Dreaming: A Resiliency Developing Tool for Leaders and Coaches

It works, and then it doesn’t. A changing landscape is the norm, and yet most of us are uncomfortable with it. Becoming comfortable with change is resiliency. Strangely, and exactly because of that, a dreaming practice can help develop it.

All change is unexpected, and all humans have a degree of discomfort with the shifting of frames necessary to accommodate a new and different scenario. That holds whether it’s a landfall of abundance — getting a raise, a promotion, meeting a new special person — or whether it’s a perceived negative, such as losing a job, a relationship ending, or sending the kids off to college.

Dreams open the door to change. Each night we enter an entirely new world in dream. In some dreams we are in our childhood home, present to a long-set-aside memory; in other dreams we are in a futuristic world with buildings we’ve never imagined; in other dreams we appear in cities we know about in waking life but have never been to. In these playscapes of our imagination we engage, interact, think-through, and take decisions, often with a cast of characters we may or may not know in waking life. Then, we wake.

Waking after dream is to enter yet again a new world. It’s our familiar world — we live it every day — and yet, the experience we’ve just had in dream has changed us, even if microscopically. We interact with the same people of our quotidian lives and yet, we are different.

Sleep again and we enter yet a new world. The childhood home of last night filled with dusty antiques is now a modern home with sleek furniture and clean lines. The sense, feel, and experience is completely different. The challenge of the childhood home dream belongs to yesterday; the challenge of the modern home dream of now again completely different. In dream we don’t think about this; rather, we engage in the new world completely, learning the set-up, the limitations, and the possibilities of what is in front of us in the moment. Completely present, we fully engage.

Wake, and it’s a new world yet again.

In waking life, the most thought-through plans of career advancement, project completion, or changing jobs will still encounter the unexpected, the difficult, and delays in forward motion. For the resilient client and team member these become puzzles to solve; viewed as a dreamer, they are simply new playscapes to enter and engage with. For the person lacking this resilient, fluid way of responding to change, such challenges can derail their entire momentum or even cause them to set their goals aside altogether. As a leader and coach, then, it is important to help individuals to develop this capacity, as it lays the foundation for them to see long-term growth and success.

The first step in a dreaming practice is to record your dreams each night. It begins with going out and finding a journal that the person finds interesting, that is exciting to open the pages and think about what what one will be embarking upon. This sets the intention to remember dreams, creates a set-apart practice, and highlights the individual’s willingness to receive and play with the unexpected.

Recording dreams on a nightly basis, as a practice, focuses us to the different worlds, sensations, and experiences of our own internal movements. This seemingly simple exercise takes us through continual change. By entering a new world in dream, waking to a new day, entering yet another new world the next night in dream, over and over we build a comfort with that which is new and unexpected. An awareness arises that the ease in which we can enter a new scenario in dream, understand its challenges and dictates, and interact with it, can be transported to waking life. Walking into work to discover the company has been sold becomes no different from falling asleep and landing in a mountain pass in a strange land where the ‘job’ is to get the caravan through to the other side. The dreamer explores the present tense world and works to figure out what is needed and how to accomplish it.

Without needing to understand the content of dreams, encouraging your clients and team members to set up a practice of recording their dreams will help them to develop comfort around change that you can build upon in your work with them.

Photo by Peter Trones on Unsplash