The Importance of Dreams

Introduction

Dreams (or daydreams, if you prefer) play an important role in sport and life, providing a vision of the future to inspire, motivate and even plan. Indeed, sport psychologists have long stressed this point. As Bob Rotella, who has worked with some of the world’s leading golfer’s says “a person with great dreams can achieve great things”.

Isn’t this obvious? Well, on one hand it is. Many of the greatest athletes have expressed having a strong vision of what they wanted to achieve, and stuck to the task of achieving it. This implies that if you don’t dare to dream, you probably won’t achieve great things.

On the other hand, us Brits are so often discouraged from dreaming as we often value logic and rationality above spirituality and creativity. Our common language, for example, describes a dreamer as someone that has big ideas but never delivers. Other parts of our culture discourage having big dreams too – you can see from the newspapers how we don’t like winners and take pleasure from knocking them down. Tell others about your dreams of Olympic success, or of winning the World Cup, and it won’t take long before someone criticises you for having ideas ‘above your station’.

It is not surprising, therefore, that most of the recent movement towards ‘positive psychology’ has come from the United States and, specifically, some American psychologists that been working on a consulting method that aims to improve the quality of experiences and performances by taking dreams and turning them into a way of living from day to day, in the real world, experiencing the feelings that they want to feel. I have yet to fully test out the Resonance Performance Model (RPM; Newburg et al, 2002) in my work but in my mind it has clarified some unanswered questions and provided a great deal of food for thought. On that basis, I thought that I might share it with you.

Dreams versus Goals

In the past I have been a little unsure, when presenting to athletes, where long-term goals and dreams differ, but I always felt that there was a difference. That difference is that dreams inspire and provide the ‘raison d’être’ for a sports person, whereas goals are an expression of a more logical way of breaking down a major achievement into more manageable steps that can be measured against to show progress.

The RPM

This distinction is important in the RPM because dreams are both a starting point and a central component in the model. The RPM is also a circular model, because the dream is being constantly updated as part of the process.

1) Dreams

In Resonance, the dream “represents the feelings that individuals seek when they engage in a particular activity”. If an athlete has the goal of winning an Olympic gold medal, for example, their dream might include the way in which they handle the pressure of being in such a major event, the commitment to pushing themselves in training and the desire to overcome opponents in the race – in other words the emotional experience of the journey that ends in winning the medal. This is important because by identifying the emotional experience you can identify how you want to feel as you embark on that journey and set about the daily activities that will help you to get there. If you can do this, then you will have lived your dream even if you didn’t, in the end, achieve your goal. Your dream is also closely related to your values, and getting in touch with those will help you to clarify your dream.

2) Preparation

As the last paragraph implied, the next stage is getting out and living the dream by taking part in the activities needed to achieve the desired feelings on a daily basis. This might include practising skills, doing physical or mental training, for example, and going about it in a way that is not just a means to an end but very much part of the performance. In this way, hitting thousands of golf balls or putting in the miles are rewarding, even joyful experiences. This is just as well, given that the best sport people tend to have accumulated around 10,000 hours or 10 years of deliberate practice (Ericsson et al, 1993). To the untrained eye all of this looks like drudgery, but that’s because the untrained eye does not see the dream.

3) Obstacles

It is inevitable that there will be obstacles to experiencing resonance – both external (e.g. injury, financial constraints, politics) and internal (e.g. doubts, fear, anger). Often it is easier to see and understand the external obstacles, but it is especially important to recognise internal obstacles (or emotions that contradict the dream), particularly as there is a danger of attributing difficulties to external obstacles when they really do lie within.

By having a clear dream, we provide an opportunity to overcome obstacles in a way that is consistent with how we want to feel. Our attempts to overcome obstacles have a direction. Our decisions are made on a clear basis – what solution will help me to live my dream?

4) Revisiting the dream

Every obstacle becomes an opportunity to grow if, after overcoming an obstacle, you engage in a period of reflection – revisiting the dream. This is an important stage in the process.

By revisiting the dream you can gain a fresh perspective as your experience adds to the clarity of the dream, or it can provide fresh motivation for you to enter again into preparation – i.e. living the dream.

Revisiting the dream could be built into the review process, but can be done through any number of activities that enourage reflection, such as keeping a log book or diary, using imagery resting, or even watching or listening to an inspirational film or song. After a major obstacle or event, a period out of the sport may be an appropriate way of revisiting the dream.

Final Points

The more you allow yourself to dream, the stronger, clearer and more helpful your dream can become in guiding you through the challenges faced in competitive sport and life beyond it. If you engage in the whole process – not just dreaming but preparation (living the dream), identifying and dealing with obstacles, and revisiting the dream you are more likely to experience positive feelings of control, confidence and enjoyment as you progress from day-to-day.

References

Ericsson, A., Krampe, R., & Tesch-Romer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100, 363-406.

Newburg, D., Kimiciek, J., Durand-Bush, N. & Doell, K. (2002). The role of resonance in performance excellence and life engagement. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 14; 249-267.

Apr 24, 05:26 PM | | | |

I am only currently able to consider new clients in the Leamington Spa/Warwick area. If you are elsewhere and require help, try the sport psychologist finder at iStadia.com. If you require a media comment, you can also post a request to the UK Sport and Exercise Media Exchange on iStadia and it will be sent directly to its members.

Rob Robson, Business and Sport Psychologist

Developing Engagement, Change and Performance