Episode 30: Impossible Goals

Hello my friends. Welcome to episode 30. It’s July if you are listening to this when it has just come out. 2022 is half over.

How did your first half of 2022 go?

Mine has been a whirlwind.

Learning so much about this podcasting thing and expanding myself in trying to understand business steps and websites. It has been hard and amazing.

When you look back on the past 6 months what are the things that you are proud of that you have accomplished?

How are your goals coming along?

What do you want to accomplish in the last half of this year?

Today I want to talk about one way to set goals for the rest of the year.

Have you ever caught yourself dreaming of an amazing future and then reined yourself back into reality by saying that’s impossible!

We have all done it.

Why don’t we go for impossible things?

Probably because we believe that it is impossible and it sounds like work to our brains so it puts up a fight trying to keep you safe and keep things status quo and as much as possible keep things efficient and easy.

I learned about impossible goals a few years back from Brook Castillo at The Life Coach School and have been setting them since.

What is an impossible goal you say?

It is a goal that your brain is pretty sure you can not accomplish.

Now I am sure you are thinking – why would I ever do that? Do you just want me to fail all the time?

Now truthfully, I kinda do.

Not that I want you to fail but I want you to stop playing small. Not taking the chance. Not even trying.

In the coaching community that I run in, we call this failing ahead of time.

This is where you decide you can’t do it so you don’t even try so really you have no idea if you could have done it or not. You have no idea what would have happened if you had tried. You just proved it true that you couldn’t do it because you didn’t do it.

This is why I think we all need to have an impossible goal.

The thing I love about setting impossible goals is that they allow you to DREAM

When was the last time you let yourself dream about the things you really want, an amazing future?

I don’t think we take the time to dream enough.

There is such a power in visualizing an outcome that we want in our life.

Seeing it all work out.

Seeing us create the thing that we really want.

Acknowledging the life that you really want to be living.

And then actually taking small steps of working toward it.

If we first don’t have a destination that we want to get to then we really have no idea what road to take or even if we should be on the road at all.

Impossible goals give us that focus.

They provide some framework with which we can evaluate the things that we are doing to see – will this action bring me closer to my goal or not?

Then we have some reason to take actions that might be scary or hard or just unknown.

Another reason I love impossible goals is that they encourage me to try new things.

When I dream about the impossible, I sometimes come up with ideas that I have never considered before.

I am willing to step outside my comfort zone to see if something new will work. Well maybe willing is a pretty strong word for this but at least consider doing something different.

I heard an interesting concept on a podcast the other day about doing less. The host was presenting the idea that instead of having more meetings, more rules, more emails, and more phone calls – what if we did less? It feels a bit uncomfortable, doesn’t it? But can you see how considering an idea that is different from what you have done before could open up a completely different future for you?

What new thing do you want to try to see if it brings you closer to your impossible goal?

The final reason I think impossible goals are so powerful is that they prepare you for difficulties and failures that will come along the way to any great accomplishment.

Here is why.

Your brain tells you it is impossible.

You decide to try to do it anyway.

You test out your first idea. It goes badly. Your brain tells you, see it is impossible. You counter, I know it’s an impossible goal. Let’s see what else might work and you try again.

When we set possible goals and it goes badly. Our brains will come up with all sorts of ideas about how we should have been better, if we had only, we should have. And so often we believe our brains and we simply give up. We should have been able to do it. We were not able to do it. We don’t have a way to counter our brains so we just don’t try again. That was embarrassing.

Impossible goals give us one more tool to help overcome failure. We know we are trying something big.

We know we are going to fail.

We know that we can fail and we can keep trying.

I saw a very interesting quote from Stacey Boehman. When you take action towards a goal, you shift impossibility to possibility to inevitability It said, Impossible to possible to inevitable.

That is the cycle with goals.

Let’s dream up something amazing.

Let’s work on taking the little steps.

Let’s attempt to make the jump from impossible to possible.

Then let’s double down and take possible to inevitable.

What is your impossible goal for the next six months?

What would you love to tell me you accomplished in December?

What are you willing to do to make it happen?

What are you willing to feel to keep going?

Any time is the perfect time to set an impossible goal.

Let’s make some dreams come true.

It will be fun.

Have a wonderful week.