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Wayne Pepper
Someday Maybe List, You’re My Best Friend
Are you a possibility thinker? I am. During the course of a day, I will have several thoughts come crashing into my mind about what I might want to do with my work, where I might want to live, how I might want to spend my leisure time, where I could travel, how I would like to serve my community. In the past, I have felt a need to commit to those thoughts, and then when things didn’t work out, I found myself doing exactly the opposite: rejecting those thoughts out of hand as frivolous, unrealistic, or whimsical. Recently however, I’ve found a great place for them in my system: Someday Maybe.
In our seminars and in coaching situations we introduce Someday Maybe as a great tool for capturing anything that we don’t want to lose but we just don’t have the time, energy, resources, staffing, budget (etc.) with which to engage. So the idea is to pull that item off the “dashboard” of our work, and place it in Someday Maybe where we can review it once a week to decide if it’s time to make it actionable.
While Someday Maybe can be a great place for the practical, but “not quite now” items like “create an intranet for our department” or “update our employee handbook” or “learn Chinese”, I like to also use it for any wild idea, notion, or thought that somehow resonates with me. As I mentioned above, I used to dismiss those ideas as whimsy, but I found myself having those ideas/thoughts pop in on a regular basis, contributing to mental distraction. So I started collecting them into Someday Maybe, and have been giving myself the opportunity to review them once a week.
So why capture the impractical? What’s the value of having “run for public office” on Someday Maybe when that seems like such a wild, foreign concept? I think the value is that we declare to ourselves: I’m open to possibility, change, new ideas. Recently I heard an actor talking about preparing for a role saying that in researching a character he would collect items that have no rational link to that character, but in doing so, he found his work enhanced.
I’ve found the same to be true for me and my work. Often by honoring that wild thought, giving it some room to germinate, it allows some tangential, seemingly unrelated idea to take hold and grow. I also find that by allowing myself to entertain those thoughts, it stimulates the creative thinking process because the element of censorship has now taken a back seat. So my suggestion to you is to experiment with your outlandish ideas and see if Someday Maybe ends up being your best friend too.
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