As a coach, I don’t deal with dream interpretation. My job is to support my clients in making their Dreams come true.
You know? Dreams…with a capital D.
But then again, by Dreams, I could be referring to the obscure Jazz fusion group from the 70s that only released two albums.
To become good at anything you must give yourself permission to suck.
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That band featured some musicians who have gone on to become legendary. Billy Cobham was their drummer. They had Randy Brecker on trumpet and his late brother Michael on sax (who I believe was only 16 when he joined the band.) And their bass player was Will Lee. Lee played with Paul Shaffer for the entire run of David Letterman’s late night TV shows.
What the hell was I writing about? Oh yeah…dreams.
It’s time for a little King Ryan’s Dream Theatre.
In my dream I was at a bar watching a local band perform. They were a pretty good cover band, but a cover band nonetheless.
It was a five-piece band – drums, two guitars, bass, and keyboards. The keyboard player was the lead vocalist.
I look up on stage during one song and the bass player disappears. This wasn’t like a David Copperfield thing that involved smoke and mirrors.
It was like the poor guy just disintegrated.
His bass falls harmlessly to the ground.
“Hey y’all, anyone out there play bass? We need to finish our show.”
I was there by myself, but the people sitting around me just push me on stage.
Keep this in mind, I’m a music connoisseur, but I am no musician.
I shake hands nervously with the guys in the band. And I put the bass around my neck.
“Alright, with our next song we’re gonna go way back. This is Whipping Post.”
Now, if you know the Allman Brothers’ classic, you know it started with a rumbling bass riff originated by the late Berry Oakley. After the opening bass line, the song evolves into the rarely used time signature of 11.
This isn’t an easy song to play well by musicians with years of experience, to say nothing of a guy who has never picked up a bass guitar.
The keyboard player points to me, and immediately the strings on the bass fall off. And the guys are getting pissed off with me because I can’t do my job.
Then I woke up.
As I have written about several times recently, I have been in a place of reinvention in my life. I have declared big things and big goals in my life for 2018. And I fully intend to blow my goals out of the water.
But to make my 2018 happen on my terms requires one thing: action. You have to take action to create the life you want.
But as Shakespeare’s widely misquoted line from Hamlet goes: “Ay, there’s the rub.”
This isn’t just about me, y’all. To create the life you want requires action and it requires practice.
You can’t create the life you want without action and practice.
Consider this: could I have gotten to the point where I could have played that opening lick from Whipping Post? Absolutely!
But I never took the action to become the next Berry Oakley. Or for that matter, the next Oteil Burbridge – Oakley’s eventual successor in that band.
To become good at something you have got to practice at it.
While I’m flexing my music nerd muscles, I give you the name of Francis Rocco Prestia. Rocco is the legendary bass player with Tower of Power. He’s developed a style of playing that fits perfectly with the Tower of Power sound. It’s unique and it’s completely his.
But if you put Rocco with a band like – I don’t know – Florida/Georgia Line, he’d stick out like a sore thumb.
I bring up Rocco because he didn’t grow up playing the bass. He played the guitar. But an old music teacher suggested he take up the bass, and he took to it like a duck in water.
It takes a lot of practice to get from the kid who just picked up the bass guitar for the first time to the legendary figure of the low end that he is today.
He took the action, and he practiced. He played thousands of shows. He practiced. And he became great.
Larry Bird is regarded as one of the finest shooters in basketball history. He was famous for getting to games well before the teams arrived to shoot in an empty building. He’d get a ball boy and he’d just shoot jumpers for hours before games.
Maureen Johnson is a prominent young adult author. She’s published ten novels to this point. And several of them have been New York Times Bestsellers.
{Side Note – one day I WILL be introduced as a New York Times bestselling author.}
I saw this YouTube video she did that brought a lot of this stuff home for me.
“Give yourself permission to suck!”
That’s like a 15-megaton truth bomb for me on several levels.
First: my novel in process, I have cut out so much garbage and have revised so much. Hell, every week here on GMP, I never submit the first draft.
Second: to become good at anything you must give yourself permission to suck. But you must also take the action to get good at it.
As Allen Iverson famously said, “We’re talking about practice, man.”
Ask anyone I went through coach training with. I wasn’t a good coach at all in the beginning. But I practiced and got better.
You can’t create the life you want without action and practice.
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I’m still not great, but I’m getting better. And there’s always room to grow.
Let’s get back to my bar band dream.
Let’s say that you want that big life? Big dreams, great career, beautiful family – you want it all.
But chances are, you might not know how to make it happen at first. In fact, I can guarantee you probably won’t!
But if you don’t take the action to make your dreams your life, it’s a lead pipe cinch that you’ll stay stuck.
So, I’m going to give you three practices that I’m taking on in my own life to create the life that I want. And I highly suggest you take these on yourself.
- Figure out what you want: What parts of your life are working? What aren’t working? Where are you living at a 4 when you want to live at 10?
- Take action every day in each of these projects: are you going to know what action to take? Probably not. But steady action will keep you on track. And it’ll help you find your way.
- Hire a coach: get supported! You don’t need to do this alone.
I already have a coach. But you need people in your life to stand for you to kick life squarely in the balls!
Email me at [email protected] and we can set up a sample coaching session.
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Where in your life are you failing to take action? Where are you settling for what you can get instead of owning your life?
I recently got a wakeup call in this area of my own life. I let the fear of not knowing what actions to take keep me from taking any action to create the life I want.
Again, I’m in process on this myself.
Just because you don’t know how to do something today, doesn’t mean you can’t figure it out.
Everything is figureoutable.
We’re just talking about practice, man.
Photo by Mr Seb