93. Someday Syndrome (CEO Summer School)

What are those goals you want to pursue or actions you want to take but aren’t actually doing? How are you engaging in Someday Syndrome? And what if that action, project, or goal you’re putting off could actually happen much sooner than you imagined?

If you are currently delaying the results you want to see and the interior design business CEO you want to become, you’re not alone. We all engage in someday-ing our biggest dreams. Visualizing the result you want without actually putting in the effort can give you the positive emotional experience you want, but when it becomes your norm, your dreams will stay in the distant future forever. 

Join me this week as I explore the concept of Someday Syndrome in-depth and give you a variety of ways to begin thinking about how you might be engaging in this habit both in your day-to-day and long-term planning. You’ll learn the downsides of only taking imaginary action, how there might be an underlying fear or resistance you need to address first, and how to lessen the tendency and impact of putting things off.


CEO Summer School is my summer podcast series where we’ll explore the power of questions. Click here to join me in CEO Summer School!

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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:

  • What Someday Syndrome means.

  • How Someday Syndrome can be a result of putting yourself between a rock and a hard place.

  • The most common signals that Someday Syndrome is showing up in your life and business.

  • Why we engage in Someday Syndrome.

  • The cyclical nature of Someday Syndrome.

  • What happens when Someday Syndrome becomes your norm.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:


Full Episode Transcript:

Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 93. This is our fourth lesson in CEO Summer School. In this one, we’re diving into the topic of someday syndrome. Those goals or actions you want to pursue in the future, but you’re not actually doing them.

If you loved episode 35 on The Later Habit, which I have heard from so many of you that it’s a favorite, you are going to love this adjacent topic. Let’s dive in.

Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.

Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. We are here with our fourth installment of the CEO Summer School series podcast. If you’re just catching this or are new to the podcast, this free interactive series started with episode 87. You can go back to listen to those and then head over to desiid.com/summerschool to get instant access to all of the one sheet guides that pair with each of the lessons so that you can apply what I’m sharing in the episodes directly to your business.

It’s completely free, but you do need to sign up in order to get those bonus reflection guides. And you’ll do that by going to desiid.com/summerschool, enter your name and email, and you will get instant access to those bonus resources.

Also, this is just wild, I turned 40 this week as you’re listening to this. And as I’ve been deciding what topics to revisit in CEO Summer School, I’ve also been kind of just scrolling through past episodes, thinking through what I’ve covered, what would support you with the lesson. And I saw that I did one last year around my birthday and it was episode 40, Birthday Reflections for a New Era.

And I thought to myself, well, one, wow, I cannot believe another year has passed. And two, I’ve been podcasting for a long time now. It kind of just hit me. We are getting really close to episode 100. And I want to say thank you to all of you who have supported the show by leaving a rating and review and tuning into the show on a regular basis. More and more designers are finding The Interior Design Business CEO podcast organically because of your support.

If you’ve been loving the show, I have an ask for you. Would you please take a few minutes to leave a rating and review? Honestly, this would be the best birthday present ever. I absolutely love to hear from you and I want this podcast to continue to be available and more widely visible to the design community.

It’s one of the ways that I can impact our industry in a way that is accessible to many more people. And no matter what stage of business they’re in, what budget they have to invest in coaching, it’s something that I can provide as a free resource. And your support in the form of a rating and review is one of the ways that I can help spread the word about this now quite large body of work that I’ve produced to help all of the designers who are not yet familiar with the show.

It would mean so, so much to me if you would pause the podcast for a moment and on whatever platform you’re listening to help me celebrate my 40th by leaving a rating and review. It can be just a quick two-minute note where you leave a brief message sharing why you look forward to tuning into the show, why another designer would want to listen. You could highlight your favorite episode or whatever it is that you want to share.

It really does mean so much to me to hear from you in that way. And also it really does impact that algorithm that’s always at play that I know you all are working with as well. All right, with that, let’s dive into today’s CEO Summer School lesson, which is all about someday syndrome.

Now, obviously this is not a real syndrome. Same with imposter syndrome, which I definitely want to do an episode on in the future. But I thought this would be a helpful topic to cover following the last CEO Summer School episode on putting yourself between a rock and a hard place.

Sometimes someday syndrome is a result of putting yourself between a rock and a hard place, because if you only have two bad options to choose from, of course, you’re going to want to put things off until some day, right? You’re wanting to delay a decision, a set of actions because you don’t like the options. So why not delay doing anything, right?

But what I want to do today is explore someday syndrome in more depth and give you a variety of ways for you to think about this and start to gain awareness of how this is showing up in your day to day and long-term planning, and also give you some thoughts about how you could lessen this impact and tendency to put things off until some day.

I kind of dove right in there, so let’s just rewind briefly and say let’s define someday syndrome just to make sure we’re on the same page. How I define someday syndrome is imaginary action taking. Basically it’s a way of putting off the things you say you want to do or goals you want to achieve, and you’re putting them off on a regular basis. It’s a repeated basis. And often it’s kind of in this dreamy, idealistic way, maybe even with a side of wishful thinking.

With someday syndrome, I do think there’s more of this future focus, whereas the later habit that I talked to in episode 35 feels a little bit more contained or within a more short-term timeframe. I thought about what would be the signs and symptoms that you’re experiencing a little or a lot of someday syndrome, and it really comes down to these two categories of behavioral or emotional patterning, and it might be both.

And it’s really around this dreaminess or dreaming about taking action, but the actions and results are just imagined. If we were to look at the behavioral category of this, it might look like putting things off or avoidance or procrastination. If procrastination is something that you struggle with, definitely go check out episode 47, How to Stop Procrastinating as an additional resource.

Back to these signs and symptoms. So for behavioral, it could be that avoidance or procrastination, like I said. It could also look like making lists or vision boards, and then making them again and again, without any forward movement on those lists or the things that you’re imagining. It could also be making vague plans and having vague timelines so it’s really not clear what outcome you’re trying to achieve someday, or when you’re going to achieve it.

You might also find yourself saying the phrase, it’ll be better when that’s another sign that you’re having that wishful thinking about the future and that someday thing that’s maybe, maybe not going to happen. Or another sign might be talking about future aspirations in a way where you aren’t the creator of the goal or habit. The way you’re speaking about someday is like the goal is just going to plop on your lap, or it’s going to happen to you in some way, but there isn’t really a sense of your own agency in the process.

If we look at the signs and symptoms of someday syndrome from an emotional pattern standpoint, one of the biggest things I see is a cycle of emotional highs and lows, meaning you get that dopamine hit or experience the positive emotions like excitement or inspiration from imagining the someday scenario. But then it’s always followed by negative emotions like disappointment or guilt or shame or judgment, you know, all those not so favorite emotions.

And it’s cyclical because you go to the low range of emotions and then want to escape that. And then you imagine the future. You imagine that someday again and get the dopamine hit, but then it kind of cycles back down into the negative and it repeats. And that negative range of emotions is showing up when you realize you haven’t followed through for the first or maybe fifth time, or maybe more, and you’re in the exact same spot you were before. And you start telling yourself, I should have done something about that. I should be farther along, but I’m not. So there’s those highs and lows.

And one of the emotions that I see show up frequently in this cycle is hope. As in, I hope this happens someday you are feeling hopeful and hope can feel really quite good, but there’s also this sort of bad taste that’s left behind from hope, if you ask me. And it’s because of that behavioral pattern that I mentioned, talking about the future like you don’t have influence over it. Hope can feel really passive. And that’s why I see it show up a lot with someday syndrome. Someday is very passive. Remember how I talked about there’s that lack of agency present?

Another common emotion with someday syndrome is the emotion of overwhelm. Someday, whatever that future vision is that you have has been built up so much in your head that it just becomes something that is too challenging to wrap your arms around. And then you end up going into a shutdown state, which of course means you aren’t making the progress that you’re hoping to make.

All of these patterns can really show up both in short and long-term planning. And for you, you might notice that someday syndrome tends to present itself more in the short-term or the long-term and maybe is more predominant within certain timeframes.

Short-term could be something like I’ll do that thing, solve that problem, join that program when things slow down. And you’re thinking it’s kind of like a short-term timeframe, maybe three months from now, or it’s like in the fall, in the summer, in the winter, whatever season you attach to a time you think will be better.

Or maybe it’s, I’ll have that difficult conversation with my employee when we aren’t in the middle of a project, right? That’s the someday. But of course we know you’re never not in the middle of a project. You’re always in the middle of a project and that someday is not actually going to happen unless you make it happen. There’s that lack of agency again.

When you think about this showing up long-term, it could sound like I’ll stop working weekends when I get to a certain revenue point in my business. Or I’ll allow myself to feel successful when I land this type of client. Or I’ll start working out regularly when my kids are out of the house. And maybe you even find yourself saying this when your kid is three and someday is very, very far away.

Often when I coach clients on someday goals, and that’s not to say that we don’t have that big vision for our business of like, oh, in five years, this is where I want to be and I’m taking measurable action to move in that direction. That’s very different than a someday goal of like, maybe I’ll achieve that in the future. I hope I achieve it in the future, but you’re not actually having any kind of planning or progression towards it.

But how this often comes up is there’s an underlying fear or resistance that we need to clean up before the client can start making progress towards that goal. Maybe it’s that there’s something about the goal in itself that feels risky. Maybe they need to invest in their business by hiring an employee or getting a certain type of training and that investment feels risky.

Or maybe they need to be super bold in their marketing about who they are for and who they are definitely not for and there is some fear of rejection or being seen a certain way. And then it’s kind of like, of course, there’s some resistance or fear, that’s natural. But that’s what we really want to address to bring those someday goals into now goals.

And the other thing that I see come up that I want to call attention to in case it’s happening for you is that sometimes those some days are related to things that we know would help us feel better. They help us feel better about ourselves. They support us mentally and physically, maybe like the working out example or meditation, journaling, yoga, having lunch with a design colleague, making connections in the industry. It’s something that you know you want, you know it serves you and for some reason you’re believing you can’t have it right now. Or you’re putting contingency on having that thing and putting it out until someday.

We all engage with someday-ing at times. That is totally normal because we engage in someday syndrome because there’s this emotional reward that we get from visualizing the result or who we will perceive ourselves to be in the achievement of that result without any effort of the actual doing, without any effort of putting something on the line. So it makes sense because it’s like you create that positive emotional experience for yourself without having to put in the hard work. So it totally makes sense.

But when we someday repeatedly, when it becomes the norm, that’s when you end up someday-ing your dreams away and delaying becoming the type of person and business owner who is capable of making that someday a reality. The imagination and that emotional reward I just spoke to can feel good, but it’s not reality. And I know that reality is what you actually want to create in your business.

So the question I want to pose to you this week in CEO Summer School is this: what is something in your business that you’re putting off until someday that could actually happen much sooner? I am so curious to hear what comes up for you with that question.

If you’re already enrolled in CEO Summer School, you’ll have the bonus resource guide delivered straight to your inbox so that you can have the space to answer that question for yourself, along with two other bonus questions that you can use to dive deeper into this concept.

And if you haven’t joined us, it’s not too late. Head over to desiid.com/summerschool. And when you enter your name and email, you’ll receive a link to all of the one sheet reflection guides I’ve released to date. And you’ll also get all of the others that are to come.

Thank you so much for all of you who have been participating in CEO Summer School, downloading the guides or replying to my emails with insights. It has been so fun for me to interact with all of you more and know how much you’re enjoying this format and how much you’re getting from this little seed of an idea I had months ago.

At the top of my quarterly plan that I created where I was working on implementing CEO Summer School, I put the goal of have fun and help people. And I feel like that’s happening. So super exciting. Glad you can join us.

And before we sign off a quick reminder to help me celebrate my 40th birthday by leaving a rating and review for the podcast. It’s only going to take a couple of minutes and it truly would mean the world to me. If you’ve already left a review, know that I appreciate you so much.

And also know that I will be giving away some more private coaching sessions with me for those who have entered in the giveaway by leaving a podcast review. I’ll have the link in the show notes where you can submit your information after you leave that review. It is just another way for me to say, thank you for supporting the show.

Next week on the podcast, you’ll have an episode that further supports your exploration of this question. And then the week after that, we’ll be back with another episode of the CEO Summer School. I don’t know about you, but it just feels like we are rolling along.

If you need the reminder, you are never behind when you’re in my world. If you haven’t filled anything out, know that you can always refer back to the resources and that you are gaining so much from simply tuning in.

Until next Wednesday, when we chat again, I’ll be wishing you a beautiful week. And we’ll talk to you in the next episode.

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94. Beyond Later: How to Overcome Procrastination

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92. Reframing Your Reality