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Vision, Goals and Plans

Are you one of those creative dreamers who chips away at the life of your dreams in small, easy chunks – maybe putting in a few hours a week on a regular basis? But more and more, you notice you don’t want to?

Or did you leap in with both feet some time ago, and have been struggling with your dream – riding wave after wave of ups and downs ever since? (And lately it feels like mostly the downs.)

Or are you still on the fence, wondering what you’d do if you tossed yourself wholly into that dream and then woke up one morning to find you no longer loved it? And so you can’t get started.

If any of the above fits, you, friend, have Dream Fatigue.

It’s a not-very-rare condition affecting anyone who has a creative mission in life. And no matter where you are on the ‘living your joy’ spectrum, Dream Fatigue will indeed seize you one of these days. It has to. For such is the stuff of life. We’re simply not programmed, as humans, to maintain stasis all the time; we simply have to breakdown once in a while.

In fact, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that eventually everything returns to chaos. That’s just the deal. If you clean a room, it will get dirty again. If you go on a diet, you’ll eventually break it; you’ve got to. Nothing exists in a vacuum, breakdown is part of the deal, and the pursuit of your creative dream is no different.

Where this affects those attempting to live their joy is that you can casually forget about this. Month after month, year after year, you may just push along, feeling you are doing what you should … but somehow it stops being fun. That’s when Dream Fatigue creeps in.

Think about it.

Have you stopped taking risks lately? Gotten a little too safe with the dream? Started feeling mild burn out when you think about goals that fired you up at the start?

Or have you simply stopped getting things done? Ask yourself in all honesty … are you truly doing everything you can to flesh out your dream right now? Is it still exciting to behold?

If not, it may be that you need to shake things up a bit, in which case I recommend a retreat. Take yourself away from your routine for a day, or a weekend or a week. Find a stimulating, quiet place where you can truly dig in and explore what’s needed next. Give yourself the luxury of reinventing the dream … after all, it’s yours right? So ask yourself (in a way in which you truly have time to think and to respond) … what do you need that you’re not getting right now?

The answer may surprise you.

Nothing more than a critical step back will make Dream Fatigue disappear – for it isn’t a reality or a set of circumstances as much as a state of mind. And only a deep reality check and an overall assessment of your operating system will do. May I recommend you get busy now, and see what you can discover.