You Can be Great If You Really Want To

The main barrier to recalling and benefiting from dreams is that waking and dreaming memory aren’t connected nearly as well as they could be with greater intention, practice and focus. Making a relatively consistent effort to remember and especially to record your dreams will help your waking mind align and integrate your dream experience. It’s also an excellent way to increase imagination and intuitive capabilities which are both intimately connected with dreams. This alone should provide strong incentive.

IT’S IMPORTANT TO WANT IT:

First and foremost, you must feel that it will be useful to you, if not extremely valuable. Without this intention, motivation will soon disappear. More importantly, the desire acts as a subjective magnet which draws your dreams into memory.

FOCUS and ATTENTION:

Understand that dream recall is an inherent, natural human trait. That is why young children are quite in touch with their dreams, as are many native cultures, some of which even share their dreams with each other daily and base important life actions upon guidance they receive. Dream recall is like a mental muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it becomes. Without exercise it may shrink, but it is there if you decide to work it out again. So if your recall is poor, trust that it will come in time, and the trust itself will actually help since expectation is a powerful subjective tool.

BEDTIME PRACTICE:

Before sleep, reread your dreams from the night (or more) before. This allows you to begin to connect with your dream memory, and is also an opportunity to interpret your dreams and spot connections to the day’s events. Then, as you go to bed, clearly request (rather than command) yourself to remember any dreams when you awaken in the morning or during the night, especially ones that would be beneficial to you. Also remind yourself that it’s a simple, natural process that happens by itself anyway. You can also suggest to yourself to spontaneously awaken when you need to without using an alarm, since any strong external perception such as a loud noise can inhibit recall. This method works well with practice, but you may initially wish to set your alarm for 15 minutes after your suggested wake-up time, just to be safe. Whenever you awaken, keep your eyes closed (or shut them if already open) and remain as motionless as possible. If you moved since waking, return to your earlier body position. Gather as many images, impressions, feelings, or body sensations or waking thoughts as you can. A helpful technique is to think of it like fishing. Gently, cast out your intention to remember a dream, and wait a little to see what comes. As soon as you get anything, no matter how brief or vague they may at first seem, rise and immediately record (or write, draw, paint, etc.) it in a journal or speak into a tape recorder (which you keep bedside). You’ll be surprised at how much more you remember as you begin writing/speaking/drawing/painting/etc.

BE PLAYFUL, PATIENT, and PERSISTENT:

Although most people start having success the first week or two, dream recall is a mental muscle which may require some time to get back into shape. Try to maintain a relaxed and playful attitude of looking forward to your dreams while being willing to let them come all in good time. Trying too hard or being too serious can be limiting factors. Dream recall and motivation tend to come and go naturally in cycles and also depend upon what else is going on in your life, and on how much sleep you get, how much you exercise, etc.. Once you begin a period of focusing on recall, stick with it for at least a few days, because consecutive nights can have an additive effect.

A WEEKLY STUDY GROUP with a shared interest in dreams like the teleclasses offered through The DREAMS Foundation (www.dreams.ca) is unmatchable for sustained motivation, inspiration and plenty of intriguing surprises and insights.

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How will you know when the problem is solved? Success criteria answer that question in measurable terms, but only if they are “SMART”. There are many versions of this memory-hook floating around, but all of them are intended to help you make sure your success measurements can achieve their purpose. Here’s my favorite:

Specific. Point to the particular problem as precisely as possible.

Measurable. You must be able to tell objectively, i.e., by measuring, whether you’ve met the criterion or not.

Appropriate. Be sure that whatever you measure will indicate success in solving this problem, Metrics that are very broad, such as overall revenue growth, are usually useless for confirming that a particular problem is solved.

Reasonable. You must have reasonable expectation that you can actually achieve the numbers you agree to. At the time you’re setting success criteria, you don’t know yet how you’ll solve the problem, but you should have some sense of how big and messy it is. For example, if it will take you full-time work for a week just to analyze the problem and you have other responsibilities, don’t promise a total solution within a week.

Time-bound. Specify when the success criteria will be met. A 10% improvement in a week is a lot different from a 10% improvement in a year. Also determine how long you will monitor the success metrics to be sure the problem really is solved.

Checking your success criteria to make sure they’re SMART can help avoid the trap of measuring something just because you can. None of us has time to collect and review metrics because they are “interesting”. Make sure your success criteria will help you make a decision, are simple in concept, are so clearly connected to the problem that you can remember them easily, and that they are SMART.

Copyright 2010. Jeanne Sawyer

Know a job is really done by using completion criteria.

Define what successful completion of each task entails. Specify not only when the task is due, but also what standard must be met. You don’t want to tell someone who has worked really hard to complete a task that they misunderstood and you wanted a sledge hammer rather than an ordinary hammer.

The need to have due dates associated with tasks is well understood, but it’s still really hard to get a real commitment to a date. Meetings frequently end with a list of action items, each carefully associated with an owner, but with a mumble about setting due dates later. Given that most people who are assigned these tasks are extremely busy, and given human nature’s procrastinating tendencies, “later” is quite likely to become “never.” Be vigilant and persistent about setting due dates. Even if they’re tentative and you have to change them later, get something down as soon as the task is identified. Then follow up to make sure the task gets completed, rescheduled, reassigned or, if appropriate, dropped. The key is to drop tasks on purpose rather than let them slip away unnoticed until the next crisis.

Establishing an agreed-to due date is a good start, but it’s not sufficient. We need completion criteria that tells us when the task has been completed properly, i.e., what the quality requirement is. For example, suppose someone is assigned the task to design the reports you will use to track how effective your problem solution is. Is the task complete when the report designer says it is, or must the reports meet some other standard, such as answering a specific list of questions, enabling a decision to be made or being accepted by the project sponsor?

Using completion criteria can help avoid misunderstandings and delays.

Copyright 2008. Jeanne Sawyer. All Rights Reserved.