The Dream

My dream was to visit and work in Italy.

I’d been in love with Italian art, architecture and design for as long as I can remember.

I had traveled to and worked in other countries including Spain, England, Germany, France and Japan where I attended design fairs, interviewed design celebrities, and researched materials for design articles I was writing for the digital magazine I’d founded.

I wanted to add Italy to that list of countries.

Each year, I would create a vision board representing the overall dream I wanted to achieve by year’s end. That year, 2012, the board included my dream to travel and work in Italy.

I had a vivid picture of my future life defined on that board. All that was left to do, was to develop a plan to get me from where I was to where I wanted to be.

Past Failures Threaten the Dream

While goal planning, I used to repeat to myself (using my inside voice?), “If I can believe it, I can achieve it”. This time, that rah-rah-rah, goal-setting cheer fell flat. I felt that it no longer held true.

I strongly believed in my dreams in the prior two years, yet, I had failed miserably to achieve them.

Failing sucks.

It not only hurts; It guts your self-confidence and sucks the life out of your dreams. Honestly, I wasn’t motivated to continue with the planning after that. I put the vision board behind a shelf. Placed the incomplete planning notes in a drawer.

I soon learned, that out of sight, is not out of mind.

I couldn’t stop thinking about my dreams. I couldn’t stop thinking about visiting and working in Italy.

Weeks later, I decided that I would rather risk failing again then to give up on my dreams.

I pulled the vision board out of hiding. Seeing those images resonated with me. I was confident that my envisioned future was the right one for me. I felt inspired and excited.

What I had visually manifested on the board WAS the dream life I wanted. What I didn’t WANT was another failure.

That meant, that I had to figure out what was going wrong and figure out how to fix it, so that I could achieve success.

Bouncing Back from Failure

Brutally honest self-assessment is brutal. There’s no sugar coating it. I can’t think of anybody I know who enjoys reviewing their weaknesses and short-comings. But, an honest self-assessment also highlights strengths – those things you are doing well and are contributing to success. I needed the full picture, the good and the bad.

Some of the good, was that:

• I had an annual planning process in place.
• I set specific vision aligned goals that were measurable, attainable, realistic and came with defined deadline.
• From those goals, I had done a decent job deriving milestones and tasks.
• I was using a to-do list for assigned tasks.
• I was using a time management system.
• I had a semi-annual review process in place.

The not-so-good, was that:

• I was only planning for a year or two into the future.
• I set more goals than I could accomplish in one year, and most of them had competing priorities.
• I set the wrong goals – easy to do, I learned.
  • Wanting to lose 20 lbs by end of year, but is that really what matters? Or is the goal to live a healthy life by exercising 3 times a week?
• I lacked a cohesive strategy to support planning and execution.
• Tasks sometimes became orphaned. Some never got done. Or I was missing an important task – that failed to be accounted for during planning.
• The time management system I was using, turned out to useless for my needs.
• Frequent and consistent progress tracking and accountability was lacking.
• Scheduled reflection and evaluation of plan and goal relevance was absent.
• In some cases, I was using the wrong success measure to track goal progress.
  • Back to the healthy life goal – measuring success by weight loss which can sometimes be outside your control, could lead to the false premise that you failed at the goal – if you didn’t lose the weight. But, you had kept getting stronger and healthier because, despite the scale not budging, you were exercising and eating right.
  • A better measure would be activity minutes achieved each week.

The self-assessment contained valuable insight. I knew exactly where I had to focus my energy so that I could improve the odds of achieving success.

I’d read nearly three dozen books, and hundreds of articles on future shaping topics. I combined what I’d learned from that research with my expertise delivering successful projects using project management processes.

From that effort, I developed a new strategic planning framework and used it to plan the path from where I was to the dream life I envisioned.

As I set off on the journey to transform my dreams to reality, I was equipped with a strong purpose, a vivid vision, a cohesive long-term strategy, an action plan, and a process for reflecting on progress.

As you may recall, my goal was to travel and work in Italy by the end of 2013. With the new system, I learned that it was an overly aggressive deadline and not realistic. Applying project management (PM) tools I saw that a more realistic deadline was 2015.

I had to lots to do including learning Italian, establishing the funds for the trip, developing relationships with Italian companies, and continuing to elevate my company’s visibility and influence in the design world.

I treated those goals as projects, and again, reached for the project management processes and tools.

There were ups and downs, over the next year, but I stayed inspired and motivated and continued to work toward my goals.

By 2014, my Italian had reached an intermediate level, I’d developed relationships with Italian brands, my magazine had become a well-respected publication on the international stage, and the travel fund was almost fully funded.

I could see the dream coming to life in the next year.

One day that spring, an email appeared in my inbox with an interesting subject line. Opening the message, my excitement grew.

I was offered an opportunity to travel to Italy to report on the Milan Furniture and Design fair for my magazine, the Decorating Diva. It was an all-expenses paid trip, and included a three-day stay in Venice prior to Milan Design Week! At that moment, I recalled a quote by the great inventor, Thomas Edison:

Good fortune
is what happens
when opportunity
meets planning.

Living the Dream

I’ve returned to Italy several times since, most recently in April. I believed in my dream vision, I made a plan and then worked that plan, survived the ups and downs, and today I’m living my dream to travel and work in Italy.

Chase Your Dreams & Make Them Come True

We all have dreams we want to live, by using strategic planning to shape your future you’ll increase the odds of turning those dreams into reality.

On this site, I will be sharing with you the strategic framework and processes that helped me achieve goal after goal – dream after dream.