I Hadn't Realised I'd Stopped Dreaming

I was so busy building what comes next that I stopped making room to imagine it.

I’ve been dreaming again since I arrived in Spain.

Not the kind that happens when you’re asleep, but about my business. What I want to build, how I want it to work, the people I want to work with and what I want my life to look like around it.

It sounds like such an obvious thing to do when you’re building a business, but somewhere over the past few months, I stopped doing it. I hadn’t lost interest or ambition, and I certainly hadn’t stopped thinking about the business. Quite the opposite. I’ve thought about it constantly. What I hadn’t noticed was how practical almost all of that thinking had become.

There was always something that needed doing next.

I had become very good at executing

The past few months have been busy. My other work has demanded a lot from me, while at the same time I’ve been determined to keep building this business. I’ve written and published every week, created new offers, made decisions about positioning and direction, watched what was working and what wasn’t, and changed things as I’ve learned more.

Most of it has happened around an already full working life. Early mornings, evenings, weekends and whatever other space I could find. I’m actually proud that I’ve kept doing it because building something alongside everything else isn’t particularly glamorous. Much of it is simply deciding that something matters enough to keep showing up for it, including on the days when you’re tired and there are easier things you could be doing.

But when I look back at the questions occupying my mind, they were nearly always about execution. What needs my attention? What needs fixing? What do I need to write? What’s working? What isn’t? What should I do next?

All useful questions. All necessary at various points.

But there was another question I hadn’t been asking nearly enough: what do I actually want this business to become?

Then some space appeared

I’m in southern Spain for two weeks with my husband. It’s partly a holiday and partly an opportunity for me to have some proper space to think about my work and how I want the rest of this year to look.

I only arrived on Saturday, but I noticed the difference almost immediately. There are fewer demands around me and, for once, every thought doesn’t have to fit into the small gap between two other responsibilities.

My mind has started wandering, and I’ve realised how much I’ve missed letting it do that.

I’ve been thinking about different ways I could teach and work with people. I’ve been thinking about what should require me to be personally present and what I could create once and allow to keep working without me. I’ve thought about conversations I’d love to have with other women doing interesting work, collaborations that might be fun, and ideas I’ve had before but never had enough space to explore properly.

I’ve also found myself imagining something much more ordinary: what I actually want a normal working week to look like when the business is further along.

Of course I care about what it earns. I’m building a business, not an expensive hobby. But I also care enormously about how I earn it, what my days look like while I’m doing it, how much freedom I have and how much of the business depends on me being present every time something happens.

Those thoughts aren’t entirely new. What feels new is having enough space for them to develop beyond a passing thought before something more urgent pushes them aside.

I hadn’t stopped wanting more.
I’d stopped giving myself enough room to imagine what more could look like.

Planning and dreaming are not the same thing

Anyone who knows me will know that I love a plan. Give me something complicated and I’ll happily turn it into a structure, a sequence and a list of what needs to happen next. That part of me has served me extremely well throughout my working life, and I have no intention of getting rid of it now.

But I’ve been reminded this week that planning and dreaming do very different jobs.

A plan helps me work out how to get somewhere. It doesn’t necessarily make me stop and ask whether somewhere is still where I want to go, or whether there might be another possibility I haven’t considered because I’ve been too busy following the plan already in front of me.

I think that’s what had happened.

I had become so serious about building the business that most of my available energy was going into building what I could already see. I was moving things forward, but I wasn’t spending much time looking beyond the next piece of work and imagining what else might be possible.

There’s an irony in that which isn’t lost on me. So much of my work is about what comes next, yet I’d become so occupied with creating my own next chapter that I’d stopped giving myself much room to imagine it.

I don’t think Spain has magically given me the answer. I haven’t woken up with a completely new business model scribbled on the hotel notepad, and there will be no dramatic announcement about how two days of sunshine changed my life.

What it has given me is enough distance from my normal rhythm to notice what had gone missing.

And perhaps that’s enough for now.

There will be plenty of time for me to turn these thoughts into decisions, plans, spreadsheets and, knowing me, probably a rather detailed framework. I’m very good at that part.

For the moment, I’m going to resist doing it quite so quickly.

I’ve only just started dreaming again.

I’d like to see where it takes me first.

Until next time,
Pia