dragontree
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