When I was first getting sober, everyone kept saying how it happens a day at a time. We just don’t drink today, they said. Which, honestly, felt like a stupid, trite catchphrase that was designed to make me crazy.
What the fuck did they mean, “a day at a time?” What about next year? What about not being able to drink on New Year’s Eve, or St. Patrick’s Day? What about my graduation or my wedding?
Well, they said, those things weren’t happening today. And all I had to do today was not drink. Eventually, it would get a lot easier to continue not drinking. Eventually, all of those todays would add up. And they have! It’s been well over 4,000 days now – and my life has gotten a whole lot bigger and cooler and richer a day at a time.
Even if you’re not in recovery, hopefully you’re still with me – because this idea of a day at a time applies to everything, not just sobriety. Turns out everything in our lives happens a day at a time. We wake up, we do our best on a given day, and we go to bed having either taken some small action toward our dreams or not.
Winning the lottery aside, we don’t just wake up tomorrow having achieved all the goals or obtained all the material goods we want for ourselves. We get fit, we change careers, we make art, we cultivate our relationships, we save money to buy whatever the fuck it is we’re yearning for – a day at a time.
The Future Is Uncharted Territory
When we’re looking off into the distance of our imagined futures, it’s really hard to think of all the days in between. When we envision ourselves one or two or five years from now, we aren’t thinking about the plodding, methodical, daily routines we’ll need to put in place to get where we need to go. And way too often, we look to that future and can’t see the way to get there, so we decide it’s impossible and don’t even try.
A lot of us feel like we need to know the path to our dreams in order to start down it, and that makes a lot of sense! When we get ready to leave the house these days, google maps can tell us both how to get where we want to go and how long it will take. We have instant access to traffic information and alternative routes to our destination. We get to feel relatively in control, and we get to have a clear sense of how long it’s supposed to take to get there.
Not so with achieving the big, juicy dreams we have for ourselves.
We don’t get to control how long it takes to find a partner and get married.
If we want kids, there’s no guarantee on whether our bodies will cooperate.
Starting a business, changing careers, producing great art – all of it unfolds on a timeline that we simply can’t predict or control.
And I, for one, find that incredibly distressing a lot of the time.
But, again, the future doesn’t come with a map. We just have to start down the path and find out where it takes us.
Dreams Aren’t Necessarily about Outcomes
Hitching our happiness to reaching a particular destination is a recipe for disappointment. Seriously. Studies have shown that while getting the things we want will elevate our happiness levels for a time, we eventually go back to how happy (or not) we were before we got the thing. Getting the job or the house or the spouse doesn’t actually make us happier in the long run.
A more fulfilling and attainable mode of chasing our dreams is shifting away from focusing on what we want (specific outcomes or destinations) and instead wrapping our dreams in the warm blanket of who we want to be along the way.
Yes, y’all, we’re calling in the ol’ “it’s the journey, not the destination” thing here, but bear with me.
Goals are incredibly helpful. They give us focus and something to work towards. They can be exciting and motivating and really effective in moving us down the path of our own awesomeness. But goals become toxic when we set unrealistic timelines, create a false sense of urgency, or hitch our sense of self worth onto highly-specific outcomes.
I love what James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits – the idea of shifting away from specific goals and toward a sense of identity: wanting to run a marathon is a goal; wanting to be someone who runs is an identity.
Who Do We Dream of Being?
Starting my coaching business is a goal – one that, technically, I have now achieved! I have a domain, and a website (VERY under construction); I updated my LinkedIn; and I announced to the world I’m available for new clients. Gold star! Fanfare! I did it! (Sort of).
Signing enough clients to quit my day job and coach full time is also a goal – one that is quite a ways down the road. And last month, I was putting entirely too much pressure on myself to make that shit happen – even though my original intention was to give myself a lot more time to reach my goal.
“But,” my brain was saying, “I have a coaching business now! I have a semi-decent logo! I’ve got enough training and practice under my belt to feel competent and excited to work with people!!”
That doesn’t mean I’m ready to quit my day job. Or, more importantly, that I actually have the time and energy to fully lean in.
Coaching full time is a goal.
Being an excellent coach is an identity.
Focusing on the identity aspect means showing up every day and doing something that contributes to who I want to be. So, writing these blogs, posting to Instagram, reading something related to my practice, tinkering with my website, having a few coaching sessions each week… all of those things are contributing to who I want to be.
The nice thing about focusing on who I want to be rather than what I want to accomplish is that it’s flexible and scalable. I can be an excellent coach to one person or five people or thirty people. Thirty people might be my goal – the threshold at which I can comfortably be a full-time coach. But I don’t have to be full time to be excellent! And that’s the beauty of it.
What Can You Do Today?
No matter how far off your dreams might be, you’ll never get there without taking the next step. Just the next one!
While creativity and getting where we want to go rarely happen in a linear way, we do still have to take things a step at a time.
On a given day, I try to write for at least fifteen minutes. Sometimes the timer goes off, and I’m done. Sometimes I write for longer ‘cause I’m feeling inspired. It usually takes between 5-10 sessions to get these posts to the point where I feel ready to post them. Then they go up, and the cycle starts again.
I don’t post as regularly as I’d like. The blog hasn’t accrued a massive fan base (yet!).
But I am being a writer. My willingness to show up and do this thing each day is tied to my sense that every little bit is contributing to the person I want to be.
Every step counts. Cracking open the old notebook and reading a few pages counts. Putting just a few things away to clear space for crafting or art projects counts. Doing a single sun salutation or push up or squat counts!
The road to our dreams is paved with small, incremental steps that we give ourselves credit for on a daily basis. If every little bit counts, it’s a lot easier to gain momentum. If only big, visible gains count… well, no wonder we don’t even try.
Do you have a big juicy dream? Do you have a moderately-sized, probably achievable dream that you want for yourself? Who do you want to be next year? How do you want to feel?
What can you do today that will be a little step in that direction?
A note about the image: in 2020, as part of a pandemic-coping strategy, I wrote out my bucket list and discovered there were a few things on it that I could actually accomplish during lockdown. One of those things was folding 1,000 paper cranes. Between August and December of that year, I did it! One crane at a time.
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