Throughout my travels I am constantly holding workshops, and when I do, I like to open with a brief introduction of each person, so I can learn, number one, what their name is, and number two, what their dreams or goals are. This gives me some information about the person. It tells me if they’ve thought about goals at all, it tells me if they were raised in a positive or negative environment, and it tells me if they are headed in a certain direction. It’s an eye-opening experience for me as a person doing the workshop.
Sometimes it’s generational and sometimes not, as far as people having dreams, whether they believe they’re possible to attain, and how dreams and goals may or may not fit into their life plan. When I ask the question, I would say that many young people, and I’m using “young people” in a millennial sense, will say they don’t really have any dreams or goals.
My next question to them is, “When you go home at night, what do you enjoy doing?” Many times, their answer is, “I go home and plan video games.” That’s it. There’s nothing beyond that. To me that is an expected answer and a disappointing and saddening answer because it means they believe on some level that they are unaware of their possibilities or abilities going forward, and that, to me, is a void that needs to be filled. This void is why many people never get ahead and sometimes there is a misunderstanding of what a dream or a goal is. Sometimes when you are going to a class or workshop on setting goals, they talk about all the different techniques of writing it down and setting a time frame, which I completely agree with, but on a more emotional level the act of simply thinking about, on a regular basis, what you want to do or accomplish can spur action if there are other factors involved. For example, I may not write down an action or goal of I want to quit smoking and the steps I’m going to take, but each time I think about quitting smoking, it plants a seed and it triggers something. For me personally, when I did quit smoking, it wasn’t a set of goals or steps, it was a sort of switch that was flipped in my head, and after the multiple attempts I had made to quit, this one took. It was just as though a switch turned off and I no longer had the urge to smoke. Now, that doesn’t mean that setting goals, writing them down and putting steps to them isn’t a valid way of achieving what you want in life. What I’m saying is that if your mind set is such that you are always thinking about the possibilities and where you want to go and what you want to do, you have that as a stimulus in your brain, that at some point is going to be activated.
Something else that often disappoints me in my workshops is the response I receive when I ask participants, “Why don’t you have any dreams or goals?” I hear answers such as, “I’m just not smart” or “I never finished school” and I just want to grab my head in frustration because what all these people are doing is putting limitations on themselves. One person who told me this, I had spoken to during the workshop and knew that he was a bright individual and had some great ideas. To hear this was extremely disappointing because I knew it just wasn’t true, but somewhere in his past experience he had been told or convinced that he wasn’t smart. The fact of the matter was that he was one of the individuals who indicated that he played video games when he got home. I asked him why he didn’t start dreaming about something and he responded that he knew he should and that sometimes he thinks about it, but he just doesn’t take it any further than thinking about it.
The last thought about filling a void – action. There is something to be said about doing anything at all. It doesn’t matter what it is but simply taking some type of action to begin realizing your dreams and goals. I recommended to this young man that he take fifteen minutes before he begins playing a video game and do something that will drive him toward an action, which will in turn get him closer to his dream or goal. He thought it was a great idea. The next thing we must do to help someone fill that void is to bring out what the dreams or goals are. What are the desires you have that you would like to see realized in your life? That’s what this is all about.
I want to encourage everyone to take the time to sit quietly and think about where you are and where you could be. Do this on a regular basis. Come to a workshop called “Purpose” and follow that with our workshop on “Goals” if you want to act toward those dreams. This is called “filling the void.”
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