From Dinner to Dreams

May 7, 2021

Last week I shared with you the process most of us go through to get dinner on the table each evening and I stated that this same process can be applied to working towards one of your dreams.

I lied.

Actually I didn’t lie, the process is the same, but the organization, skills and work required is greater.

But that should not come as a surprise.

Let me help you visualize the difference.

Every day you use a process, or a series of steps to plan for your dinner. You’ve been doing it so long you feel fairly confident about your skills. Your family and friends love your cooking and you find it tasty as well.

Then your best friend asks you to prepare the food for her wedding reception dinner.

She will have 100 guests.

You have 6 months.

Her hall is booked and it has a full commercial kitchen which you can use both all day Friday and Saturday, the day of the wedding.

How are you feeling?

Well, if you are like me you would have to take a few deep breaths.

Of course you are going to say yes, she is your best friend and you have the skills.

Which is to say you have many of the skills you will need, not all of them.

The first thing you will need to do is find out what your best friend’s vision for her wedding dinner is. The best way to find this out is to ask her, let her describe it to you and then ask a lot of clarifying questions. You also need to find out her budget, how much she is expecting to spend per person for the dinner. Find out if she will be asking someone else to look after decorations, dinnerware, serving and clean-up so you know exactly what you will be responsible for.

Once you have some details regarding what you are going to be doing, then you need to do an assessment of what skills will be needed to complete this task, which skills you already have and which skills you don’t have.

Next you will need to decide whether you wish to approach another friend with some or all of the skills you don’t have so that they can complete the pieces of the task you are less comfortable with. If you decide to do it yourself you will need to figure out how you are going to learn the skills you don’t have.

In our example lets say that your friend has someone else looking after the decorating and has hired a company to provide the dishes and take away the dirty ones, but you will have to hire a team to help prepare the food, cater the event, set the tables, serve the food and clean up.

For dinner your friend would like to offer guests their choice of steak, chicken or portobello fajitas served with black beans and rice. You are very familiar with fajitas as you make chicken fajitas often. You don’t know how to cook steak and you have never made black beans and rice, but it sounds easy. The three biggest challenges with the menu for you will be the steak, the black beans and rice, and knowing how much food to make for 100 people.

The biggest challenges for you related to getting dinner on the table for everyone is that you don’t have experience making dinner for more than twenty people and you have never managed a staff before.

Is this dinner within your ability to pull off successfully? You determine that yes it is. You are glad you have six months to get ready though, because you will need it.

There are some big steps to complete for the organization and execution of this dinner, and many little steps required to reach each of these big steps. I highly recommend you take one of the big steps for this wedding dinner, and break it down into all the little steps you would need to take to complete that big step. Think of it as one of your first steps to planning for your own audacious life goal.

I hope this helped you not only understand a little bit about the process for planning for an audacious goal, but also feel less intimidated about it and believe in your ability to get there.

Are you ready to visualize your own audacious dream?

Great. Please go to my post titled, “Your Joy-Filled Life” to learn how.

Next week I’ll give you some tips to help make reaching your audacious goal even easier.

Velvet

Living with more joy and more dreams!