Why Imagine?

Why imagine?

When we exercise our imaginations, we facilitate their dreams.

I am learning that the art of flying is directly linked to the art of finding our balance. When we feel grounded and in balance, we are ready to fly.

I have been observing the conditions for flying for over twenty years, coaching hundreds of leaders and facilitating numerous team development programmes. I am discovering there are five key themes, represented in our Flying Stone Stack, and when we focus on them, they help us fly. Each one is essential and each one worth focussing on in its own right.

Let’s begin with the imagine stone – why is it so important and how could it help us encourage our children to fly?

It is our imagination that helps us to identify what we most want to happen. Imagining encourages us to reach beyond our experiences and go further than we might believe possible. It is like an extra dotted line reaching beyond what we know already. When we exercise our imaginations, we question the status quo, challenge ourselves and create possibility in our lives.

As adults we can be out of practice with using our imaginations, perhaps because we have had to become sensible and pragmatic and responsible for others, and perhaps because we are already feeling vulnerable. We always feel much safer when we know what we are doing; we aren’t always in the best place to consider outlandish ideas; we are tired, and we don’t want to lay ourselves open to disappointment. We might not naturally tap into our imaginations, so we won’t be in the habit of doing so, it will need to be something we decide to do.

As parents, I think there are lots of reasons to put our dreams on the backburner in order to support everyone else. Until, that is, we realise that they are watching and learning from us all the time. I discovered that if I wanted my children to dream big, it wasn’t enough to tell them – I needed to show them what that looks like by dreaming big myself. This thought encouraged me to leave my comfortable job in the civil service as a new mum and pursue my dream career of being a coach. It felt like jumping off a cliff and it was terrifying, but hopefully one day my story might inspire my children to go after their dreams.

When we let ourselves imagine, we will help both ourselves and our children grow the characteristics of empathy, curiosity and optimism.

It is our imaginations that create our future and theirs; we can decide to live with limited imaginations or with complete freedom to create the life we want.  

How can you continue to grow yours?

1. Be enough – realising you already have everything you need is the best place to start – it is even harder to imagine possibility from a negative stand point
2. Be a dreamer – find where your energy is and practise playing with possibility
3. Be uncomfortable – keep choosing courage over comfort to discover more about yourself.