The New Year is upon us, and the expectation of improved life is rampant. Resolutions will be made and swiftly broken by many well-intentioned people. Others will labor along valiantly to meet their intended goal. For many, if not most, the journey of improvement is a joyless, if not grueling, one. It is an attempt which feels lonely and tedious. A journey to something they want, but a journey which feels heavy laden. The solution for our resolution-failing, busyness-flailing society is to learn how to dream together, in “families” (both home and work families), with collective resolve!
In my first year of being the head boss within my position at the schools, I envisioned myself a leader particularly adept at releasing other people into their dreams. I encouraged new ideas and would lend authority to anything people wanted to try their hand at. I thought myself quite noble doing so. At the end of the year, I felt a personal success in seeing many of those under me get promoted into their own higher leadership positions. However, before these wonderful people moved on, I asked to receive their direct feedback about their time with me, particularly my greatest weakness. One of them revealed to me the broken way I viewed dreams and goals She said she missed my leadership support in my failure to “Andrew” her ideas. She always felt encouraged and championed to go after new things herself, but she also felt alone and isolated in those things because she didn’t feel like I made her ideas mine. I gave them my verbal blessing. I didn’t give them the full weight of my invested blessing.
I am learning from her brave feedback as I continue to forge on in communal dreaming. I have gone from being a leader of a bunch of isolated people pursuing their own individual goals to becoming a leader learning how to cultivate an environment where dreaming truly happens together by investing myselfinto the dreams of others. I have been a slow convert, but I am recognizing the importance of teamwork, cooperation, and maybe more bluntly, other people. You see, I am naturally one of those arrogant few who rolled his eyes at group assignments growing up, did all the work himself, and let the “slackers” off easy—or, more accurately, sitting ashamed in the incompetence I draped over them. Trading in the arrogant striving for my own personal achievement, I am learning how to come to goals, resolutions, and dreams from a communal lens. Personal accountability is important, but familial accountability can create a place where more people succeed, where everyone achieves more, and where individual arrogance is impossible.
One place I am learning and growing in the art of dreaming together the last handful of years is in my own family. One of our foremost Trinity Family slogans is, “DREAM together. BUILD together. CRAFT together.” I believe “together” is the way humanity was designed to grow up. Our family sits down monthly in what we call “retreats” to plan ahead and dream about where we are going. From those dreams, we make goals; they are OUR goals. It might be the goal of my wife to do her yoga every day, but she is not alone in making it happen. Though she is the one who needs to actually do it, everyone in the family takes it on as their responsibility by encouraging her or creating time for her or noticing her activity or lack of it. If it doesn’t happen, we have all failed. If it does, we all celebrate the victory and share the credit.
As a slowly recovering isolationist, my greatest struggle is trusting my own goals and dreams to others. It has always been my belief I could do it better myself, but I am learning to trust, at least this family of mine, to share the burden of the things I specifically want to achieve. I no longer work in the schools, but in my next out-of-family leadership position, I am resolved to make this corporate dreaming one of my primary goals. I will need the help of others to make it happen. This New Year, I want to issue a challenge to pursue communal, familial dreaming. Don’t let yourself or others carry their resolutions in isolation. We were meant to DREAM together.
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