Achieving Impossible Goals
What’s something you’d love to do, but feels impossible?
Get your toddler to sleep through the night?
Get a new job?
Go to the gym regularly?
Improve your relationship with your spouse? With your mom?
I’d like to introduce you to the idea of the impossible goal - which is a goal that you believe might be impossible, but you’re all in to try anyways.
This blog describes how to approach impossible goals with confidence and resilience, so you can keep going until you succeed.
Accepting the worst-case scenario
Let’s imagine your goal is to sleep train your toddler. You think it’s probably impossible. You think you were probably cursed with the kid who physically can’t sleep through the night (That’s what I thought when I was sleep training twin boys!)
OK. Let’s roll with that. If you try, you’ll probably fail. Can you deal with the worst-case scenario of that?
If you were to go all out in pursuit of this goal, you might have to:
Read several good sleep training blogs.
Do all the bedtime shifts for a couple weeks, if your spouse isn’t willing to help.
Endure crying and push back from your daughter.
The worst-case scenario is that you will make these investments and your daughter will still not sleep well. Can you handle that?
Usually, once you really define the cost of failure, it’s not nearly as bad as your brain makes it out to be. Usually, it’s something that pales in comparison to the payoff off success.
On the off chance that you do succeed, and your daughter learns to sleep from 7 pm til 6 am, how would your life be different? Would you:
Finally get a full night of sleep?
Stop feeling so tired and lethargic all the time?
Have more energy and ambition to achieve those other goals you’ve had on the back burner?
Have more patience with your daughter? With your spouse?
Failing ahead of time
When we live in that fear that we may fail, we probably won’t even start towards our goal. Essentially, the fear of failure will cause us to FAIL AHEAD OF TIME. We don’t even allow ourselves the possibility of trying and succeeding.
But what if you told yourself: “Yep, this is probably impossible. If I try, there’s a good chance I’ll fail. And that’s OK.” If you accepted the possibility of failure, could you stop fearing it a little?
Failure is the goal
Once you decide that your goal might be impossible, but you’re willing to try anyways, here’s what I want you to do.
Write a list of 10 things you could to do advance your goal. I want this list to be 10 things that will probably not work – but if they did work, they would propel you towards your goal.
Now, I want you to make failure the goal for all of these actions. Tell yourself: “My goal is to fail at these 10 things.” Then, get out there and do them. It takes all of the pressure off!
This is the very best strategy that I know for achieving the impossible.
Strategic by-products
When you take this type of massive action, you certainly increase the probability of success. But you also get some strategic by-products that might be even better. And you get these things, even if you never do reach your impossible goal.
Re-define yourself: You will change the way you think about yourself. Every time you take action, you create evidence that you have agency in your own life. That you have the power to chase what you want.
Learning: We like to think that we can solve problems in our own head. That if we just think about the situation long enough, a solution will arise. It doesn’t work like that. When you take action, you learn a tremendous amount about what works and what doesn’t, which will help move you towards your goal.
Model resilience for your kids: Building a business is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I try a lot and I fail 80% of the time. And I don’t shelter my kids from it. I tell them about my dream, and how excited I am. I also tell them about my failures and my disappointments. I show them how I get back up again. I want them to know that they can do hard things, and that they, too, can get back up again. What do you want to model for your kids?
Book a free coffee chat
Could you use a little support to get through this rut, Mama? Let’s have coffee.
During a free, virtual coffee chat, we’ll talk about your unique situation and figure out:
What’s not working
What you want instead
The pathway to get there
From there, we can explore whether Creating Me offers the right tools to help you reach your goal. And if we don’t, I’ll connect you with other resources that might fit better.