In this blog, Ryan Moor outlines the content for his talk at Printavo’s 2nd Annual Print Hustlers Conference that is hosted on July 21-22nd in Chicago, find out more and reserve your seat here.
I’m always excited to speak to groups about things I am passionate. The best speaking advice I have ever heard is from Tony Hseih of Zappos, when speaking, spend more building your passion and less time building your speech, your passion will come through and your speech will too. So when Bruce asked me to talk about leadership, goal setting, and building I decided to pick one that I was the most passionate about and that I hope could add the most value to every life here.
Last year I spoke about leadership, and how the natural form of leadership is to be brave, go first, and go with a conviction and in a direction that inspires others to follow. Leadership is then stepping back and supporting those who decide to follow you all the while moving up and down the line, sometimes playing the cheerleader in the middle, sometimes it is helping the one at the end up the mountain, and sometimes it is going first into battle.
Leadership is humility, courage, and selflessness. This year I am not going to talk about what leadership is, I am going to talk about what great leaders do in their life to support their role, growth, and ultimate success as a leader. Here are three things that I have found in my developing role as a leader and observed and learned from the leaders whom I aspire to be like.
- Don’t forget to dream big
- Make goal setting systematic
- Find and make the right habits
In my experience there is a three part system that leaders employee in their lives and business cultures to create ongoing success. You can achieve some form of success by doing some of them and I know that from experience, but to get to your full potential as human and a leader they all have to present, working in unison, and pushing you forward and this is the experience I am a continual student of. Today, we are going to talk about not forgetting to dream big.
Don’t Forget to Dream Big
Everything starts with a dream and through that seed, amazing things can grow and become. Dreams form in your imitation through thought and imagery, the more real are, the real they become in actuality. When do you dream, where do you dream, how do you dream and how can you dream bigger and better.
When and Where to Dream
Some start life with wild imaginations, dreams of grandeur, stardom, and outer space ambitions.
Some, due to circumstances never knew what dreaming was because they were raised in a physical or mental state of scarcity not having the basic needs necessary in order to advance up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and envision a better life for them or the world around them.
For those who once dreamt big, how do we relight and enhance that?
For those who never have, how do we start?
Dreaming is a very interpersonal, very quiet, and very exciting thing. Refining the process of dreaming can accentuate the power and effectiveness of it and greatly enhance the rest of your life. As a child, I remember first dreaming as a second grader about the grandeur of success and recognition on the mythical battlefields of my grade school.
There was the girl, a seventh grader who was so smart. She would walk past my 2nd grade room everyday to go over to the high school and study the tools, mostly comprised of tractors. I was infatuated with tractors and got several tractor magazines picking out the ones that would do the best job in the setting, in this case my high school playground. In my mind, late at night, and wee into the morning I would come up with these extraordinary scenes where our school is being attached. I organize all the students and their relevant tractors to create a giant fort with huge walls and moats, and then of course how I save the girl from impending doom.
As I got older the tractors changed to sports cars, then to tour buses, and now to private jets. The school yard battle turned into battle of the bands or national tours or the battlefields of business and now the battle for our world’s environment and equality for its people. It’s harder today than it was 30 years ago, but here are the things that I do in order to help me remember to dream big.
Dreaming is best done when your body is busy but mind is active, which allows your body and mind to operate independently, this is also the time when I come up with the best new ideas.
Examples:
- While running. My morning and evening runs are times when I hit the road and just think. My body is busy pounding the pavement, my mind is able to dream, create, and form the necessary connections between the two.
- In the water. In the bath, shower, or hot tub while your body is being submerged or showed with warm water, its sense are engulfed, your mind is now free.
- Household project time. When I clean (the house, the cars, the land scaping) I love to learn via audio book. When the audio book is done playing, I start dreaming, how to apply what I learned, going big like the hero’s I am listening to in the book.
- Driving. This used to be more effective that it is now as now I use this for more learning time, which then turns into dreaming time.
- As you nod off. Today it seems like sleep comes too quickly to dream as I am normally exhausted from the day, however, if you are a night owl and don’t fall to sleep earlier, try going to bed a little earlier and playing a movie of your future in your head vs checking your phone, working, or watching TV. You’ll be surprised where you will go and how easily it puts you to sleep.
How
Dreaming has to be visual and the best way to make it visual is to actually make it visual. If your dream is to own a private jet, get magazines or print out pictures of private jets. Whatever your dream is, get visuals of it, pin them, print them, virtually, physically and in areas where you can see them. This is where subscribing to a magazine,newsletter or podcast enhances the effectiveness of this technique because it keeps new content coming in every month or week.
Create a dream board, there are a ton of aps, websites like pinterest, or systems out there that allow you to pin your dreams, connect the dreams, and remind you of your dreams.
Stay tuned for Ryan’s next blog that goes over making goal setting systematic.