07 Jun Dreamy Summer Days

Summer conjures up many things. Long, lazy days with popsicles and picnics. Bonfires on the beach. Long family road trips. Coastal Redwood forest hikes. Exploring San Francisco visiting my grandparents. Learning something new with a summer job. Tackling the never ending project list. Giving myself permission to daydream. Daydreaming is underrated!

I started thinking about summertime bliss when one of our company’s alumni came back to one of our agency meetings a couple weeks ago to have us ideate around new ice cream flavors. He founded a few different companies and his most prominent one, Gresescent, is an ice cream company (truly one of the highest quality ice cream brands I’ve had in my life). During this brainstorming exercise, the head strategist, Linda, on our team kicked off our summer ideation prompt asking us to visualize our childhood lazy summer days. We netted the exercise out with our flavor suggestion: Pink Summer Dream – Hibiscus Watermelon Rosé flavored ice cream, one of three finalists in the agency flavor contest.

Daydreaming is a gift because it allows us to unshackle our day-to-day grind and free our brain to think about things in a new way. The what if’s, why not’s, how might we’s. It stimulates creativity and problem solving. Think of the potential new ideas you might concept while giving yourself the luxury to allow your thoughts meander. There are so many articles published about this topic.

Mind-wandering is not laziness…It can offer significant personal rewards: These rewards include self- awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion… – Scientific American, Rebecca L. McMillan and Scott Kaufman

This is the first summer that I have not programmed my kids into back-to-back educational camps. I saw their subscription craft boxes accumulating and hoards of unread books collecting dust. During my own childhood summers, my friends and I had a blast making up our own game shows, writing faux newspapers, teaching pretend school classes, secretly riding our bikes to play inside enormous 4,000 square foot new homes under construction (not a good idea in retrospect, not legal or safe). For once, I want them to enjoy unlimited unstructured play, turning off the electronics. Maybe they will even settle into boredom that can stimulate something interesting.

“Once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to really wander, you start thinking a little bit beyond the conscious, into the subconscious, which allows different connections to take place…I think we should be bored and we should embrace boredom. I think we need to bring boredom back into our lives. You come up with the really great stuff when you don’t have that easy, lazy junk food diet of the phone to scroll all the time.”  – Dr. Sandi Mann

This summer, our CEO is mandating that our execs take staggered, month long sabbaticals. Semi-unplug. Besides an 8 and 10 week maternity leave (which was certainly no vacation), in the last two decades, I haven’t ever taken a large chunk of time off. Even after two graduations or during job hopping, it was a week or two at most. And I am one that is perpetually multi-tasking and rarely relaxing. What in the world am I going to do with some free time then? I am going to take a family vacation, spend time with my kids on their summer break, schedule friend dates, do yoga, read, purge, take a design class, and a cooking class or two. I’m not sure what to expect, but I’m hoping that there will be some new inspiration points and renewed perspective for me to apply to Built By She!

So when I Google, “How to Daydream,” many more articles come up saying that we’re doing it all wrong.

Never schedule your daydreaming. Rather, allow it to occur organically, like drooling. A good time to daydream might be just before lunch, or during a meeting, or in the middle of a conversation that has hit a lull.… This is a good time to give your brain a rest and start daydreaming about robotic slave armies, or new candy bar flavors, or pig-tuna hybrids — are they best consumed as sushi or bacon? – Jon Methven, NY Times

Amidst the crazy, noisy, havoc ridden life you may have as an entrepreneur, try giving yourself permission to daydream. Squeeze it into the time you already don’t have for self guided meditation or working out. Or rather, once it starts, don’t try to refocus yourself. You might be in the middle of work, a project, or even in a meeting. Allow it to linger, flow on, and permeate your activity. You never know what might happen. You may find that next idea for a product extension, a business model pivot, or solution to some nagging operational issue. ♫ Dream on, dream on, dream on, dream until your dreams come true! ♫