A dream without a plan is just a wish

When I first decided in 2005 I wanted a smallholding, I had a tendency to view my dream through rose-tinted glasses. Everyone does to some extent, whatever the dream happens to be, because until you start living your dream you can only approximate what your life will be like on a day-to-day basis. Your brain will also always make the dream a blissfully happy experience.

If someone asked me in 2005 what I would do on my dream smallholding, what my plans were, my answer would have been very vague. At that point, I knew there would be chickens and veg, probably pigs and sheep, but how many of them and on what acreage I had no clue. I also didn't have a clue whether that would sustain us, whether we would have to sell our produce and even how we would afford it, but I was confident it would all work out. Then I came across this quote on the internet.

"A dream without a plan is just a wish."

According to psychologists, you will be around 50% more likely to achieve your dream if you write it down. That's when I realised how far removed from reality my dream was - I had nothing written down at all. Watching repeats of The Good Life and reading smallholding books didn't get me any closer to having smallholding. That started a period of intensive research as I tried to separate the dream from the likely realities I would face. I started writing it down.

For example, for some people the dream is to spend every day immersed in smallholding, making jam, pottering around the garden, bottle feeding orphaned lambs, gathering herbs, wearing hunter wellies and a Cath Kidston tea dress...the reality is not really having the time to potter due to a full-time job plus lambs stick their poo-covered trotters on the dress the second they see a bottle and chewy little piglets bite straight through your expensive wellies.

The dream could be to have an old stone cottage with an Aga to cook on that heats the whole house, where you can sit with you feet up against it in the evenings and produce a wide array of wholesome tasty food...

the reality is all that stone can make for a cold damp house, and if anything goes wrong with the Aga or you have problems getting it or keeping it lit, it will usually coincide with you doing chores outside on the wettest, coldest, muddiest day ever. Then you find your dinner hasn't cooked while you've been out and there's no hot water to wash the mud off :(

Before coming here I was very confident I wouldn't be bothered by cold slippery mud because I would be living the dream on my smallholding! Now I'm here...I really, really don't like cold wet slippery mud. It is grim to deal with during torrential storms when I have to check the animals; my clothes get covered, shoes are always plastered in it, I have ended up covered in mud after slipping flat on my back in it, and the house entrances need constantly cleaning during the winter. There are sometimes mud smears up the walls.

So, if you're thinking about this Good Life (and for everything I have written it is a good life) here are some other things you might want to consider: 

• How's your health and will it stand up to what you want to do? 
• How isolated do you want to be?
• How far do you want to be from a main town?
• How far from your neighbours?
• How much land is enough and how much will be too big an area to maintain? You can cope with it now, but what about in 10 years time when your back hurts a lot more?
• Do you consider privacy to be the last house on the way out of a village or a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?
• Do you want mains gas heating system, or will you settle for an oil or a wood burning range as your source of heat? What secondary systems will you have?
• Do you want to be able to drive in bad weather or are you happy to be snowed in for a few days? At what point would you feel trapped and start to panic?
• How are you going to fund it? If you're a couple will one of you work or both of you? Full-time or part-time? 
• Will you buy outright or have a mortgage? The bigger mortgage you have the more hours you have to work to pay for it. Would you be better renting or maybe buying with parents or friends?

You won't get everything you want, it's rare when property hunting that you do, but what will you compromise on? For example, you may not want neighbours within five miles of you but if you have a health problem in the future you could need their help one day, so perhaps no more than a mile away would be better.

Get it all out of your head and write it all down. It will change as the months and years go by, that's inevitable, because life changes and you have to adapt to keep up. Things will happen to you that make you grow and develop wisdom about who you are and how you fit in the world, and that in turn will change what you want and your dream. The act of writing things down creates a powerful mental shift, it starts the wheels turning. 

But it won't happen unless you commit your dream to paper.