Stop setting "realistic" goals! It's so damaging than when achievement guides and how-to-reach-your-goals instructions tell you to set “realistic” goals as part of your process.
Their intention in telling you to set "realistic" goals is to ensure you set something you can likely reach within whatever the given time frame is. Unfortunately, it can have an even worse effect. It can cause you to edit your big amazing wonderful goal to something "you can reach", something lesser, or even something you try to figure out would please their idea of "realistic". It’s like already saying your goal is too big and we need to cut it down. Cut it down, be more normal, stop embarrassing the rest of us with your awesome amazing goal… be realistic.
“Realistic” is a semantically charged word. That means it carries around a LOT of bad baggage with it that resonates unconsciously. Whether you hear it as such or not, on an inner level, “realistic” is a failure word. It connotes limitation, smallness, “reasonableness”, normalcy, status quo, fitting in with society and the culturescape.
“Realistic” is also often used socially to turn off our best and bravest ideas. Think of the times you’ve had an amazing idea or vision, one that had you totally stoked - one that opened up the broadest future for you. You brought your vision to a friend, telling them how bright its potential, how really committed you were. And all the friend said was (even meaning well), “GET REAL! You’ll never do that. Be realistic. You can’t. You’re….” too young, too old, in the wrong field, too introverted, etc. "Nobody does that. Nobody gets that opportunity." They may have lots of "rational reasons" why this goal is "unrealistic".
But history is full of innovation that transcends that, and who defines what's realistic anyway?
Was the electric lightbulb realistic? No, not in the era of gaslighting. And there wasn’t even an electrical generation framework in place at the time. Even the electrical infrastructure had to be built, and was… and quickly took over, lighting up our cities.
Was aviation realistic? No, the idea of an airborne craft that could support a human being was ridiculed. Once it had been built… was COMMERCIAL aviation realistic? Was the idea that not just one of these airplanes, but hundreds of thousands, would be flying passengers in and out of cities daily, realistic?
Is space travel realistic? We now have SpaceX and other private companies reaching for the stars... literally.
So when you see some achievement-oriented instructions say, “Set realistic goals,” gently laugh at it and mentally cross it out (or really cross it out, if it’s your book) and say or write in, LIMITLESS GOAL.
Realize that that “realistic” instruction is already causing you to edit your goal - “Oh yeah, well, I guess it’s not all that realistic… I’ll chop off a bit here, edit that part out, go for something lesser. Something realistic.”
Don’t go for something lesser. If you say, “I want to help uplift a million people” or even if you say, “I want to help uplift a million people by next Tuesday” - maybe you will or won’t help a million people by next Tuesday, but it is not for anyone else to say whether you will or won’t reach that goal. Let the magnitude of the vision keep you dialed in to its amazement as you work to get there. Help two people, a hundred, a thousand, as many as you can. Let your vision of a million people guide you. Learn, reflect, and try again.
Let nothing limit what you feel you can achieve. Do your best version of it over and over as you refine it, and keep reaching for the stars.
How will you be even a little more LIMITLESS today?
Keep Growing,
Katherine Lieber coaches and trains on self-leadership, limitlessness, energy health, inner power, and healing the wounded professional to recover your core vision in the workplace. She is the founder of TitaniumBlue Leadership. Be limitless - be the hero in a world that needs you.
© 2019 Katherine R. Lieber & TitaniumBlue Leadership
