Champion of Dreams ~ The Podcast for Coaches
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A powerful exercise to Energize Your Dream (3 of 9)
Imagine your year playing out in a wonderful way. (like you did in the first 2 exercises)
Now this time you imagine yourself playing at an elite level in these experiences.
You can use this model as a way to get some ideas about how to PLAY for your Dream.
Imagine yourself playing beyond what you can do right now and then write out the details of what you see.
Go beyond Industrial Age mindset that says success is finding the right way to do something and then just repeat it forever and don’t mess up.
As a player you can continue to play better and better all the time; you can always become the next version of yourself through play!
For coaches… this is a very important exercise … because coaching is all about playing better.
Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
play, dream, creating, imagine, players, envision, relating, learn, experiences, episode, coaching, exercise, moments, highlight, explore, champion, coaches, comfy chair, pursuing, influencer
SPEAKERS
David Buck
00:00 Welcome!
All right, hello to you coach David Buck here with you. This is the champion of dreams podcast, the podcast for coaches, powered by CoachVille.com, where we are the champion of your dreams to be a great coach. And together, we champion the dreams of amazing players, making the world a better place all over the world. team play for transformation.
00:30 Energize Your Dream
This is episode number three, for December 25 2020. In this episode, we will continue our exploration of ways that you can energize your dream for the year ahead. And in this episode, we are going to play with a really provocative question that my players have really loved engaging with for many years now. And that question is: what does playing at an elite level look like for you.
01:07 Imagine playing at an elite level
So remember, in the first two episodes, we played with this idea of using your imagination to play out the year ahead and hone in on the highlight experiences that you really want to have. And one really big idea is to focus on the experiences, rather than the accumulation of things that we learned in the industrial age. So this is big. But now going through this next step of playing at an elite level, this brings up several really important ideas that we need to explore, to really energize your dream.
01:49 Players always imagine playing better
So the first one is that when you’re playing for a dream, you are a player and as a player, you want to have this attitude that you can always imagine yourself playing better, you can see it, you can envision yourself. And that’s really the exercise we’re going to play with today. And this is big, because in the industrial mindset, the basic idea was you learn how to do things the right way, and then you just keep doing them the right way forever and don’t mess up. This is a really, really, really dreary way to live life. But this was the big idea of the industrial age, make habits don’t make mistakes.
02:37 YOU make the difference
But in the connected age, its purpose and play. And so we’re pursuing experiences that we can’t control, we can’t do the same way every time. But we can really focus on our abilities to play better, and create those highlight moments that we are dreaming of, and you play better through practice. But practice really begins in your imagination. And that’s what we’re going to play with in this exercise.
03:11 A Soccer Example
One thing I can share with you as a little example, for me, this is easier to envision. First off, when I think about myself as a soccer player. I’ve been playing soccer since I was 12 years old. I’m about to turn 59 I still play in the over 50 League. And I am always envisioning myself playing better than I play now. I keep looking for creative ways to use my 59 year old body out on a soccer field, I think of ways I can practice different skills and I imagined myself playing better than I did last season. This is sort of the nature of playing something. If you play something that you’re really passionate about, then you you just naturally activate your imagination to envision playing better.
04:06 The Performance Possibility Gap
So I want to help you bring that kind of activation to your big dream for the year ahead. And this can be powerful, even if it’s in business or leadership or career community activism, personal growth, whatever your dream is about. You can imagine yourself pursuing these highlight experiences by playing better than you do now. In coaching, we call this the performance possibility gap. When you play something, there’s always a gap. There’s always the next level, the next version of you. And that gap is the fun, it’s the fun is to step into that gap. Okay, this is where I am. This is how I play, but I can play better. I can practice I can use strategies and all sorts of things to play better.
05:03 How to PLAY Life
Okay, but this brings up a really challenging and interesting question when it comes to these type of dreams we have in life coaching, like business and leadership and career and these type of things. How do you play them? You have to be able to play before you can imagine playing better.
05:22 Four Pivotal Moments of Social Play
So over the years, I’ve been creating this model. And it really took shape this past year, and I call it the four pivotal moments of social play. And this is going to really help us to imagine playing better playing at an elite level. So a pivotal moment is a moment where you make the difference in what happens with your energy, your creativity, your choices, your actions, it’s you who make the difference in this pivotal moment. That’s what makes it pivotal. And then social play is a very important idea. And that’s what we’re doing in our big dreams, we want to get out into the world of other people, this is where we play, playing for your dream is social play. And that means co creating with and for other people.
06:19
So I created this little model, just a way to understand how to play for these types of dreams in life. There are four items: relate, create, explore, and experiment. These are the essential activities of social play. you relate for influence, you create for expression, and sharing, you explore for visibility, and you experiment for change. And if you think about your big dream, and these highlight moments, you’re being a positive influence, you’re becoming an influencer, you’re expressing yourself, you’re creating visibility for you and your dream and what you’re doing. And you’re creating change. This is what it’s all about.
07:13 The Exercise
So when you want to imagine yourself playing better, the exercise is to look at these four areas. And think, okay, relating for influence. Yeah, I can imagine myself talking with a potential player, really being in a groove with them, really hearing them connecting with them sharing just the right story at just the right time. These are all ways that you can play better: you talk to potential players, you just meet people, you can become better at relating for influence. And you can imagine yourself being this really high level elite player, you can imagine yourself creating for expression: whether it’s writing, just writing really awesome things, inspiring things, recording videos, audios, creating experiences you want to share with people, you can imagine yourself in that creative zone, really creating things and being illuminated. So this is the idea.
08:20
So what I want you to do is to get in your comfy chair, your comfy place, this is the exercise and just take 15 minutes and look at these four areas, sort of map them toward your highlight experiences. And just go through each one. This is the way I did it the other day, I think of myself relating for influence. Where can I do that? How can I do that at a higher level? And I imagine that. For me, a big one is the exploring for visibility, really getting out there being more visible, talking with influencers, making great connections with people, you can kind of imagine yourself in this flow of playing in this way. And that’s what you want to do in this exercise.
09:11 Go beyond Industrial Thinking
And it’s important to remember, again, this goes beyond industrial thinking, which is where you just learn how to do it the right way and then you just keep doing it. In this connected age of purpose and play. There’s always a next level you can always get better you can always become an even better version of you out there in pursuit of your dream.
09:37 Please Share This
All right. Please feel free to share this with your players or anyone you know who would love to play big and especially anyone who would love to learn more about coaching. This was really fun sharing this with you have an awesome day. I will be back with you tomorrow. You can find the transcript of this episode as well as lots of other awesome things for coaches and players on our website. CoachVille.com. And until the next time remember, everyone needs a champion for their dreams. That’s why there’s coaches.